SPECIAL AGENT HAS TUNNEL VISION

Customs Work Now Takes Back Seat to Illegal Immigration

Sometime in January, one of the men who works for Miguel "Mike"
Unzueta, special agent in charge of the federal Immigration and
Customs Enforcement bureau in this salubrious southern Californian
border city, got a tip. It seemed that drug smugglers had bored a
tunnel from Tijuana across the border.

As with much of the intelligence generated by Unzueta's team of
investigators, this tip provided specific information about what was
going on in Mexico but scant detail about what was happening on the
U.S. side of the line. "We were hearing rumors. The tom-toms started
beating. People started talking, 'There's a tunnel.' The difficulty
was to find it, to corroborate the rumor," Unzueta recalled.

By Jan. 23, Unzueta's agents had pinpointed the site of the tunnel in
Tijuana, and Unzueta had passed on the information to Mexican
counterparts. After a 36-hour wait for Mexican authorities to issue a
search warrant, Mexican and U.S. lawmen entered the tunnel in Tijuana
and, guns drawn, slid 80 feet below the surface of the earth and then
groped their way 2,400 feet north only to pop out into the middle of a
50,000-square-foot warehouse in Otay Mesa, a suburb of San Diego.

The tunnel is known to the men and women of the ICE bureau in San
Diego as "El Grande." Dug through a composite of clay and decomposing
granite -- perfect for tunneling -- the shaft had electricity, a
ventilation system, pumps to remove groundwater, concrete flooring for
traction in steep areas, and wood roofing to bolster the walls and
ceiling.

On the Mexican side of the line, authorities discovered two tons of
marijuana. In the United States, agents found 300 pounds. Work had
begun on a cold storage facility in the U.S. warehouse. Apparently the
smugglers were planning to move narcotics around the United States in
fruit and vegetable trucks. In subsequent weeks, Unzueta's agents
arrested a Mexican man in connection with the warehouse and are
seeking two others.

The uncovering of "El Grande," the longest and most sophisticated of
the 21 underground passageways linking the United States and Mexico
that have been discovered since Sept. 11, 2001, was another success in
the career of Unzueta, 45, the grandson of Mexican migrant workers and
a longtime federal agent.

Unzueta grew up in Santa Barbara, Calif., and started his career
straight out of college with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms. He was posted to Spokane, Wash., in 1983 at the height of
the Aryan Brotherhood and Nazi movements. In an area awash with
explosives from the mining and timber industries, bombings were
frequent and Unzueta learned to love the investigations, especially,
he said, post-bombing reconstructions.

"I found that fascinating," he said in an interview at his office -- a
round room on the seventh floor of a nondescript office building in
downtown San Diego. "Back then, I would have done this job for free.
Now I'm glad I get paid."

White supremacists bombed the house of a Catholic priest and set off
four bombs at once in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, hoping to divert law
enforcement's attention so they could raid the national armory there.
(The plan failed.)

Despite the fun, Unzueta angled to return to California after a few
years. Customs was hiring and Unzueta, with his fluent Spanish and law
enforcement background, landed a job in 1987. Once in San Diego, he
was assigned to Operation Alliance, a multi-agency narcotics task
force. He spent the first three years mostly working undercover,
buying stolen cars, guns and heroin in a storefront operation in the
barrios of east San Diego.

He had shoulder-length hair, no love life to speak of, worked six days
a week and loved it. For his undercover identity, he took the name
Miguel Castaneda, a tip of the hat to Carlos Castaneda, the late
Peruvian-born, peyote-munching bestselling author.

"For some reason, I had a knack for buying heroin," Unzueta said.
"People just trusted me."

Joe Garcia, a fellow agent at the time, said Unzueta's people skills
helped him become a successful undercover agent. "He has the ability
to make people feel that they're his friends," he said. "He seems open
and trusting so that people buy into it right away. He had that very
innocent look about him."

Unzueta got out of undercover work after three years. "I just felt
like the tide was going to turn and the odds were not in my favor," he
said. "Undercover is one of those things -- it's like opera. You
either like it or hate it. And if you don't have a knack for it, don't
even bother because you're going to get hurt."

The transition from the life of a field agent to an administrative job
is difficult for an agent who, in his own words, was used to a life of
"running and gunning and arresting people left and right."

By 1992, Unzueta was supervising 10 agents. By 1997, he had been moved
to Washington, D.C., where he was placed in charge of all of Customs'
covert operations. A few years later, he was put in charge of all of
the Customs offices in the western United States.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were followed by an enormous
bureaucratic shakeup, the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security and the merger of the investigative wings of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service and of Customs into ICE.

For Unzueta and many other senior Customs agents, the transition was
rocky. For one, they were used to dealing with things -- drugs, money,
controlled technology, child pornography -- while Immigration handled
people. "We worked criminal investigations where at the end of the day
somebody goes to jail," Unzueta said. "Now some cases end up with
criminal arrests, but a lot of them end up in front of an immigration
judge."

Another issue was the culture. "With some of us being immigrants
ourselves, it's just not what we signed up to do," said Mark Bastan,
the special agent in charge of ICE in Baltimore who worked with
Unzueta in Washington.

Unzueta left Washington in 2002 and returned to San Diego. He was made
the special agent in charge, or SAC, in 2005. Since then, the
illegal-immigration issue has loomed large on his beat and around the
nation.

Unzueta was driving toward the border along Route 905 to show a
reporter "El Grande." Almost 20 years ago, when he started work in San
Diego, illegal immigrants lined the road, trudging toward jobs and a
new life. They would mass in a soccer field across the border and pelt
U.S. Border Patrol agents with rocks and Molotov cocktails before
sprinting across. Now a high-security fence has moved the problem into
the deserts -- of eastern California and Arizona.

"I don't care what side of the [immigration] equation you're sitting
on, it's just really very complicated," Unzueta said. "The SACs, we
don't make policy and we try not to break it. But we'll implement
whatever policy Washington comes up with. We're the generals in the
field."