FORKS, Wash. — The Olympic Peninsula has always felt more like the edge of the world than a mere national boundary.

Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times Jose Hernandez picking salal, an ornamental shrub, near Forks, Wash.

Then the United States Border Patrol vehicles started showing up.

Sometimes they respond unexpectedly to assist with mundane traffic stops conducted by the local police. Sometimes they hover outside the warehouse where Mexican immigrants sell the salal they pick in the temperate rain forest. Sometimes they confront people whose primary offense, many argue, is skin tone.

Those kinds of scenes might be common in towns that border Mexico in Texas, Arizona or California. But the border here is with Canada, which is separated from the peninsula by the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

“What’s the purpose of the Border Patrol in a place that has no border problems?” asked Art Argyropoulos, who is from Greece and runs a restaurant on the peninsula with his wife, who is from Mexico.

Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times The Border Patrol is building a $10 million facility in Port Angeles.

The Border Patrol says its priority is to address potential terrorism and smuggling threats from Canada (a ferry runs between Port Angeles and Victoria, British Columbia), but many people say the peninsula has instead become an unlikely new frontier in the effort to fight illegal immigration from Latin America.

“Everybody’s scared,” said Benigno Hernandez, 38, who has lived in Forks, population 3,500, for more than a decade. “Everybody’s leaving.”

In Forks, several hundred immigrants had long found winter work picking salal, a wild shrub whose branches are used in floral arrangements around the world. But now, schools are losing enrollment because students’ parents have been deported. Mobile home parks are half empty. At Thriftway, the main grocery store in the town, the weekend rush has slowed because the salal pickers who used to shop after getting paid on Saturdays have disappeared, sometimes because they were detained, sometimes because they were afraid.

“It’s happened very much in the past couple of months,” said Mayor Byron Monohon of Forks. “I think the Border Patrol has just put a lot of pressure on the situation.”

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a class-action suit against the Border Patrol, claiming that its officers were illegally stopping and interrogating people on the basis of racial profiling. This month, the Rights Project filed another suit, alleging that Border Patrol agents sometimes asked to support other law enforcement as interpreters — Border Patrol agents are required to know Spanish — while intending instead to investigate for immigration violations.

In the class-action suit, the three named plaintiffs are all minority members who said they were stopped and questioned without cause: two were corrections officers, one was the student-body president of Forks High School, whose parents were born in Mexico. The student, Ismael Ramos-Contreras, who will be a freshman at Western Washington University in the fall, said the Border Patrol’s presence has become unnerving but also a source of dark humor, including when the school soccer team travels to away games.

“If we see Border Patrol, it’s like, ‘Everybody hide!’ ” he said. “The majority of the soccer team is Hispanic.”

The Border Patrol would not comment on the lawsuits and said it prohibited profiling based on race or religion.

“What they’re focused on up there are the same things that we’re focused on around the country,” said Ronald D. Vitiello, the deputy chief of the Border Patrol. “That’s, you know, the threat of terrorism, the criminal organizations that use the border for their own gain and being prepared to combat those threats, eliminate the vulnerabilities that we know about and mitigate the risk where we can.”

Officials sometimes cite the 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who became known as the “millennium bomber” for his plan to detonate explosives at Los Angeles International Airport. Mr. Ressam was convicted after he tried to enter the United States at Port Angeles with bomb components.

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A version of this column originally appeared in www.nytimes.com.

Readers Comments (1)

1. Tracy Eidson-Zentz says:

   May 29, 2012 at 5:12 pm

   It’s not immigration when you come in illegally. That’s just dishonesty prettied up, but it’s still wrong. You’re welcome if you enter legally. Let’s fix that system.

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