Immigrant smuggling on rise
Smuggling of humans across the U.S. border near Danville, Wash., northwest of Spokane, is spiking, federal authorities said Monday.
In the past two months, Border Patrol agents apprehended 11 illegal immigrants, more than the total for the previous fiscal year, according to Lonnie Moore, special operations supervisor with the Spokane sector of the U.S. Border Patrol.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Border Patrol arrested 10 illegal immigrants in the Danville area.
The latest arrests came late last week when Border Patrol agents, acting on a tip from a local farmer, spotted eight Korean citizens, including two children, traipsing through a field in the United States.
The Koreans, who couldn’t speak English, were being led by Harry Edward John Harrison, a Canadian citizen, who was arrested on federal smuggling charges. He was ordered held in jail after an initial appearance Monday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Cynthia Imbrogno.
The Koreans who accompanied Harrison all admitted they had illegally entered the United States, and told Border Patrol agents they had been driven from Vancouver, B.C., to a Canadian drop site north of Danville.
The Korean citizens likely will be deported after being processed through U.S. immigration proceedings, unless they are repeat offenders. The juveniles, a 12-year-old girl and 14-year-old boy, also face likely deportation.
After his arrest, Harrison told U.S. Border Patrol agents he is receiving methadone for a heroin addiction, court documents say.
Harrison said that while staying at a halfway house in Surrey, B.C., he was approached by a man who offered him $500 “to guide a group of people into the United States on foot,” the documents said.
Harrison and the Koreans were dropped off Thursday on Canada Highway 3, not far from a U.S. Port of Entry at Danville, the documents say.
The group planned to illegally enter the United States on foot, then be picked up at a prearranged location in the United States. At that point, Harrison apparently intended to return to Canada.
“This occurred in broad daylight,” Moore said. “There are paved roads on both sides of the border, and access is relatively easy.”
At night, detecting and apprehending drug and human smugglers is a more difficult task, U.S. authorities say. The Border Patrol relies on night-vision goggles, motion detectors, aircraft and various forms of random patrols on horseback, four-wheel-drive trucks and even ATVs.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. border security was significantly increased with the assignment of substantially more agents west of the Cascades, near the Blaine, Wash., port of entry.
Since then, federal authorities say, smugglers have begun looking for the next weakest link; many are coming to the U.S.-Canadian border in Eastern Washington, handled by the Oroville and Curlew stations of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Details of the most-recent human smuggling case aren’t fully known. In previous cases prosecuted in the Eastern District of Washington, many Korean women have paid as much as $2,000 each to be smuggled into the United States.
If they don’t pay in advance, some Korean women have been coerced into working in prostitution in U.S. cities, authorities say.