Deterence on the Rio Grande

Washington Post:

On June 1, the three Ordaz-Valtierra brothers from Mexico illegally crossed the Rio Grande with the same dream that so many other Latin American immigrants have: head north from the border, get jobs and start sending money home.

Their journey, instead, ended in a federal courthouse here, where, dressed in orange prison jumpsuits, each was charged with the federal misdemeanor crime of entry without inspection. Each pleaded guilty and was sentenced by a U.S. magistrate judge to 15 days. Under guard of U.S. marshals, they were put in shackles and bused to a West Texas jail to serve their time and await deportation home.

"I'm sorry," Juan Carlos Ordaz-Valtierra, 27, said through an interpreter as he stood before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dennis G. Green. "I didn't think it was this difficult to cross into your country."

It wasn't. But this year, most of the 210-mile stretch of riverbank between the small border cities of Eagle Pass and Del Rio became a "zero tolerance zone." If apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol, illegal immigrants are prosecuted by federal authorities for a misdemeanor, sent to jail for 15 to 180 days and then deported. If they are caught illegally entering the country a second time, they are eligible for a felony charge of illegal entry and as much as two years in federal prison.

"Catch and release" -- in which Mexican citizens are returned promptly to Mexico, but citizens of other countries are given a notice to appear in immigration court at a later date, set free and never tracked down by authorities -- would end here, said Department of Homeland Security officials at a Washington news conference earlier this year. "Catch and remove" would start. And, officials predicted, as this tough policy became known, immigrants would be discouraged from crossing through this slice of southwest Texas.

As Congress discusses tightening immigration laws -- from criminalizing an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States to instituting a guest-worker program -- this federal experiment called "Operation Streamline II" has shown what it takes to stop the flow of illegal immigrants: aggressive enforcement of the laws on the books. That entails putting the fate of each illegal border crosser in the hands of not only the Border Patrol, but also the local offices of the U.S. attorney and the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement office of the Department of Homeland Security.

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There is much more. The program shows the effectiveness of consequences for illegal entry. Even if it has shifted the crossing point somewhere else, it shows that if the same procedure was adopted along the entire border, it could have a dramatic effect ins lowing the tide of illegal immigrants.