With federal agents flooding traditional smuggling routes and thousands of National Guard troops now helping out, smugglers have sought to get the most people over the border in the quickest of ways. That often means cramming people into vehicles, usually vans and S.U.V.’s, in which people have been found under seats and the dashboard and, in larger vehicles, hidden in the gas tank.
The Yuma County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday that the three men and six women killed were among 21 Mexicans “stacked like cordwood” in a Chevrolet Suburban whose driver lost control after crossing a spike strip laid down by Border Patrol agents.
Twelve people were injured, including five critically. The driver had made a U-turn apparently to avoid a Border Patrol checkpoint, sped as fast as 80 miles per hour and crashed shortly after driving over the spikes on a state highway 30 miles north of Yuma, said Maj. Leon Wilmot of the sheriff’s department.
The driver, Adan Pineda, 20, was charged Tuesday with transporting illegal immigrants, and Major Wilmot said he might face additional charges when the investigation was complete.
Jennifer Allen, executive director of the Border Action Network in Tucson, an advocacy group, said escalating deaths and the spate of crashes showed that the crackdown on the border had deadly consequences that policy makers in Washington often ignored. Ms. Allen questioned the use of the spike strip, which Border Patrol officials said appeared to have been properly deployed and generally causes vehicles to slow to a stop.
“The practices are lethal,” Ms. Allen said. “It should not be a death sentence to flee the Border Patrol.”
The Border Patrol said it began seeing a surge in vehicle deaths in 2003, the start of a major push in border enforcement. Deaths in motor vehicle accidents jumped to 40 that year from 22 the previous year.
Since October, the start of the government’s fiscal year, there have been 42 deaths in accidents during illegal crossings at the Mexican border, already more than the 36 recorded all of last year.
“You are seeing smuggling organizations and the people who put their hands in smuggling organizations with a total disregard for human life,” said Mario Martinez, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in Washington.
The vehicles either crossed the border in rough terrain or picked up people who had already crossed at arranged places in the field or in safe houses, Mr. Martinez said.
Local police said the crashes often involved increasingly risky smugglers desperate not to get caught and not to lose their payment, generally around $3,000 a person, for delivering immigrants to their destinations.
Major Wilmot said the smugglers “even ram into patrol cars trying to get away.”
Figures were not immediately available for the number of injuries in such crashes, Mr. Martinez said, but they are believed to be high. In February, a van carrying 28 people crashed near the Mexican border in San Diego, injuring 20 people.
In April, near Sonoita, Ariz., 4 illegal immigrants died and 21 were injured when their truck overturned.
Often, officials said, the vehicles are in disrepair, making the trip ever more perilous.
In general, as enforcement tightens across the 2,000-mile border, smuggling by car seems to be increasing. Arrests of illegal immigrants in the San Ysidro section of San Diego and the Otay Mesa section of Chula Vista, together the biggest ports of entry, have increased in recent years.
Arrests of people being smuggled in cars tripled to just under 50,000 last year from 19,000 in 2001. This year, however, such captures have decreased to about 14,000 since October, with customs and Border Patrol officials theorizing that smugglers have been deterred by additional screening of vehicles put in place in January, more officers and dogs searching cars, and other efforts.
Advocates for immigrants said the deaths Monday and an overall increase in recent years arise from immigrants making ever more desperate efforts to cross the border.
Last year, a record 473 died along the Southwest border, most of them succumbing to desert heat that regularly exceeds 100 degrees or drowning in rivers. This year, 353 people have died, a 6 percent drop from the same period last year.
