Thursday, Jan. 25, 2001 | 6:51 a.m.
Authorities said "Operation Crossroads" also will attempt to break up drop houses and curb the escalating violence associated with smuggling.
"There are all kinds of horror stories - children being held hostage for ransom, women being raped, migrants being stripped of their shoes and left in the desert," said Johnny Williams, western regional director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"These smugglers have callous disregard for their human cargos. All they care about is the dollars they make. They increasingly resort to violence," Williams added. "We will do whatever it takes to weed this evilness out."
The latest INS effort is similar to "Operation Denial" that had agents conducting 24-hour surveillance last year at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport and McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, considered two top smuggling transit hubs.
That 90-day operation began in August and resulted in more than 2,700 arrests at the two airports in the first month of the crackdown. Nearly 30 smugglers eventually were prosecuted.
"This is a larger operation," said Roseanne Sonchik, INS Phoenix district director. "In Operation Denial, we had about 60 officers. In this operation, there's about 100."
About two dozen INS agents will again be assigned to Sky Harbor Airport with an undetermined number at McCarran, which had 18 agents the last time.
"We want to severely cripple the smuggling activity through Arizona and into Nevada," Williams said at a Wednesday news conference. "Their access to these airports are essential to their business. We're going to focus on activity there... We're prepared to do it for several months if that's what it takes."
Williams said the officers - in plain clothes but with badges visable - will be looking for suspicious patterns of behavior associated with migrant smuggling such as last-minute purchases of a large number of tickets, late-night flights and boarding flights at the last minute.
Some human rights groups say the INS operations at the airports fails to solve the smuggling problem and winds up in racial profiling instead.
"Our organization is vehemently opposed to this," said Isabel Garcia, founder of Coalicion de Derechos Humanos in Tucson. "It's not going to stop smuggling, and brown-skinned people are the ones to suffer. How can they tell who fits the profile? You can't tell really."
"These officers have received special training," Williams said. "We are targeting criminal behavior, not racial profiling. Our goal is not to get in the way of legitimate travelers."
Sonchik said the extra officers also will work with local police and other agencies to locate and bust drop houses throughout Arizona.
The homes, which can house up to 100 migrant workers in squalid conditions, are used by the smugglers to warehouse people until transportation to their jobs is found.
Illegal immigrants pay smugglers as much as $1,500 for the journey from Mexico and often remain in debt as they work in the United States.
Williams said the INS will continue to work aggressively to combat smuggling activity along the Arizona-Mexican border. With increased enforcement, arrests of illegal entrants have dropped significantly in recent months.
"From October to now, arrests are 20 percent down in the Tucson corridor compared to a year ago and in Douglas, it's 40 percent down," said Tony Esposito, an INS assistant regional director.
"The numbers are very positive. We know we're on the right path," Williams said. "But we are very concerned with summer coming up. The smugglers are always trying out new routes."
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