Most people pulled over for inspection at roadblocks aren't Hispanic, says Port Angeles Border Patrol agent
By Jim Casey, Peninsula Daily News
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While admitting "racial profiling has always been a big issue," Agent Christopher Dyer said, only 20 percent of people sent to "secondary inspection" are Hispanic.
Secondary inspection, he said, involves further questions for people agents choose to investigate more closely.
That still is roughly four times the ratio of Hispanics to non-Hispanics in Clallam County, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released in August, and roughly 10 times the ratio in Jefferson County.
"Let's face it," Dyer told members of the Port Angeles Business Association, "the biggest number of our apprehensions [nationwide] are of Hispanic descent."
In a briefing last week, officials said that since stepping up roadblocks on the North Olympic Peninsula in August, the Border Patrol has made 25 arrests, most for illegal immigration.
Five-fold strategy
Dyer addressed PABA's weekly breakfast meeting at Joshua's Restaurant, 13 DelGuzzi Drive.
His main message was that the Border Patrol has a single mission — "operational control of our nation's borders — with a five-fold strategy:
Dyer said he'd been asked in Port Townsend how many terrorists he'd caught.
While he didn't share his answer Tuesday, he said the question set him to researching the definition of terrorism.
Terrorism, Dyer said he learned, was any act designed to kill or harm civilians in order to compel their governments to a desired action.
And the term terrorists, he said, should include members of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a gang that originated among El Salvadorian refugees.
Murderous gang
Two days before Christmas 2004, MS-13 — who Dyer said is heavily involved in gang warfare over lucrative drug-smuggling routes — machine-gunned a bus in Honduras, killing 28 people who included seven small children.
"It was an act of intimidation," he said. "I have to lump those guys in with terrorists.
"Our mission is to seek these guys out and safeguard our communities."
Dyer entered the Border Patrol in 2002, and after four months of agency training, was sent to Arizona.
There, he said, agents apprehended 800 to 1,000 people a day, and he sometimes would arrest 40 people himself daily.
"It was the Wild West out there," he said.
His next posting was to Van Buren, Maine, where his new targets were drug smugglers.
Videotaped protesters
Dyer has been in Port Angeles since July.
He said he has mostly received thanks from citizens on the street but has sometimes encountered "a huge — I hope it's a vocal minority — that doesn't approve of the work the Border Patrol does."
One of those voices belongs to Paul Richmond, a Port Townsend Democrat, who unsuccessfully ran against U.S. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, in the primary election in August. Dicks' sixth congressional district covers the North Olympic Peninsula.
Richmond asked why Border Patrol agents had repeatedly videotaped participants in the Sept. 20 protest against U.S. immigration policy at the Richard B. Anderson Federal Building in Port Angeles.
"When anybody says they are going to protest in front of any federal building," Dyer answered, "we have to call federal protective services to protect us."
When a PABA member said that, despite the inconvenience of checkpoints, he supported the agents, applause swept the audience.
'Chinese inspectors' of '20s
A border-protection agency has operated on the Peninsula off and on since 1922, when a newspaper report called officers "the Chinese inspectors."
With the massive buildup of the agency from 2,000 officers in 2002 to 19,000 in fiscal 2009, the Port Angeles station has grown from five to 25 agents, from three vehicles to 17, all operating from a WPA-era brick building on First Street.
As reported in the Peninsula Daily News last week, a new station for air, land and sea security has been authorized in the Port Angeles area, but Dyer said he didn't know when it would be built or bought.
On the nation's southern borders, Dyer said, apprehensions have dropped, along with crime in border communities, due to increased Border Patrol activity.
As for protecting the Peninsula, he cited Ahmed Ressam, the so-called millennium bomber convicted of carrying explosives into the United States from Canada to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.
Patrolling Dungeness
Ressam was arrested on Dec. 14, 1999, at the Port Angeles ferry terminal after he drove off the MV Coho ferry.
"That hits home," Dyer said.
"We're not immune here on the Peninsula. We're not some island."
What we are is a border, he said, answering one woman's question about why she had observed Border Patrol vehicles patrolling the shore at Dungeness.
"That's our border, right there," he said.
"It's just Border Patrol agents being vigilant."
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Reporter Jim Casey can be reached at 360-417-3538 or at jim.casey@peninsuladailynews.com.
Last modified: October 07. 2008 9:00PM