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CITIZENSHIP, PLEASE?
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Rochester Border Patrol plucks more than 1,200 illegals from buses and trains.
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By Tim Martinez (tmarti04@syr.edu)
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Published Wed, Apr. 30, 2008
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As the Amtrak train slowly pulled into the Rochester station on a cold Friday morning, Border Patrol agents Ryan Howe and Adrian Cotsworth quickly walked across the empty platform in their olive green uniforms and boarded the train carrying about 200 passengers.
 “Hello, how are you two doing today?” Cotsworth asked a young couple sitting in the blue seats. “Could you please state your citizenship?”
“American,” they both replied casually.
“Thank you,” he said politely and moved on.
Passengers filled the aisles, some boarding with luggage and others standing up to stretch their legs. The agents, pistols visible on their hips, continued to ask passengers about their citizenship.
As the commotion began to settle, the agents hopped off the train as it proceeded east to New York City.
The agents did not find anyone illegal, but it would not have been at all unusual if they had. The Border Patrol station in Rochester is the most active station along the 3,000-mile northern border. Agents say that in 24 hours they can check up to 15 buses and two trains for illegal immigrants.
Busiest station on the border
Last year, the Rochester station detained 1,223 illegal immigrants, more than any of the 55 other stations along the Canadian border. The people these agents catch don’t fit into a singular mold. Cotsworth, the head agent in charge of the Rochester station, said that the immigrants detained come from more than 75 countries across five continents.
The Rochester station, one of the six stations that make up the Buffalo Sector, made more arrests in 2007 than some entire sectors of the northern border. For example, the Houlton Sector in Maine registered only 95 detentions in 2007, and the Spokane Sector in Washington detained 341 illegal immigrants.
From October 2007 to February 2008, the station made approximately 755 detentions, and the numbers for a year are expected to be higher than they were last year.
“There’s a lot of people traveling through Rochester,” Cotsworth said. “Our focus here is trains going to Chicago or New York. We’re in the middle of everything.”
The northern border, though it attracts less media and public attention than the Mexican border, is a hot channel of traffic for undocumented workers and families. Cotsworth said that about 10 percent of the annual detentions made by the Border Patrol—more than 1 million annually—come from the northern border.
Agents at the Border Patrol station are responsible for getting bus and train schedules and going to the stations to check travelers’ identification. Under the section of the United States Code on Aliens and Nationality, agents have the right to board and search any means of transportation for illegal immigrants within 25 miles of the border. The law also states that all foreigners are required to carry valid identification.
Looking for signs
The majority of the station’s apprehensions occur on the buses and trains agents check daily. While on these checks, agents have learned techniques that weren’t taught in detail during their training, such as looking for signs beyond a passport or visa to tell whether someone might be an illegal immigrant. Experienced agents analyze body language and look for suspicious behavior.
“It’s not what they’re saying, it’s what they’re not saying,” Cotsworth said. “It’s sweat, it’s shaking, it’s stuttering, it’s bad breath. It’s things that people can’t control—and you learn to read it just by doing it so much.”
Opponents of the Border Patrol’s methods have accused the agents of racial profiling in the selection of the people they question. The Border Patrol has recently been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that agents racially profile Iraqi immigrants.
Francis Matthews-Giba, an immigration lawyer who volunteers with the Detention Task Force, an immigrant rights group, said that he is under the impression that the Border Patrol racially profiles in its searches.
“I travel Amtrak and the bus service and they’ve never asked me for anything,” he said, explaining that he is ethnically Irish and Ukrainian.
Cotsworth defended his agents’ search methods. “We question people with blond hair and blue eyes as much as anyone else,” he said, explaining that his office has arrested people from such diverse countries as the Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Sweden and Venezuela. “We question everybody.”
Checking the records
When that questioning alerts the agents of a possible suspect, they contact the regional dispatch center at the Buffalo Sector Headquarters in Grand Island to check for records on the subject they’re interviewing.
Agents in the field require frequent assistance from the dispatch center. When agents from Rochester or any of the stations in the sector call for a background check, dispatch enters the individual’s name into various databases for clues the target may be an illegal immigrant. Dispatch maintains contact with the agents in the field from all stations to make sure they are safe and report in.
The center itself includes several computers and two large plasma-screen television sets that show a live feed of Rainbow Bridge in the city of Niagara Falls. Cameras positioned at hot spots along the border are equipped with infrared technology to catch people trying to cross at night.
“It’s nothing like ‘CSI’ on TV, but we can do a lot,” said Joel Serra, an agent who works in dispatch. “We’re all their technology. They call us here and that’s what we’re expected to do.”
Once dispatch finds any records and reports back to the agents, travelers who are not illegal are let go. Illegals are arrested and transported back to the station, where their fingerprints are entered into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which checks for a criminal history.
From cuffs to the courts
The Border Patrol issues the detainees a notice to appear in Immigration Court and reads them their rights. The Immigration Court eventually makes the final rulings on the cases. If the person is eligible, bond is set somewhere in a typical range from $5,000 to $10,000.
From the station, female detainees are transferred to a county jail and males are taken to the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia.
At that point, the case is turned over to another agency—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Detention Removal Operations—and the Border Patrol no longer deals with it. Whether an illegal gets deported, stays or enters the naturalization process is left up to the Immigration Court. People often mistake the Border Patrol for doing the deportation and work of other agencies, Cotsworth said.
“We get a bad rep for a lot of stuff, stuff we’re not even involved in, the raids on the factories and the farms,” he said. “We’ve been accused of staking out daycare centers. It’s just stuff that we don’t get involved in.”
The Rochester station has been the subject of a protest by an activist group that had meant to target ICE, another agency under the Department of Homeland Security that’s received media attention for raiding farms in the hunt for undocumented workers.
Although the Border Patrol is not a part of ICE, its agents must work closely with other Department of Homeland Security elements and law enforcement agencies.
“On a local level we partner with county sheriffs, all the town police departments, state police, I mean basically every law enforcement agency in this area we have a relationship with,” Cotsworth said. “Part of our national strategy is partnering with other law enforcement agencies.”
Responding to a changing world
The busy Rochester station is a relatively new addition to the Border Patrol’s Buffalo Sector. The 4-year-old station opened to respond faster to calls about possible illegal immigrants in Monroe and Orleans counties. Previously, the Niagara Falls station, located 72 miles away, covered the area.
The opening also was prompted by a bigger focus on the northern border when the Department of Homeland Security was established after 9/11. The terrorist attacks prompted the new department to create U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which took control of the Border Patrol agency that had previously been a part of Immigration and Naturalization Services. This restructuring unified the Border Patrol’s administration and established 20 sectors across the country, each containing several stations.
The shift in control placed a greater emphasis on the northern border because agents were no longer focused on enforcing immigration law. The new goal of Border Patrol became preventing the entry of terrorists and terrorist weapons via legal ports of entry, authorized entrances along the border where all visitors pass through customs.
Senior Patrol Agent Clay Linn, who transferred to the Rochester station from the southern border three months ago, said that even though the rate of arrests is slower up north, he’s impressed nonetheless.
“If I had a normal job, I would do this for free on the weekends,” he said. “That’s how good this job is.”
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