[ilbegone]

An update:

UC San Diego team developing device to help migrants safely, illegally cross border

January 1, 2010

By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise

Similar to how global positioning systems help drivers navigate Inland roads, a new device being developed at UC San Diego will assist migrants in illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ricardo Dominguez, an associate professor of visual arts, said the Transborder Immigrant Tool is primarily to help save lives by guiding migrants to water as they walk through harsh desert terrain. Hundreds die each year as they attempt to illegally cross the border. But he also sees it as a form of "electronic civil disobedience."

"The border itself is an illegal entity," said Dominguez, who views the ability to cross borders to seek a better life as a basic human right. "Civil disobedience is about breaking the law for a higher law."

Dominguez heads a team developing the devices at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology on the UC San Diego campus.

The device, which Dominguez hopes to distribute through churches and nonprofit groups on both sides of the border by next summer, will include poems welcoming migrants.

"It is in some ways a mobile Statue of Liberty," he said.

Raymond Herrera, founder and president of the anti-illegal-immigration We The People, California's Crusaders, called on federal authorities to prosecute Dominguez, whom he accused of using public university tax dollars to further illegal activity.

"They're giving the tools, the implements to break the law," said Herrera, of Victorville. "He's aiding and abetting a criminal act. This man's a criminal."

Kathleen Kim, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and an expert on immigration law, said federal law could be interpreted as barring the types of assistance that Dominguez is providing.

But, she said, "so much immigration enforcement is dependent on the policy objectives of the administration in charge." The Obama administration is unlikely to go after Dominguez, Kim predicted.

Dominguez said he realizes he risks prosecution but said that is part of civil disobedience.

Dominguez said he got the idea for the device while talking with a colleague at the institute who was developing a device for off-trail desert hiking.

Dominguez's system, which will be installed in hundreds of cell phones that Dominguez and colleagues are buying for as little as $6 on eBay, will be programmed to direct migrants to water jugs that nonprofit groups place in the desert for them. They also will point them toward Border Patrol stations in case they need life-saving assistance.

Dominguez said his devices cannot direct migrants toward any location, like standard positioning systems already sold at electronic stores. A true GPS points the user toward any specific longitude and latitude. Dominguez's device will connect once to a satellite. The locations of water jugs and other landmarks are then accessed via a Web-based system.

A voice-recognition system would allow migrants to say, for example, "I want water" in Spanish or one of several indigenous languages, and then be directed to water sources. It also will tell them where highways and other landmarks are, giving them the most direct route to get there.

The $9,000 to buy the phones and deliver them comes from the institute's research fund, Dominguez said.

Field testing in the desert will take place over the next few months, said Dominguez, who plans to share the technology with groups helping migrants cross the deadly waters separating North Africa and Spain. Then Dominguez and his colleagues will meet with sympathetic nonprofits and churches on both sides of the border to receive feedback. Those groups will be trained later on how to update water location and other information to the devices, he said.

Agent Louie Avila, a Border Patrol spokesman, said some migrants already use portable GPS devices, along with scanners that can pick up Border Patrol agents' conversations.

"This is nothing new," Avila said. He predicted the agency would obtain one of the devices to find out what paths migrants might be taking.

'POSITIVE THING'

Immigrant rights advocates praised Dominguez.

"Anything that can help bring down the number of deaths at the border is a positive thing," said Jennaya Dunlap, of Immigration Raids Rapid Response Network, which monitors immigration enforcement actions in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. "So many people die there because of lack of water, heat, or because they get lost."

An October report by the American Civil Liberties Union that analyzed U.S. and Mexican government data said between 3,861 and 5,607 migrants have died in the desert since 1994, when the federal government ramped up enforcement in more populated areas and pushed many migrants to cross the border in remote, often-treacherous regions.

Enrique Morones, founder of San Diego-based Border Angels, which places water and food in the desert for migrants and hands out clothing, said he regularly warns people of the dangers of crossing through remote areas and doesn't encourage it.

But he said many migrants, desperate to lift their families out of poverty or reunite with loved ones in the United States, cross anyway. The new device won't in itself persuade people to cross -- the trek will remain risky -- but it will save lives of some of those who already made the choice, he said.

Hector Rivera, a recent UC Riverside graduate who volunteers for Border Angels, said even those fighting most strongly against illegal immigration should support the distribution of the new device.

"To me, this is about human life," he said. "These are human beings and we need to do whatever is possible to allow them to live."