FEDERAL JUDGE TO TALK ABOUT RISKY STOPS

Increasingly, South Texans in border counties and along roads and highways
used by smugglers and undocumented immigrants are complaining of encounters
with federal law enforcement officers.

Most area residents are used to being questioned at border crossings and
checkpoints on the northbound lanes of major highways.

But increasingly, the U.S. Border Patrol is setting up mobile checkpoints
on roads less traveled and employing roving patrols.

In 1924, when the agency was formed, 450 agents were hired to detect and
prevent illegal immigration, primarily from Mexico, along the newly
regulated border.

As the service has grown, so has its mission, and the escalation has been
dramatic in the last decade.

But agents still are heavily concentrated along the 1,945-mile southern border.

By 1993, there were 3,965 Border Patrol officers, including 3,389 in
southwestern states. Five years later, there were 7,982, with 7,257 in the
Southwest. This year, the agency added 900 agents and it will have 10,000
men and women in green uniforms within a year.

The Border Patrol's enforcement duties have expanded. Created as a mobile
force charged with stemming northbound illegal migration, it now fights
smuggling of people, drugs and money and watches traffic in both
directions. More than a year ago, Senior Federal District Judge Filem=C3`n
Vela of Brownsville was riding with three staff members in his sport
utility vehicle to Laredo when a Border Patrolman pulled them over. When he
asked why he had been stopped, Vela says the agent said that there were too
many passengers aboard.

Several weeks ago, Vela was on the same stretch of Highway 1017 near
Hebbronville "with an assistant U.S. attorney in his car," when they were
pulled over by another Border Patrolman.

"He came up and recognized us or something," the jurist says, "and said
'have a good day.'

"I said: 'Wait a minute, why did you stop us?' He said because of our
(car's) tinted windows, and I immediately let him know that that was not
legal grounds for stopping us."

Vela reported the incident to the agent's higher-ups, as he had after the
first incident, he says, and again, "they expressed great interest in
resolving this matter."

The federal judge is quick to say that he is neither angry nor embittered,
and makes a point to note that the patrol officers don't write the laws
they're enforcing. He also recognizes that some roads are notorious for
their illicit traffic.

Assistant Sector Chief George Gunnoe of the Border Patrol's Laredo office
declined comment on the two stops.

Vela insists his concern isn't about being twice inconvenienced, or because
he considers the stops an affront to his position.

"The importance here (is) that under the laws of the United States, people
cannot be stopped for no reason at all," he says.

"When we get a case, as judges, and there is a motion to suppress
(evidence), the only way we permit admission of whatever was found in the
vehicle, drugs or illegal aliens, is based on the facts of the original
search," he says.

"And if they are stopping me for no good reason, they may be stopping
others," he says.

"When they're going around stopping judges, you start asking yourself: 'Is
this the way they stop everybody and just happen to come across something
illegal?'"

Vela plans to address the Border Patrol's sector chiefs next month in San
Diego, he says, because he feels that legally risky stops can be fixed with
"more education, training and genuine sensitivity."