THE BORDER REPORT

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has quietly started up an old deportation program that caused a fervor about five years ago when the agency first implemented it.

The lateral repatriation program is intended to ship captured illegal migrants through ports of entry far, far, far from where they first entered the country illegally. For example, migrants captured by Naco, Ariz., station agents are bussed eight hours west to Tijuana and voluntarily repatriated into Mexico through that port of entry, where, presumably, they'll voluntarily try again.

The  whole idea behind the lateral repatriation program is to send migrants back to Mexico away from ports of entry where their migrant smuggling rings hold power. Ostensibly, migrants who are removed from, say, Agua Prieta, and dropped in Tijuana, will land in a city they've never been to before, hours away from the Agua Prieta-based smugglers who snuck them into the country in the first place. Stripped of their resources, the thinking goes, the migrants will say "to hell with it," and go back home.

It's a decent idea on paper but as I recall, it didn't work so well the last time they tried this and this time things may actually get worse. First, the United States has no business dumping extra people onto Ciudád Juárez. The city has had more than 500 murders this year and is clearly beyond the capacity of the municipal government to handle an extra 300 or 400 or 1,000 refugees (I know, I know; relax. I said municipal government. I doubt the Mexican Feds are beefing up resources to deal with migrants at the moment and the municipal governments along the border are always the first ones to have to make arrangements for these people who, otherwise, would end up on the streets.)

A few savvy bus companies simply added new east to west buslines to meet the new demands as well.

This does not solve the problem.

In 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol tried the same thing, criss-crossing migrants from one port of entry to another after Mexico denied them airspace access to fly them back to Mexico City. As I recall, the program cost about $500 a plane ticket and State Department officials couched the program as a life-saver, saying deaths in the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector had dropped. Their accounting efforts were off by a factor of some 30 percent; more dead migrants were found in the Arizona desert that year than any previous year. The following year, they started the interior repatriation program, at another cost to taxpayers of $14 million a year. By creative accounting measure, that program was deemed a success and continued.

The lateral program also outraged Mexico because adult males were shackled at the hands and feet and one Border Patrol agent I spoke with tells me that at least one flight was grounded because of weight safety issues.

I spoke with officials at the Tucson Sector office who confirmed the lateral repatriation program is back in action but they referred specific questions to Washington D.C. which was closed by the time I got wind of all this.

I heard about this program from some Naco, Sonora, folks who started seeing migration numbers in their city drop about a week ago. So sit back and grab your popcorn, mi estimado lector; as soon as the mainstream press gets a wind of this, the circus will be back in town.

-- Michel Marizco