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'Slave ships' in Colo. keep INS busy

By Mark H. Hunter
Special to The Denver Post

Feb. 24 - Smuggling season is in full swing in southern Colorado. Almost every day, San Luis Valley law enforcement officers are stopping vans packed with undocumented immigrants heading for the East Coast.

The annual flow began last fall as a trickle, but it recently turned into a torrent for Immigration and Naturalization Service officers based in Alamosa. INS officers have processed more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and confiscated more than 50 vehicles since late October.

"We have the busiest Quick Response Team office in the United States," said Don Buechner, INS supervisor in Alamosa. "We processed seven vehicles and nearly 200 people last week." The Alamosa County jail is often filled with detained immigrants, and a county storage lot is jammed with 20 confiscated vans. The INS is even paying local junkyards to store the overflow of vehicles.

Just last weekend, two "smuggle vans," as officers call them, crammed with young men and boys, were impounded after one of them slid off icy U.S. 160 and into a Wolf Creek Pass snowbank. Nobody was hurt, but last month three Mexican nationals were killed and 15 were injured in an accident east of Walsenburg.

The smugglers' pipeline begins in Phoenix and follows U.S. 160 from Tuba City to Cortez, over Wolf Creek Pass and through the San Luis Valley to Walsenburg, where they continue eastbound on Colorado 10.

Smugglers often follow state highways to avoid the more closely watched interstate highways.

In recent years, smugglers packed dozens of people into unheated rental trucks and travelled during the day - until law enforcement caught on. Now, they buy used vans, take out the seats, fill them with up to 20 men, women and even children, and travel at night to avoid detection.

"They remind me of slave ships,"

Buechner said. "They jam people into them just like the holds of slave ships. They are being exploited." Most of the vans aren't even roadworthy, Buechner said. Often the headlights don't work, the vans weave from the excess weight, and some don't even display a license plate, an omission that always alerts police.

"The officers are sympathetic, but they realize they can't let an overloaded van carrying 20 people go on down the road," Buechner said. "It's unsafe for them and the general public." The drivers hardly ever stop, Buechner said. Often when the vans are searched they are cluttered with food wrappers and reek of body odor, buckets of human waste and jugs of urine. No illegal drugs have been found, so far.

"About 70 percent of them are going to Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina to work in agriculture," Buechner said. "Some are going to Washington, D.C., and New York City." One recent load was headed to a chicken processor near Minneapolis.

"One load last week was really sad," Buechner said. "There were several 14- to 16-year-old boys who should have been in school, but instead they come to the United States to be exploited and get paid under the table."

The INS is cracking down on employers who hire undocumented workers, Buechner said. Several people arrested recently told him about their future employers as well as their "coyotes," or smugglers, who charge from $500 to $1,000 per person.

Detained immigrants are fingerprinted for future identification then bused to Denver or Albuquerque and returned to the border at El Paso, Texas. Repeat offenders and drivers are jailed until they see an INS judge.

The INS plans to double the number of agents in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, and open "Quick Response" offices in Carbondale, Durango, Craig, Alamosa and Brush. Some Carbondale and Durango residents oppose the INS plans, but the San Luis Valley has welcomed the Alamosa office that is now under construction and slated for completion later this spring.

Copyright 2000 The Denver Post. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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