A coalition of immigrant rights organizations, church groups, and Latino business people had called the march a few days earlier amid outrage over the arrest of 154 people in Ontario and Corona over June 4-5.

In a typical story, marcher Christina Silva, 27, said the border cops had set up checkpoints near her home in Riverside. Her sister had seen them pulling two workers out of a meat market, she said.

Since the march the total number arrested has climbed to over 400. Arrests have occurred in more than 20 Southern California cities, from Escondido to Ontario, 50 and 100 miles from the border, respectively. Over 90 percent of those caught in the dragnet are from Mexico.

The sweeps have been carried out by the recently formed Mobile Patrol Group, based in Temecula, California.

Officials of the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a section of the Department of Homeland Security that oversees the Border Patrol, have described the sweeps as “routine business.” Such activity “will continue indefinitely,” they say. Workers have been stopped in markets, at bus stops, outside apartment buildings, at roadblocks and in other public spaces in several cities in San Bernadino and Riverside counties, as well as elsewhere.

Border Patrol spokesman Angel Santa Ana told the Sacramento Bee that his agency “has questioned 9,972 people on trollies and at bus stops, train stations and other public transportation venues in San Diego County since the middle of April.”

“With resources, manpower and Operation Gatekeeper, we changed our mode to a forward deployment,” said Sean Isham, another patrol spokesman.

Introduced in 1994 under the Democratic Party administration of U.S. president William Clinton, Operation Gatekeeper more than doubled the number of agents at the border, and furnished them with more surveillance aircraft, high-intensity lighting, infrared scopes, and underground sensors. Isham said this clampdown “has freed up our resources to act on intelligence that’s been gathered.”

Last year, the Border Patrol carried out similar sweeps in San Diego County, arresting people waiting in line to enter the Mexican Consulate in the city of San Juan Capistrano to apply for matricula consular identification cards. Following protests, Border Patrol sector chief William Veal announced that agents’ activity would be curtailed. However, CBP Commissioner William Bonner overturned this directive last August. The recent raids are the first to be carried out in Southern California since this policy shift.

Press accounts have noted the impact of the raids, describing commercial districts emptied of shoppers, reduced attendance in schools, and workers staying home or even going to work hidden in the trunks of cars.

Griselda Gómez, 57, who works at a fish-processing plant in San Pedro, told the Los Angeles-based La Opinion daily that she hadn’t worked for two weeks. “The supervisor warned us not to come to work without our papers, and recommended to many of the workers that it would be better to stay home,” she said.

Although police departments have denied taking part in the sweeps, eyewitness accounts strongly suggest collaboration with Border Patrol. One Ontario man told La Opinion that a cop stopped him and “asked me for my work permit and I asked if he was immigration or what, because then he didn’t ask me for my license instead of my papers. He immediately turned and spoke to a Border Patrol agent who was beside him, and the Border Patrol agent came and asked for my papers.”

An article in the San Diego Union-Tribune noted that the number of detentions “jumped 25 percent to 535,000 nationally in the six months ending March 31 compared with a year ago. The increase reversed a four-year decline.”

On Tuesday, June 15, over 100 people from some 20 immigrant rights organizations met in a library in San Bernadino to discuss further actions. The meeting, called by the National Alliance for Human Rights, projected organizing a march in Los Angeles and set meetings to form coalitions in San Bernadino and Riverside Counties to carry out further protest actions.  
 
 
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