Border agents will be allowed to make arrests on city streets, by Gregory Alan Gross, San Diego Union Tribune, August 16, 2003.
An order that angered many San Diego-Based Border Patrol agents and caused a firestorm of public outcry from conservatives, anti-immigration activists, and "law-and-order" advocates, has been rescinded by higher-ups in Washington, D.C. It is now legal again for the 1,600 Border Patrol agents who work for the San Diego office to stop and question suspected illegal immigrants on city streets - in San Diego and in outlying suburban neighborhoods. On August 8, San Diego Border Patrol Sector Chief William T. Veal issued a memo which ordered the agents to cease their policy of stopping suspected illegal immigrants on the streets. The order stated that agents were barred from "any interior enforcement or city patrol operations in or near residential areas or places of employment." Why?
On August 2, a Mexican family of five was on its way to the Mexican Consulate in downtown San Diego; when they had reached to within a block of the Consulate, they were stopped by the Border Patrol, found to be lacking proper credentials, arrested, and sent back to Mexico. The Consulate filed a formal complaint against the Border Patrol, and Veal issued his memo six days later. Veal's memo read, in part: "We have a continuing obligation to prevent any public perception that the Border Patrol may be conducting 'neighborhood sweeps,'" he wrote. "The operational priorities of the San Diego sector are geared toward maximum containment at the border."
Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (in Washington, D.C.), rescinded Veal's order on August 15, and the official reason for that, according to Bonner's spokesperson Gloria Chavez, was that the Veal memo (on Aug. 8) was "overly broad and restrictive statement of the Border Patrol policy..."
Three Concepts from Street-Level Bureaucracy (by Michael Lipsky)
1) "Conflict over the Scope and Substance of Public Services" is clearly a concept that applies to this situation with the Border Patrol. Lipsky (page 6) notes that "The public sector has absorbed responsibilities previously discharged by private organizations in such diverse and critical areas as policing, education, and health... [and] Public safety, public health, and public education may still be elusive social objectives, but in the past century they have been transformed into areas for which there is active governmental responsibility." And indeed, especially since 9/11/2001, the issue of border security has been very important, and so Border Patrol agents feel they need to have the power to enforce federal laws not just at the border itself, but inland, in the big city of San Diego. And then budgets come into play, as well, as Lipsky reports (page 8): "Debates over the proper scope of services face the threat of being overwhelmed by challenges to the entire social service structure as seen from the perspective of unbalanced public budgets." And most cities, and states, are…
