Lone, Overwhelmed Border Agent Patrols 9 Counties in N. California

DUBLIN, Calif. — Tom Madden, a burly 20-year veteran at the U.S. Border Patrol, used to spend his time chasing down tips from citizens and visiting construction sites and bus terminals to round up illegal immigrants.

Now, except for a secretary, Madden sits alone at his desk, surrounded by empty cubicles and typewriters hidden by dusty black covers.

With the Border Patrol devoting 2,200 agents to San Diego alone, agents have become a rarity in Northern California. Only 24 agents--down from 65 a few years ago--must cover nearly all of the state north of Los Angeles.

Madden is responsible for a 300-mile stretch of coastline as well as inland areas from Oregon through the Wine Country to the booming suburbs of east San Francisco Bay.

“I’m not able to do as much for the public as I would like to do because of the limited manpower. Lack of manpower, actually,” said Madden, who with his green uniform and folksy manner seems straight out of a 1950s TV western.

Last week, the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that it is making a major change in the way it pursues illegal immigrants, in part to compensate for limited resources inland. It will reduce workplace raids and concentrate on investigating employers suspected of collaborating with smugglers and on auditing company employment records. The change has already been implemented in California.

The lack of agents in the interior has drawn criticism from Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Imperial Beach) and other Southwest congressmen who believe the Clinton administration should have sought 1,000 more Border Patrol officers next year.

In January, police in the Bay area suburb of Dublin pulled over a van that had run a stop sign. Inside were 12 illegal immigrants.

If the van had been traveling in San Diego; Tucson, Ariz.; or anywhere along the U.S.-Mexican border, deportation would have been automatic. But it was a Saturday, Madden’s day off. And with no 24-hour detention cell for illegals in Northern California, police had no choice but to free the immigrants.

Such occurrences are common, Madden said.

Madden used to lead a five-man patrol at the Livermore Sector office responsible for Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino, Lake, Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa and Alameda counties.

His last colleague was transferred in January. In May, he too could be gone. Livermore Sector Acting Chief Robert Logazino said Madden will likely be promoted to an administrative job, and there are no immediate plans to replace him.

“Without the agents here, we’re totally reactive,” said Madden, who has his hands full just doing paperwork and shuttling prisoners from the local jail. “We have no proactive enforcement at all here. It’s very difficult to work with just one person.”

Madden and his fellow agents once traveled regularly to farms in Mendocino County and other northern parts of the state, but he hasn’t been there in two years.

Of California’s estimated 2 million illegal immigrants, as many as 400,000 lived in Northern California in 1997, according to projections by San Diego economist Enrico Marcelli of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

There were 626 illegal immigrants deported last year in Madden’s nine-county coverage area, nearly 40% fewer than in 1994, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are fewer illegals in the region. Asked to explain the drop, Madden simply said: “No people.”

Every weeknight, an INS bus leaves Dublin for Los Angeles. It seats 66 people and is almost always filled with the illegal immigrants captured that day.

The INS, which oversees the Border Patrol, said the deployment issue is complicated and won’t be fully resolved until the agency’s reorganization is approved by Congress.

INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice stressed the importance of Operation Gatekeeper, which the agency launched more than four years ago to focus on catching illegal immigrants entering from Mexico.

“While we’ve seen attrition in Northern California, we have had a huge infusion of new agents along the southern border,” she said. “If we can deter people from entering the border, they won’t end up in Northern California.”

Also, about 160 special INS agents throughout Northern California compensate somewhat for the lack of Border Patrol presence, said Kice, who stressed that the INS agents have the same authority, even if they don’t wear Border Patrol uniforms.

“The public should not be left with the impression that we are not doing the job,” she said. “We just have other officers who are doing the job.”

But Raul Cano, a special agent based in San Francisco, said it is all they can do to keep up with their own workload, which includes helping to prosecute criminal undocumented immigrants, solving drug and organized crime cases and investigating workplaces and counterfeit documents.

“It’s kind of like a Catch-22 situation,” Cano said. “They need as many uniformed officers on the border, but part of the mission necessitates having uniformed officers in the interior.”

The INS has tried to compensate in other ways--leading seminars to teach business owners how to spot illegal green cards, for example. There’s also a pilot project that allows employers to verify the status of workers through an Internet site.

But Bilbray contends that INS efforts must be spread throughout the country’s interior, not just at the border.

“Internal enforcement is where we have a gaping hole now,” Bilbray said. “You need to have the law enforced everywhere. That means just as much in Sacramento as in San Diego. We need to strengthen our enforcement, not cannibalize it.”