The political rhetoric over illegal immigration is disconnected from the everyday realities of life on the border.
TUCSON, Ariz.—An A-Star helicopter got the radio call at about 9:30 p.m., as it traversed the Ajo Desert, roughly 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexican border. “We’re on a group of 13. We’re close to moving in if you guys want to come and play.”
Ground agents of the Homeland Security Department’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection were making their way to a spot where they thought illegal immigrants were hiding. Other agents were stationed on nearby mountains watching their movements with truck-mounted lasers.
“They’re still grouped up there. A bird’s very close by. We’re about 10 minutes out,” one officer reported. As the helicopter neared, now two miles from the border, the radio crackled. “We’ve got runners. We’ve got two lasers [on them]. The A-Star is not far behind. We’re gathering the bodies now.”
“This is going to be fun. I hope we’re not too late,” the pilot said as he banked the helicopter down to a few hundred yards above the ground and began sweeping the sagebrush with a spotlight. It illuminated two Hispanic men emerging from behind a shrub. A uniformed ground agent waved them toward a few others huddled nearby.
The border agents had seven foreigners in their custody, men who hours earlier had climbed over a 24-foot iron fence on the border. The helicopter searched the surrounding area for the rest of the group. “Look under your NVGs,” the copilot instructed, using the acronym for night-vision goggles. “You can see color better. Look for blue jeans, flashes of red. If you see anything, let us know.”
The spotlight revealed some freshly abandoned backpacks, a spooked rabbit, and assorted trash, but no additional people. “Look at all those water bottles. I wish they’d clean them up so they don’t keep catching my eye,” the copilot complained. The helicopter abandoned the search a few minutes later after getting a send-off from a ground agent who was “walking out” the captured men.
Their next stop would be a caged bus taking them to a processing center. Within 48 hours, the border-crossers would probably be formally deported: driven to a port in Texas or California to be sent back to Mexico far from where they crossed over. Border Patrol agents might detain some of them for further investigation.
The roundup was typical for a Tuesday night, a loosely coordinated policing effort akin to cops patrolling a city neighborhood. The agents’ beat is the southern Arizona desert. Their job is to look for people who have crossed from Mexico illegally. When ground sensors, roving lasers, or cameras pick up signs of movement, the agents track their prey on foot, on horses, or in jeeps.
Sometimes they find vehicles stacked to the gills with marijuana. Sometimes they find cattle. Sometimes they stare at sand all day.
The agents’ day-to-day jobs are far removed from the political battles over border security and immigration that go on in Washington and along the presidential campaign trail. The White House changed hands three years ago, and the immigration stances of some members of Congress may have helped or hurt their election prospects, but the only change that the rank-and-file Border Patrol has seen is a steady influx of resources, technical assistance, and manpower.
When Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano left her job as Arizona governor in 2009 to join President Obama’s administration, she identified the Tucson sector as a top border-enforcement priority. It is the area most trafficked by smugglers along the Southwest border. In a National Journal interview last year, Napolitano said that the resources pouring into the region have “never been more extensive, and the president intends to sustain that.”
The buildup dates in part to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the focus of customs and border agencies suddenly morphed from immigration to national security. In 2000, the United States had 9,200 Border Patrol agents. Now it has almost 22,000. The Tucson sector employs about 4,000 agents, twice as many as any of the eight other Southwest sectors. Tucson gets a growing arsenal of tactical and surveillance equipment—everything from Black Hawk helicopters to mounted camera towers to laser-based mobile-surveillance sensors.
Critics, including Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl, all Republicans, say that the Obama administration has failed miserably at controlling the state’s border with Mexico. “With hundreds of thousands of people illegally crossing the border every year, and record drug smuggling and violence, shouldn’t the government be working to completely secure the border?” Kyl queried last year when he and McCain unveiled a proposal to bring 6,000 National Guard troops to the region and add 5,000 Border Patrol agents.
By all appearances, the administration has ignored the governor, as well as Kyl and McCain, instead focusing on its own plan to bolster border security. Last year, Customs and Border Protection launched an unprecedented project—a Joint Field Command center that brings together the agency’s separate divisions (border, ports, and air support) in Tucson, right at the heart of the illegal flow. “With the chaotic border environment that Arizona suffered from in the past, it needed a body that can make decisions on the ground versus them going up to headquarters,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey Self, the agency’s top official in Arizona.
Self, like the agents in his command, is fiercely apolitical about immigration, saying that his first duty is to secure the border and win over the residents who are most affected by the trafficking. “In my mind,” he said, “success is actually when you change perception of the citizenry within the state of Arizona.”
The border agents don’t care whether the surge in resources is rooted in public relations. They just view it as a welcome improvement to their jobs. Last year, the agency erected a fence through the cross-border town of Nogales made of thick iron poles, with sharp plates across the top. It replaced a solid metal barrier made of discarded Vietnam War-era landing mats. Before the new see-through fence was installed, smugglers made a game of hiding on the Mexican side and throwing large rocks at Border Patrol vehicles. The veterans called it “rocking.”
“You’d be driving along, and all of a sudden your windshield caves in,” said Mario Escalante, a public-information officer with Customs and Border Protection who has spent 11 years trekking the border. With the old fence, agents on the U.S. side couldn’t see activity on the Mexican side. Smugglers could hole up for hours against the wall and wait for a patrol van to drive by. Once a vehicle was gone, they could toss their drugs over.
Almost overnight, the agents were safer. The new fence eliminated the rocking problem. It forced smugglers to areas farther away from civilization, safe houses, and highways. That gave the agents more time to find and apprehend them. The desert provides few hiding places. If illegal entrants manage to scale the fence inside a city or crawl out of a drain pipe from an underground tunnel, they can disappear in a minute. Out in the wilderness, agents might have a few hours to coordinate a ground apprehension and call for air support. The more remote you are, the longer it takes to run to safety. “We want to get them when they’re asleep, when they think they’re safe,” Escalante said.
Federal and local law-enforcement personnel in the Tucson border sector are engaged in a sophisticated surveillance and hunting game with the border-crossers. The agents see no distinction between the people who are smuggling drugs and those coming across in hopes of finding a job and a better life. “The guy that’s crossing people today is crossing dope tomorrow,” Escalante said.
The federal agents and local police are expert trackers, trained to detect any signs of activity along frequently traveled areas. They can identify the types of shoes that illegal entrants are wearing to determine the size of a group or, if they already have apprehended a few, how many might still be at large. They can tell whether the people are in a hurry. Agents use tricks for detecting activity, such as deliberately arranging sticks on well-trodden areas, or desert “roads,” and checking later to see if the display has been disturbed. “There are trails everywhere,” Escalante said. “You’ll know as an agent if you’re tracking dope or people.… If they’re dopers, they’re not going to use the road.”
Agents also drag tires along the dirt thoroughfare that runs parallel to the border fence, a tactic similar to grooming a ski slope. Anyone who crosses leaves easily detectable footprints. Some entrants try to foil the agents by laying blankets over the tire marks. Some even wear “carpet shoes” to mask any identifying characteristic prints.
The Mexican side of Nogales is on higher ground than the U.S. side, which gives smugglers lookout points to observe the Border Patrol and search for weaknesses. Agents are keenly aware that their every move is being watched. “I go home after an eight- or 10-hour shift,” Escalante said. “They can stay up there for weeks. They have all the time in the world.”
Rarely do border-crossers make it across without guides, sometimes called “coyotes,” who charge $1,500 or more a head to shepherd groups of people into the United States. The groups often scatter when agents appear. Scattering is also a useful tactic for drug smugglers, giving them a chance to protect at least some of their load. If it’s a human-smuggling operation, the guides will try to blend in with the passengers to avoid detection.
Smugglers have been known to send scouts into an area where they think a ground sensor is located. If the Border Patrol shows up in that spot to look for the intruder, the smugglers know they’ve correctly identified a sensor. A special team of sensor experts on the Border Patrol constantly moves the equipment. Even the agents patrolling the beat don’t know where the sensors are until one of them is triggered.
Local police, civilian officials, and federal agents routinely cooperate. Last year, the city of Nogales, Ariz., removed at least a dozen parking meters across the street from the international border fence to thwart a sophisticated tunneling operation in which smugglers parked cars with holes bored in the bottom in a designated spot where the tunnel from the Mexico side ended. “That’s how close we work with Border Patrol. So we took away 18 parking spaces, knowing that we could lose $8,000 to $10,000 in parking revenue in that year,” said Mayor Arturo Garino.
The enforcement logistics are complicated. Federal agencies in the region include Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security Department’s interior immigration-enforcement agency, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, the Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI. The active smuggling areas span at least three counties that have a variety of government structures and political leanings. (Nogales is a Democratic haven. Pinal County, north of Tucson, is more Republican.) Border missions also take place on the Tojono O’odham Indian Reservation, which lies to the west of Nogales, so tribal leaders are involved as well. The Border Patrol’s pilots must maneuver around a no-fly zone dictated by the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Local and federal officers alike shrug at this potpourri of law enforcement, saying that it creates no confusion on the ground. Lt. Matthew Thomas of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, a regional SWAT team officer, was recently assigned to a task force tracking smugglers in the county’s Vekol Valley, a known drug route. On a bright February morning a few days into the operation, Thomas casually deliberated with federal officers over cell phones about which of their three agencies would be in the best position to conduct “knock-and-talk” interviews at some of the homes in the area. “We all have different operating rules,” Thomas said. (The Border Patrol assumed the task.) At the same time, Thomas had his police radio tuned to a Bureau of Land Management agent tracking a suspected drug vehicle through a neighboring valley. If the federal agent got close, Pinal County police would back him up.
Tactics constantly evolve on both sides of the border. As crossing has become more difficult, agents in the Tucson sector are apprehending fewer illegal entrants. They are concentrating on the remainder, but the diehard crossers are getting better at dodging them. Still, the overall reduction in border crossers and law enforcement’s increased agility signifies that Customs and Border Protection is doing something right.
“We’ve had about a 41 percent reduction of traffic over the last year, and that’s as a result of the continued resourcing, the technical, tactical infrastructure, personnel. But it’s also as a result of the fact that we’ve gotten a lot better at understanding our capabilities, understanding the critical capabilities of the adversary,” Self said. “We’ve got a lot of dedicated young men and women out there, and they go out there, and they put it on the line every day. And they’re only going to get more mature. It’s a young workforce right now. They’re going to get better at what they’re doing.”
The Border Patrol’s evolving sophistication is almost completely independent of the political battle over immigration that has paralyzed policymakers. Congress has been unable to act on all but the most trifling legislation since a massive overhaul measure, which would have given undocumented immigrants already in the United States a chance to earn green cards and citizenship, died in the summer of 2007. Critics say that such legalization programs should not even be on the table until the United States can substantially stop the illegal inflow of immigrants and drugs.
Arizona’s Legislature decided it couldn’t wait for the federal government to act and passed a harsh law to crack down on illegal immigration in the state. The statute has garnered national attention, several court challenges, and, most recently, a heated exchange between Brewer and President Obama.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu’s loyalties are divided. The chief law-enforcement officer of a county some 70 miles north of the border fiercely defends the Border Patrol agents who work hand in glove with his officers. “We work famously locally with [Customs Enforcement], with the Border Patrol,” he said.
But Babeu also harshly criticizes the Obama administration’s border-security efforts. “It’s just the people up top that I truly believe are all …
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