Twenty-three rescued from suspected smuggling boat off San Diego
Twenty-three people were rescued from a suspected smuggling boat off the San Diego coast not far from where another vessel broke up a few weeks ago, killing three people.
The small boat, known as a panga, was spotted shortly before 3am on Monday by a US border patrol video system as it drifted near rocks off the coast of Point Loma. The coast guard responded but the craft refused commands to stop, authorities said.
The boat got stuck in the surf line, and San Diego lifeguards and harbor police were called. The coast guard eventually pulled the vessel out of the surf and unloaded the people, authorities said.
The boat carried 20 men and three women, all from either Mexico or Guatemala, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
This month, three people died and more than two dozen were taken to the hospital after a wooden boat suspected of smuggling immigrants capsized in the same area.
That boat was larger than the opentop wooden panga-style boats typically used by smugglers to bring people illegally into the US from Mexico. The boat was overcrowded and overturned on rocks near the Cabrillo national monument.
Smuggling off the California coast has ebbed and flowed over the years but has long been a risky alternative for migrants to avoid heavily guarded land borders. Boats enter from Mexico in the dead of night, sometimes charting hundreds of miles north.
Deaths on the smuggling route are unusual but not unprecedented. At the time of the accident earlier this month, the US border patrol said in a statement that warmer weather fueled a misperception that illegal crossings would become safer or easier.