'I'm going to keep trying until I make it'[Illegal aliens]

No matter how tough the laws or hard the journey, migrants vow they won't give up

NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - At least six times this week, Salvador Hernandez has waded into the chilly waters of the Rio Grande and fought the treacherous currents to reach U.S. soil. And every time, he has turned back rather than fall prey to U.S. Border Patrol agents, lurking just beyond the bushes on the other side.

"You don't know what we suffer just to get here. We can't risk being sent home," said Hernandez, a Salvadoran who trekked through miles of jungle and hopped seven moving trains to reach this Mexican border city.

Others along the Texas-Mexico border echoed that feeling: No matter the obstacles, how high the fence, or how tough the law, they're going to keep on coming to the United States.

Alarmed, some U.S. lawmakers have been wrestling with proposals to overhaul immigration laws. Foes of one plan, which calls for hundreds of miles of new border fencing, protested this week in Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix and other cities.

But along the muddy banks of the Rio Grande, little of that mattered to would-be crossers eyeing the narrow stretch of water standing between them and their American dream.

They vowed to continue their northward journey, largely indifferent to what happens in Washington or anywhere else, including Cancun, where President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox met Thursday to discuss immigration and other pressing concerns.

"Hunger knows no borders," said Nestor Gonzalez, a Honduran electrician who was fishing for food in the Rio Grande, which he planned to cross later. He hopes to work for several years in the United States and send money back home to support his three small children.

About 400,000 people illegally enter the United States every year, by one estimate, despite U.S. border security measures costing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

The flow continues despite the increasingly deadly toll. A record 473 migrants died last year — most from dehydration, exposure and drowning — as they chose less patrolled, but more dangerous routes across deserts in Arizona and Texas, according to the Border Patrol.

That figure does not include scores of Central American migrants killed or injured while traveling through Mexico, according to human rights groups. For Central Americans, the U.S. border is only the final hurdle in a long, perilous journey.

Rights activists in Nuevo Laredo estimate that more than half of the migrants that reach the border have been robbed along the way, most of them by Mexican police.

"We're like cheese. Everyone wants to take a bite," said Carlos Gomez, 38, a Salvadoran migrant who was plotting his return to the U.S. two months after being deported. He said he was spurred on by the thought of his 7-year-old, mentally handicapped daughter waiting for him in Miami.

But Central Americans' journey has gotten harder since Hurricane Stan knocked out railroad bridges across Mexico's southern state of Chiapas in September.

Where the migrants once hopped the train near the border, they now have to walk about 200 miles through jungle and highlands to reach the nearest working station. Along the way, many are attacked by gang members or extorted by police. Others are maimed or killed in falls from speeding trains.

Still, they continue traveling north, spurred by poverty and natural disasters in their home countries. And the immigrant flow is rising, said Leonardo Lopez, an outspoken Jesuit priest who runs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Nuevo Laredo.

In 1999, 4,647 migrants took refuge in the shelter. That number swelled to 11,400 last year, he said.

Increased border security on the U.S. side has achieved only two things, he contends: "More people die and migrants have to pay more" to immigrant smugglers.

A U.S. Senate proposal would beef up border security and give temporary guest-worker permits to as many as 400,000 migrants. Some of that plan's opponents prefer enforcement only. They want to spend $2.2 billion to add 700 miles of fence to the border and to make it a felony to slip into the U.S. illegally.

While in Cancun, Bush hopes to persuade Fox to crack down on immigrant smugglers and help prevent Central Americans from using Mexico as a trampoline into the United States.

Fox has promised to do what he can in hopes of seeing U.S. lawmakers establish a guest worker program, which Bush backs. But previous Mexican government efforts to halt the flow of migrants have yielded few results, largely because of corruption among Mexican officials, human rights activists say.

Both police and immigration officials "are in bed with the migrant smugglers," said Arturo Solis, who directs a human rights group in the border city of Reynosa. He said there are few deportations, particularly along the northern border, since police prefer to extract money from the migrants.

Among the abuses, rights workers say: Police kidnap migrants and take them to safe houses. There, smugglers force them to call their families to get money for the journey across.

Other smugglers abandon their charges along the way, or simply rob them without bringing them to the border, activists say.

"Because they're migrants, they don't have the protection of the law," said Lopez, whose shelter provides the only haven for the thousands of migrants headed north into Laredo.

Dionisio Paniagua, a haggard-looking Honduran migrant, said he was robbed at gunpoint by an immigrant smuggler, so he complained to police in Reynosa. They promptly threw him in a detention center.

He is now trying to get legal residency in Mexico, rather than take his chances with the Border Patrol.

"I'm not going to risk my life so that they can hunt me down on horseback or in a truck," Paniagua said from an overcrowded migrant shelter in Reynosa.

"The migrants are like kamikazes," he said. "They'll throw themselves at the border, regardless of what the law says."

As the mother of a severely disabled child, this is one very sore subject for me. Because of the illegals willingness to leech off our social programs, the most vulnerable of our citizens are in jeopardy of losing that safety net funded by our tax programs. And a lot of these individuals have paid taxes of their own into these programs, as have their parents and grandparents. It is not the right of illegals or their children (which I also see as illegals)to take from a US citizen. We cannot be expected to fund the needs of those not willing to step up to the plate and do their part.

This is a serious issue for me; I provide 100% care for my daughter, acting as her nurse, teacher, therapist, social director and advocate along with the normal motherly functions. It's a 24/7/365 job that I've been doing now for 12 years; saving California hundreds of thousands of dollars every year - and that's just for her 24-hour medical care. I'll be damned if I'll step aside and say it's ok to take from my child what she has every right to obtain. Because your correct, Sheana, it takes an arm and a leg to care for our citizens that cannot care for themselves. Then, it takes the other arm and leg to put back into our programs just to keep them available.

Congrats to you for taking on a monumental task, out of love. I agree with you 100%. I took care of my Dad til the day he died, CHF (congestive heart failure). We could get no help! The hospitals are still hounding my mother with unpaid bills, they were turned into collection agencies long ago.
I would give illegals nothing! no medical, no food stamps, no welfare.....nothing! And as for their babies born here, I agree, they should not be citizens.
Again, my prayers are with you and good luck.

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