SAN DIEGO — Border Patrol agents are firing tear gas and powerful pepper-spray weapons across the border into Mexico to repel what the agency says are increasing numbers of attacks by assailants hurling rocks, bottles and bricks.
The counteroffensive has drawn complaints that innocent families are being caught in the crossfire.
“A neighbor shouted, ‘Stop it! There are children living here,’ ” said Esther Arias Medina, 41, who on Wednesday fled her Tijuana, Mexico, shanty with her 3-week-old grandson after the infant began coughing from smoke that seeped through the walls.
A helmeted agent on the U.S. side said nothing as he stood with a rifle atop a 10-foot border fence next to the three-room home Arias shares with six others.
“We don’t deserve this,” Arias said. “The people who live here don’t throw rocks. Those are people who come from the outside, but we’re paying the price.”
Witnesses in Arias’ hardscrabble neighborhood described eight attacks since August that involved tear gas or pepper spray, some that forced residents to evacuate.
The Border Patrol says its agents have been attacked nearly 1,000 times in a year.
The agency’s top official in San Diego, Mike Fisher, said agents are taking action because Mexican authorities have been slow to respond. After an attack, he said, U.S. authorities often wait hours for them to come, and help usually never arrives.
“We have been taking steps to ensure that our agents are safe,” Fisher said.
Mexico’s acting consul general in San Diego, Ricardo Pineda, has insisted that U.S. authorities stop firing onto Mexican soil.
U.S. officials say the violence indicates that smugglers are growing more desperate as stepped-up security makes it harder to sneak across the border.
Border Patrol agents were attacked 987 times along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, the agency said. That’s up 31 percent from 752 attacks a year earlier.
