The Alien Transfer and Exit Program is an effort by the Border Patrol to disrupt well-established smuggling routines in the Tucson Sector. A total of 94 detainees will arrive at the port of entry seven days a week, all of them male, and all of them 20-60 years old. They’ll walk over the international bridge to Ojinaga, Chihuahua, where they may find housing in a temporary shelter or acquire a bus ticket back home.

Marfa Sector Chief Patrol Agent John Smeitana talked about the program during a meeting with the press Tuesday in Marfa.

“This is designed to break the smuggling cycle between the smugglers and the aliens who pay them,” he said. “It will continue until we break the cycle.”

Smeitana addressed the group from a podium set up in a conference room outbuilding at the sector’s headquarters. Reporters from three television stations and three newspapers were present.

Smuggling is a business, Smeitana said. Illegal immigrants pay smugglers up to $2,500 to cross. It’s highly organized, with smuggling operations making use of safe houses and personnel on both sides of the border to get their clients into the United States. Often, said Smeitana, immigrants who are caught and returned to the same area will go back to the same smuggler and try again.

“The idea is to remove the aliens from the smuggling pipeline,” he said.

According to the Border Patrol, agents in the Tucson Sector apprehend 300 to 1,000 illegal immigrants every day, most of them from Mexico. More than 200 immigrants died last year in attempted crossings, said Smeitana.

In contrast, Marfa Sector agents returned about 4,500 immigrants to the Presidio port of entry last year. Of that 4,500, 169 immigrants were later apprehended when they attempted another illegal entry into this country.

Transporting the immigrants from the Arizona border to far-away Presidio is hoped to have a chilling effect for those immigrants who might otherwise attempt another crossing. Neither Presidio nor Ojinaga have developed the kind of smuggling infrastructure that is present in places like the Tucson Sector or San Diego.

“It’s easy to come across there,” said Smeitana. “Smugglers of people or drugs like to use existing infrastructure – highways, trains, buses. They need the ability to get across, to move and transport them out of the area and they need a place to go. There’s less of that infrastructure here.”

(staff photo by FRED COVARRUBIAS Jr.)
Marfa Border Patrol Sector Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Victor Velazquez, left, and Marfa Border Patrol Sector Chief Patrol Agent John Smeitana discuss the alien transfer program on Tuesday.

Identifying information will be gathered on those immigrants who take part in the busing program. Officials will get an idea of the program’s success by measuring how many of the immigrants are caught again.

Only non-criminals of Mexican origin are eligible for the program.

There are 708 agents presently assigned to the Marfa Sector, said Smeitana. No new personnel will be required to support the upcoming initiative.

What happens to detainees once they return to Mexico, Smeitana was asked. Won’t some of them simply stay in Ojinaga or try to cross into Presidio?

“On the Presidio side, our enforcement posture will deter that,” he answered. And in Mexico, the consulate and the federal immigration agency are splitting the cost of bus tickets for the immigrants to return to their communities of origin.

“Ojinaga is providing transport,” Smeitana said. “They don’t want them there either.”