H O U S T O N, May 1
The smuggler, who uses the alias Francisco Suarez, told Art Rascon, reporter and anchor at KTRK, ABCNEWS' Houston affiliate, that he is helping illegal aliens start a new life in the land of opportunity.
Suarez also showed Rascon how it's done, taking him along an extraordinary journey through 18 states, which the journalist recorded for the award-winning documentary Smuggler's Highway.
"I'm providing a service that these people have a chance at a new life," Suarez said. "I mean people are coming from Romania, Russia, India, Taiwan, China and Japan."
Since Sept. 11, there have been rising concerns about how the Arab terrorists were able to get into the United States undetected. Suarez said he has smuggled in residents of Middle Eastern countries. Asked if he could have brought in any Muslim extremists, he did not discount the idea.
"We've had our fair share of Muslims too," he said.
The Rise of People Smugglers
It used to be that the typical illegal immigrant came in on his or her own — but no longer. Now, 90 percent of illegal aliens each pay professional smugglers thousands of dollars for assistance in getting over the border, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Business is booming for these "people smugglers," who INS officials say are responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens across the border.
People from all over the world make their way to Mexico which has become a staging post for people like Suarez to illegally smuggle them into Texas.
Discussing his work, Suarez comes across as streetwise, arrogant and unrepentant. He claims to have smuggled in anywhere from "a half-million people to 800,000, maybe more."
It may sound like an extraordinary number, but the INS says it is not inconceivable.
A Wild 18-State Ride
People smugglers are able to do their work by bribing dozens of people, including border patrol officers, to keep quiet, Suarez said. Those who help deliver the cash for the bribes, and even some American police officers, are on the smugglers' payrolls, he said.
Suarez also claims that airline ticket agents and security personnel at certain airports around the country are paid to turn a blind eye to the people being smuggled into the United States. But it all starts with bundles of cash for corrupt border agents.
In one instance, Suarez says he slapped down $10,000 to bribe a corrupt border agent, but he does not believe he is doing anything wrong.
"I'm providing a service that [lets] these people have a chance at a new life," Suarez said.
That new life begins with a wild ride through the United States. For one of his smuggling missions, Suarez took Rascon on a trip through 18 states, covering 4,136 miles in 72 hours. During that time, he delivered 20 smuggled foreigners.
Desperate to Reach New York
One of those smuggled in was a woman who gave her name as Maria, who hailed from Honduras. She had been on the smuggler's highway for more than a month, and was desperately trying to reach the rest of her family.
It cost her $4,000 just to get to Houston, and it was to cost her hundreds more by the time she arrived at her destination in New York City.
PAGE TWO...PICK YOUR U.S. CITY...
The exhausting road trip stops for only three restroom breaks every 24 hours, usually at night. For food, there is one stop a day, and only at restaurants that have conspired with the smugglers. The restaurant pit stop also gives the illegal aliens a chance to eat and wash up, something they may not have done for days, if not weeks.
Eventually, one by one, the illegal immigrants are dropped at inconspicuous locations. The first stop was in Tennessee, where one of those smuggled paid $2,000 to get dropped off. The immigrants must pay up front, but hundreds and sometimes thousands more dollars are due at delivery.
A Smuggler’s City of Choice
Back on the road after the Tennessee drop, they headed to the city that never sleeps, arriving in New York City 36 hours after the road trip started.
It was the final leg of Maria's 30-day journey, and she tried her best to make herself look presentable for the family.
New York is a prime city of choice for the smugglers. Five illegal aliens are eventually picked up by relatives or friends, and there are happy reunions.
But Maria's story did not have a happy ending. Her family couldn't come up with the final payment, making the smuggler furious.
"Boy, that pisses me off, [stuff] like this," Suarez said. "The family is not even prepared. And it's, it's a waste of our time."
They waited for three hours in Times Square, but the family could not cobble together the $520 payment needed to spring Maria from the smuggler. The sobbing woman was ordered back into the van. The next stop was Houston, which had been her entryway into the United States.
In Its Own Words
“An invasion is spreading across America like wildfire, bringing gangs, drugs and an alien culture into the very heartland of America.”
— Voice of Citizens Together video, “Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union,” 1999
“A misguided immigration policy and a hostile force on our border are threatening the bonds of our union. If she is to survive, America needs leaders who will fight for her. Leaders who will control our border. Leaders who will repel invaders. Leaders who will put an end to the cultural cancer which is eating at the very heart of our nation. America and her western civilization must be rescued if she is to make her date with destiny in the twenty first century.”
— Voice of Citizens Together video, “Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union,” 1999
“Americans, especially white Americans, should get out of California — now, before it is too late to salvage the equity they have in their homes and the value of their businesses.”
— Glenn Spencer, “White Fight or Flight,” American Patrol website, 2003
Background
Glenn Spencer, one of the harder line anti-immigrant ideologues now operating, founded Voice of Citizens Together (VCT, which is more commonly known, like one of his websites and his radio show, as American Patrol) in 1992. According to a 2005 article in LA Weekly, Spencer claims that the sight of “Mexicans” in the Rodney King riots “tearing down [his] old neighborhood” prompted him to start Valley Citizens Together as a way to bring attention to the growing threat of illegal immigration. The name was later changed to Voice of Citizens Together to broaden the group’s appeal. Later, the American Patrol (AP) name was added; today, that name is much more commonly used than Voice of Citizens Together.
Riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, Spencer led VCT/AP into a loose federation of groups under the banner of “Save Our State” to lobby for the passage of California's Proposition 187, which would have denied educational and other benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. Although it passed in 1994, Prop 187 was stalled for years in the courts and effectively killed in 1998 by the incoming Gov. Gray Davis.
It was later that year that VCT/AP — along with Barbara Coe’s hard-line California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) and the better-known Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)— began working with the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). Coe, Spencer and Rick Oltman, then FAIR’s western regional representative, all came to Cullman, Ala., to speak at a 1998 anti-immigrant rally hosted by the CCC, a group that regularly spews vitriol at black people (“a retrograde species of humanity”). Also attending was an unrobed Alabama Klansman. The event, held to protest a swelling population of Mexican workers in the region, ended with the arrest of one of the rally’s organizers, charged with violating a local ordinance regulating outdoor fires by burning a Mexican flag. It was seen as an early indicator of the mixing of white supremacists and other extremists with more “mainstream” nativist elements.
VCT/AP uses its website, American Patrol Report, and self-produced videos like “Treachery and Treason in America” and “Conquest of Aztlán” to vilify Mexicans, deride so-called fifth-column Latinos, and rant about the allegedly long-planned Mexican invasion of the American Southwest. On the site, Spencer attacked Mario Obledo, a leading Latino activist and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as “Pinche [a slang Spanish term often translated as “worthless” or “fucking”] Cockroach and 1998 Asshole of the Year.” A cartoon character was depicted urinating on Obledo’s picture. (Bizarrely, Spencer later denied to reporters that the site had ever carried such a caricature.) Spencer posts material on his site from such men as H. Millard, an infamous columnist for the racist Council of Conservative Citizens who once bemoaned the “slimy brown mass of glop” that immigration and interracial families were making of the U.S. population.
VCT/AP’s videos push racist, anti-Latino conspiracy theories. Its video, “Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union,” which was sent to every member of Congress, purports to prove that the Mexican government and Mexican-Americans are conspiring to take over the American Southwest and create the nation of Aztlán. “Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest,” says the video (which also features a scuffle between VCT and anti-racist activists). The video then proceeds with an assortment of sound bites from Latino activists and Mexican officials — including references to “la reconquista” — that “prove” that there is a Mexican plot to break the Southwestern states away. A “hostile force on our border,” the narrator warns in grim tones, is engaging in “demographic war” against the United States. “Mexico is moving to capture the American Southwest.”
Under the banner of America Patrol, Spencer also ran a weekly radio show that aired in several cities in the late 1990s. On it, he hosted a series of extremist guests, including Kevin MacDonald, a California professor who accuses Jews of pursuing an immigration policy specifically intended to dilute and weaken the white population of America.
Thanks to groups like VCT/AP, variations of the Aztlán conspiracy theory are now widespread on the American radical right and in the much larger nativist movement. Columnists like Sam Francis, the late editor of the Council of Conservative Citizens’ Citizen Informer, have spread the theory throughout the radical right. And MSNBC news commentator and close Francis friend Pat Buchanan, a white nationalist, has helped to more widely publicize variations of the theory, as have other “mainstream” commentators like CNN’s Lou Dobbs.
In 2002, Spencer abandoned California for Cochise County, Ariz., joining several other anti-immigrant activists including Minuteman co-founder Chris Simcox, who have relocated to the southern border. (In a 2003 essay, “White Fight or Flight,” Spencer suggested that white people “should get out of California — now, before it is too late to salvage the equity they have in their homes and the value of their businesses.”) Setting up operations in the Pueblo del Sol subdivision in Sierra Vista, Ariz., Spencer created American Border Patrol (ABP), a private organization that would serve as a “shadow Border Patrol.” (Although it has its own website, ABP is essentially an Arizona extension of his California group, VCT/AP.) Using high-tech sensors, infrared video-cameras mounted on model airplanes, and “citizens” roaming the often mountainous terrain on ATVs, Spencer’s operation was designed to embarrass the federal government into fully militarizing the border by capturing images of undocumented workers on film and uploading them to the American Border Patrol website for all to see.