BORDER AGENTS, LURED BY THE OTHER SIDE

As Enforcement Grows, Corruption Cases Increase

SAN DIEGO -- The smuggler in the public service announcement sat
handcuffed in prison garb, full of bravado and shrugging off the
danger of bringing illegal immigrants across the border.

"Sometimes they die in the desert, or the cars crash, or they drown,"
he said. "But it's not my fault."

The smuggler in the commercial, produced by the Mexican government
several years ago, was played by an American named Raul Villarreal,
who at the time was a United States Border Patrol agent and a
spokesman for the agency here.

Now, federal investigators are asking: Was he really acting?

Mr. Villarreal and a brother, Fidel, also a former Border Patrol
agent, are suspected of helping to smuggle an untold number of
illegal immigrants from Mexico and Brazil across the border. The
brothers quit the Border Patrol two years ago and are believed to
have fled to Mexico.

The Villarreal investigation is among scores of corruption cases in
recent years that have alarmed officials in the Homeland Security
Department just as it is hiring thousands of border agents to stem
the flow of illegal immigration.

The pattern has become familiar: Customs officers wave in vehicles
filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband. A Border
Patrol agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall
prey to temptation and begin taking bribes.

Increased corruption is linked, in part, to tougher enforcement,
driving smugglers to recruit federal employees as accomplices. It has
grown so worrisome that job applicants will soon be subject to lie
detector tests to ensure that they are not already working for
smuggling organizations. In addition, homeland security officials
have reconstituted an internal affairs unit at Customs and Border
Protection, one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies,
overseeing both border agents and customs officers.

When the Homeland Security Department was created in 2003, the
internal affairs unit was dissolved and its functions spread among
other agencies. Since the unit was reborn last year, it has grown
from five investigators to a projected 200 by the end of the year.

Altogether, there are about 200 open cases pending against law
enforcement employees who work the border. In the latest arrests,
four employees in Arizona, Texas and California were charged this
month with helping to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country.

While the corruption investigations involve a small fraction of the
overall security workforce on the border, the numbers are growing. In
the 2007 fiscal year, the Homeland Security Department's main
anticorruption arm, the inspector general's office, had 79
investigations under way in the four states bordering Mexico,
compared with 31 in 2003. Officials at other federal law enforcement
agencies investigating border corruption also said their caseloads had risen.

Some of the recent cases involve border guards who had worked for
their agencies for a short time, including the arrest this month of a
recruit at the Border Patrol academy in New Mexico on gun smuggling charges.

The federal government says it carefully screens applicants, but some
internal affairs investigators say they have been unable to keep up
with the increased workload.

"It's going to get worse before it gets better," said James Wong, an
internal affairs agent with Customs and Border Protection. "It's very
difficult for us to get out and vet each and every one of the
applicants as well as we should."

The Border Patrol alone is expected to grow to more than 20,000
agents by the end of 2009, more than double from 2001, when the
agency began to expand in response to concerns about national
security. There has also been a large increase in the number of
customs officers.

James Tomsheck, the assistant commissioner for internal affairs at
Customs and Border Protection, said the agency was "deeply concerned"
that smugglers were sending operatives to take jobs with the Border
Patrol and at ports.

Mr. Tomsheck said the agency intended to administer random
lie-detector tests to 10 percent of new hires this year, with the
goal of eventually testing all applicants. His office has contracts
with 155 retired criminal investigators, adding 36 since last fall,
to do background checks.

In one of the new corruption cases this month, at a border crossing
east of San Diego, a customs officer allowed numerous cars with
dozens of illegal immigrants and hundreds of pounds of drugs to pass
through his inspection lane, investigators said.

The officer, Luis Alarid, 31, had worked at the crossing less than a
year, and the loads included a vehicle driven by Mr. Alarid's uncle,
the authorities said. Mr. Alarid has pleaded not guilty to a charge
of conspiracy to smuggle. Investigators found about $175,000 in cash
in his house, according to court records.

In another recent case, Margarita Crispin, a customs inspector in El
Paso, Tex., began helping drug smugglers just a few months after she
was hired in 2003, according to prosecutors. She helped the smugglers
for four years before she was arrested last year and sentenced in
April to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit up to $5 million.

Although bad apples turn up in almost every law enforcement agency,
the corruption cases expose a worrisome vulnerability for national
and border security. The concern, several officials said, is that
corrupt agents let people into the country whose intentions may be
less innocent than finding work.

"If you can get a corrupt inspector, you have the keys to the
kingdom," said Andrew P. Black, an F.B.I. agent who supervises a
multiagency task force focused on corruption on the San Diego border.

Comparing corruption among police agencies is difficult because of
the varying standards and procedures for handling internal
investigations, said Lawrence W. Sherman, the director of the Jerry
Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and an
authority on corruption.

But he described policing the border as "potentially one of the most
corruptible tasks in law enforcement" because of the solitary nature
of much of the work and the desperation of people seeking to cross.

Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, declined an
interview. But in response to questions at a recent news conference,
he suggested that the breadth and depth of border security
improvements would inevitably produce problem officers.

"There is an old expression among prosecutors," he said. "Big cases,
big problems. Little cases, little problems. No cases, no problems.
Some people take the view we ought to make no cases and then we would
have no problems. I think that is a head-in-the-sand view, which I do
not endorse."

A Veteran Gone Bad

The customs inspector stands just outside his booth, his hand waving
a stream of cars through the Otay Mesa crossing just east of San
Diego. They zip past, one after another, no questions asked, an
unusually easy welcome into the United States where inspectors are
known to grill citizens about their travels before allowing them through.

But time was running short for this Customs and Border Protection
officer, Michael Gilliland, a revered veteran on the late shift
expecting a special delivery -- a vehicle with several illegal
immigrants -- in his crossing lane.

Rather than intercept them, he had arranged for their safe passage
through his lane, federal prosecutors said.

Mr. Black, the F.B.I. agent from San Diego, shook his head as he
watched a surveillance videotape of Mr. Gilliland.

"You're basically giving that smuggling organization an opportunity
to conceal whatever else they want in that vehicle," he said,
"whether it's drugs, weapons, terrorists."

The smugglers use any ruse available to lure border workers but seem
to favor deploying attractive women as bait. They flirt and charm and
beg the officers, often middle-aged men, to "just this once" let an
unauthorized relative or friend through. And then another and another.

Prosecutors believe this is how smugglers ensnared Mr. Gilliland, who
eventually pleaded guilty to taking $70,000 to $120,000 in exchange
for letting hundreds of illegal immigrants pass through his lane. He
was sentenced last year to five years in federal prison. Two women he
had befriended also pleaded guilty.

The case against Mr. Gilliland, 46, stands out for the number of
immigrants he helped and the shock of a respected veteran gone bad.

To young inspectors, Mr. Gilliland was a mentor, quick with advice,
even an embrace, a burly go-to type with 16 years under his belt.

"He knew the laws backward and forward," said Edward Archuleta, an
internal affairs agent with Customs and Border Protection who once
worked with Mr. Gilliland and eventually helped bring him down.

A tip steered F.B.I. agents to Mr. Gilliland's illegal activities,
but it took agents two years to build the case. The evidence against
him included secretly recorded phone conversations in which Mr.
Gilliland coordinated with Mexican smugglers when to drive their
cargo of illegal immigrants through inspection lanes.

One morning, while Mr. Gilliland was taking a break from his shift,
agents called him over and told him he was under arrest. They had
braced for Mr. Gilliland to become belligerent, but instead he
collapsed into a chair, weak-kneed.

"My grandfather always told me that when you're born, the only thing
you're born with is your word, and only you can give that away, your
integrity," Mr. Gilliland said at his sentencing hearing. "And I'm sorry."

A Breach of Trust

The case against the Villarreal brothers -- the former Border Patrol
agents in San Diego -- illustrates how hard it has been for
investigators to hunt for and root out corrupt officers, many of whom
know how to game the system.

The Villarreals would meet illegal immigrants near the border. The
doors of their government-issue truck would swing open and Mexicans
and Brazilians would climb in. Off they drove, Border Patrol agents
at the wheel, but not to a station or jail, investigators said.

Instead, they said, the migrants were taken to a drop house in San
Diego and later transported by others in the smuggling ring to cities
and towns far from the border.

The case against the Villarreals had shock value, even to those on the inside.

"Just really brazen, broad daylight," said an investigator, who was
granted anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss a
continuing investigation. "They could say, 'We picked these guys up,
we're taking them in.' "

As they closed in on the brothers, a squad of agents from several
federal agencies met. Some had qualms about speaking openly in front
of such a large group, fearing internal leaks.

Their fears were apparently borne out when, a couple of weeks after
the meeting, the brothers quit their posts, left their badges at
their family's home in National City, Calif., and have not been seen
publicly since.

A lawyer for the family, Jon Ronis, declined to say where the
brothers were and said neither they nor family members would comment.
Mr. Ronis said Raul and Fidel Villarreal were ready to defend
themselves if the government brought a case.

Federal officials declined to comment because the case was still
open. But investigators described some aspects of it on condition of
anonymity. When the public service announcement was being made for
Mexico, for example, Raul Villarreal spoke excitedly about his role
in producing it, even suggesting camera angles and lighting, said a
person familiar with its production.

Just when and why the brothers turned against the Border Patrol is
unclear, even to the investigators. There is speculation that Raul
had grown disgruntled with the work, chafing at having been moved
back into the field from his public affairs job, considered a
comfortable, high-profile position.

The Villarreal case is especially alarming for the level of trust the
brothers had earned within the Border Patrol. Their betrayal has had
the effect, at least in some investigations, of leading the
authorities to move in more quickly when agents are suspected of wrongdoing.

In the case of Jose Olivas Jr., a Border Patrol agent in San Diego
who was discovered serving as a scout for smugglers, an arrest was
made within a year. Mr. Olivas, an agent for 10 years who had worked
as a liaison between the agency and the United States attorney's
office, was sentenced in January to three years in prison.

The drawback to moving in fast, investigators said later, is that
they probably will never know how deep Mr. Olivas's ties were to the
smuggling organization. He suggested to a judge that he had been
drawn to smuggling to help pay his bills.

Policing the Police

An internal Web site at Customs and Border Protection features a page
devoted to a rogue's gallery of agents and officers recently
convicted of corruption-related charges.

The intention, homeland security officials say, is to send the
message that corruption will not be tolerated. That message has taken
other forms, as well. When Mr. Olivas, the San Diego border agent,
was sentenced to prison, several agents attended the court hearing at
the behest of homeland security officials to shame him publicly.

"I am truly embarrassed just looking at them," Mr. Olivas told the
judge. "I am truly sorry for the breach of trust that was given to me."

But if the department is serious about catching wrongdoers,
investigators of corruption cases say it also needs to make
fundamental changes in the way it polices the border police.

One result of the awkward marriage of agencies that begat the
Homeland Security Department is that three internal affairs units, in
addition to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have a hand in
corruption investigations. In the best case, having more than one
unit investigate corruption can be a "force multiplier," in the words
of one investigator, but more often, it can slow cases down and lead
to confusion over who should take the lead, several investigators said.

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general has nearly
170 investigators to police 208,000 department employees -- including
other large agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service -- and
gets first crack at cases. When it passes on an investigation, the
case is picked up by either the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's
office of professional responsibility or the Customs and Border
Protection internal affairs unit.

The F.B.I. also develops its own cases. Don Allen, a retired agent
who until 2005 supervised a multiagency task force in San Diego
investigating corruption among border officers, said internal affairs
units did not always readily share information and often resented any
sense of being big-footed by an outside agency. He said law
enforcement agencies often "had a negative impression of the bureau."

Thomas Frost, an assistant inspector general with the Homeland
Security Department, said the limited number of investigators meant
his office focused on "those most important cases and what resources
we can bring to bear."

He suggested it would be "more efficient" if his office had more
investigative resources under its control so that it could better
track "everything going on."

"Let's face it," Mr. Frost said, "part of the issue of the border is
it is kind of a balloon. When you squeeze one part, another bulges."

Some Recent Cases

Jose Ramiro Arredondo, 33, a Customs and Border Protection officer in
Laredo, Tex., was arrested in March after a smuggler who had been
detained told the authorities that Mr. Arredondo had helped bring
illegal immigrants across the border.

Miguel Angel Avina, a trainee at the Border Patrol academy in
Artesia, N.M., was arrested in May on fraud and conspiracy charges
related to his participation last year in a ring that smuggled at
least 110 guns into Mexico, the government said. He has been
dismissed from the academy.

Juan Luis Sanchez, 31, a Border Patrol agent, pleaded guilty May 20
to drug, bribery and fraud charges. He admitted transporting at least
3,000 pounds of marijuana in his Border Patrol truck from summer 2002
to January 2004 in exchange for $45,000 in bribes.

Jose Magana, 44, a Customs and Border Protection officer at the San
Luis, Ariz., border crossing, was arrested May 12 on charges of
conspiring to smuggle illegal immigrants. The authorities say he
allowed people to pass uninspected through.

Luis Francisco Alarid, 31, a Customs and Border Protection officer,
was arrested May 16 on charges of conspiring to smuggle illegal
immigrants and drugs into the United States. Mr. Alarid allowed
numerous vehicles with migrants or drugs to pass through his
inspection lane since at least February at a border crossing east of
San Diego, the authorities say. One vehicle, containing 18 illegal
immigrants, was driven by his uncle. He has pleaded not guilty.