"Smuggling Rings at LAX Targeted"

The LAT intones:

Federal authorities launched a crackdown this week aimed at breaking up smuggling rings that use Los Angeles International Airport to send illegal immigrants across the United States.

In the first coordinated operation to halt human smuggling at the world's fifth-busiest airport, uniformed Border Patrol agents and undercover immigration investigators arrested 64 undocumented immigrants on Tuesday and Wednesday...

"This is not about picking up large numbers of illegal aliens using LAX," said Kevin Jeffery, deputy special agent in the Los Angeles office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "This is about dismantling criminal organizations."

The complaints of ethnic profiling from the usual suspects are first referenced in paragraph 6. And, I want to stress just how much the DHS is going out of its way to assure everyone that they're only using intelligence to search for smuggling kingpins or principals. They are not racially profiling.

The SanFran Chronical story "Officials start crackdown on human smugglers at LAX" stresses the negative, pointing out that the raids will just push the smugglers to other airports in the second paragraph. Surprisingly, the Chronical story doesn't include quotes from the usual illegal immigration advocates.

The AP report, on the other hand, goes in the direction one would expect based on its headline: "More Arrests At LAX, Immigration Groups Fear Profiling". Concerns about racial profiling start in the second paragraph, and over a third of the article is devoted to their cavils. It even includes a quote from Mexico's consul general in L.A. (Someone should tell the AP's reporter or editor that "consul" is the person, "consulate" is the building or office pertaining to a consul, because in their report they confuse the two.)

Immigration2003 · Thu, 07/15/2004 - 11:17 · · Importance: 1