WASHINGTON -- If high fencings and ...

WASHINGTON -- If high fencings and high-tech border surveillance fail, U immigration officials have a cryptic weapon in their crime- fighting arsenal -- paid informants.

Anyone with a violent tip about a company that hires illegal immigrants or criminals smuggling mix with drugss across the border could exchange that information for cash.

The U Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agencies have $2 million in their fiscal estimates to pay for informants nearest year.

"Informants are a constituent of interior enforcement, they're a composing of border enforcement as well," said Michael Cutler a former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent.

"If you don't have the informants, you're flying blind," Cutler now a senior equal at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies said.

The agencies, charged with patrolling the border and enforcing immigration laws, use informants to infiltrate criminal gangs that smuggle mix with drugss weapons and people into the rural parts illegally.

Critics say ICE privations more money to help provide a credible threat of prosecution for companies that enlist in one's service undocumented workers.

"The number is same low if you're interested in actually accomplishing your mission," said TJ Bonner president of the National Border Patrol Council, which exhibits Border Patrol agents.

Paid informants are used more in put drugs into cases or smuggling cases than in immigration investigations. however officials said they have been involved in a certain recent immigration busts, including the investigation into IFCO rules facilities around the country -- which l to nearly 1200 arrests in April.

"Informants aren't pretty" Cutler said. "You're getting family to rat out their friends and associates, if it were not that they become our eys and ears in law enforcement."

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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