Surveillance blimp, south of El Indio, Texas
Meanwhile, on that bright summer day south of El Indio, I found myself surrounded by Border Patrol agents. Several trucks had pulled up, and men in green uniforms were peering through all the windows of my minivan.
“What seems to be the trouble, Officer?” I asked.
“You turned around,” came the reply.
The lead agent was friendly enough, but he was insistent. He wanted to know what I was doing out there in the middle of nowhere on a remote stretch of highway not far from Mexico. My explanation, that I had driven south from Del Rio because I was curious about the security infrastructure that had materialized in recent years along the border, struck him as implausible and weird. I told the assembly of agents that I was curious about that blimp up there in the sky, the aerostat. They looked at me as if I were a space alien rather than the sort of undocumented immigrant to which they were accustomed. I fought the urge to become indignant, to protest my rights as an American citizen to go where I pleased on a public highway. I knew they were just doing their jobs, and I was inarguably a suspicious character. Fortunately, being a suspicious character is not yet a crime in the United States, and I was permitted, after a time, to continue on my way, at liberty.
Driving north back to my grandmother’s house, as I passed one Dollar Store after another, road signs ordering me to obey the road signs, and the curiously discontinuous segments of the new border fence, I thought about Richard Latham and the changes that had come over the border country since he was murdered in 1984.
Richard’s death took place at a time when security along the border, especially at crossings, was taken for granted. Much had changed since then, but it wasn’t clear to me that the omnipresence of law enforcement had done much to prevent random killings or to stop determined criminals from entering the United States. Billions had been spent since then on border security, but what did it really mean to secure a 1,954-mile border—of river valleys and canyons, mountains, deserts, and vibrant communities that straddle both sides of the line—that people have crossed more or less freely for hundreds of years? Is it akin to building a dam, like the one at Amistad Reservoir, to stop the unwanted flow of people and goods? And if a secure border is something like a dam, what happens if the pressure behind it grows too great?
I didn’t have the answers to these questions, so I decided to do some reporting on the subject, to find out what the Border Patrol and its institutional masters in the Department of Homeland Security thought it was accomplishing along the Mexican border. I resolved to re-create, in a rough and highly approximate manner, the journey of the first illegal immigrant to enter Texas, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Instead of the Mariame or the Patarabueye, however, my journey across Texas would be in the company of the Border Patrol.
—
I arrived in Brownsville, Texas, shortly after the murder of Jaime Zapata, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who was shot dead at a roadblock on the highway between Mexico City and Monterrey, in the state of San Luis Potosí, by members of the Mexican drug cartel known as Los Zetas. Zapata, a former Border Patrol agent, was a Brownsville native, and his funeral was held two days after I pulled in to town. A procession passed through the community as residents lined the streets waving American flags. Some of the Border Patrol agents I spent time with in the Rio Grande valley attributed the relative quiet along the line that week to the Zapata killing; the cartels seemed to be watching and waiting to see what the American response would be. The Gulf Cartel, which had been fighting a war with its former enforcers the Zetas for control of the smuggling markets, or “plazas,” along the South Texas border, resulting in more than a thousand deaths over the previous year, denounced Zapata’s killing and called for justice. “It’s clear that the federal government should act without delay against these assassins,” the cartel said in a statement. “Because the spilling of blood in the country is now drowning society.”
I did not attend the Zapata funeral, but several weeks later, sitting in an office in the Ronald Reagan office building in Washington, D.C., I watched high-definition video footage that was taken of the Zapata funeral from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter. The video was shot from about three miles out; the mourners at the funeral were probably not even aware that a helicopter was in the area. I watched playback of that video feed on the web portal of a system called the Big Pipe, a surveillance “asset” that I first learned of in Brownsville, which is where I met Kenneth Knight, deputy executive director of national air security operations for the Office of Air and Marine. Ken Knight is the man who built the Big Pipe.
Knight is a man with a persuasive personality, authoritative white hair, a strong jaw defining a ruddy complexion, and a disarming West Virginia accent. Both times we met, he was dressed in the khaki jumpsuit that all OAM pilots wear, and it turned out that he was a helicopter pilot himself. When we met in Brownsville, I had no idea who he was, but he already knew about me. “I need to talk to you,” he said, with conviction, deftly hijacking my tour of the sector headquarters. Knight was in town to coordinate air support for the Zapata funeral, and he didn’t have much time for me just then, but he gave me a quick demo and briefing on the Big Pipe and then invited me to Washington, where he promised to give a full bells-and-whistles demonstration of his baby.
What was the Big Pipe? The answer wasn’t obvious to me at first, but Knight tossed out terms like “total domain awareness” and strongly suggested that he possessed the means of attaining that state. From the quick briefing I received in Brownsville, the Big Pipe sounded as if it might be the framework for the elusive “common operating picture” that would integrate and rationalize the increasingly unwieldy data streams generated by the high-definition surveillance technologies policing the endless flow of commodities, both licit and illicit, that pour across our international boundaries. The dream of an integrated system fusing these rivers of data into a comprehensive and intuitively manageable real-time graphical interface had been one of the primary aims of the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBInet, the doomed mega-contract with Boeing to build a “virtual fence” along the nation’s borders. It was a reasonable ambition; the military has deployed similar command and control systems for a decade. But the international boundary between Mexico and the United States is not, certain appearances notwithstanding, Afghanistan, and there remain certain niceties, such as the U.S. Constitution, that complicate the ambitions of our paramilitary border guards.
In January 2011, after years of effort and more than $1.5 billion had yielded just a few dozen miles of partially operative tactical infrastructure in southern Arizona, the DHS secretary, Janet Napolitano, had canceled SBInet. The demise of the Boeing program immediately inspired a flood of punditry, both from advocates of high-tech solutions to border management and from critics. Yet here was something that was potentially even more ambitious, which had somehow escaped notice. Could the Big Pipe succeed where SBInet had failed? Would a more comprehensive and sophisticated common operating picture enable us to secure the border? I suspected it would not, but I was curious to know more.
—
The path to total domain awareness is not straight. Down by the river, clear lines of sight can be difficult. Weedy, fast-growing brush often chokes the banks of the Rio Grande as well as the no-man’s-land between the river and the border fence. Carrizo river cane, an invasive species that aids and abets the passage of other such species, grows everywhere. Single-track trails snake through the tall grass. A dirt road runs alongside the border fence. The road is heavily trafficked and well maintained; dust lies thick on the ground and offers up a rich testimony to a tracker who knows the art of sign cutting. The Brownsville and Matamoros bridge, the oldest crossing in Brownsville, rises up behind us as we walk along the river. Broken shards of glass twinkle in the dense ground cover. Thick vegetation does a good job of hiding the ubiquitous debris of human civilization: cast-off plastic water and so
ft-drink bottles and small articles of clothing—socks, T-shirts, a sneaker. Torn black plastic trash bags rustle in the light breeze, especially along the landing spots worn slick from the passage of bodies who slip out of the oily black nighttime river, briefly pause, quickly pull dry clothing and supplies from trash bags, then dress themselves and furtively crawl, scramble, or run toward the black steel pickets. They could try for one of the many gaps in the fencing, but that would be too risky. Some do it anyway and get a quick ride back across. The fence can be climbed, and so they climb.
It was just before dusk on a warm February afternoon, during the magic hour when the low angle of the sun lengthens all shadows and bathes the landscape in a golden glow. Agents D. Milian, R. Caballero, and C. Croy took me down to the river. We were in the middle of town, right next to a port of entry, where you’d think people would not dare to cross, but you would be wrong. The river is perhaps ten yards across, maybe fifteen, the railroad bridge of the port not more than fifty yards away. Even here, they cross. The Carrizo and the brush offer a million opportunities for concealment, and acres of empty land lie between the river and the nearest paved road; once reached, the beckoning neighborhoods of Brownsville will provide the safety of a stash house or a waiting vehicle.
As we walked, I asked questions, and a German shepherd named Crazy, from the local K-9 unit, demonstrated her skills. “I’ll take a dog over a piece of electronic equipment any day,” Croy said. Caballero agreed, as did Milian, who had just hidden himself, for my benefit, amid a tangle of weeds, vines, and thorny bushes so that Crazy could sniff him out. K-9 dogs all work for their own special toy; Crazy loved her well-chewed and nasty segment of black PVC pipe. Such dogs are trained to detect dope, firearms, cash, humans. They smell fear, yes, but more important they have the uncanny ability to smell concealment. In tests, dogs can smell the difference between a person they can’t see and a person they can’t see who is hiding. They can smell the difference between twenty dollars and twenty thousand dollars.
We walked down a trail looking for fresh signs of traffic, and I noticed how much thicker the brush is on the other side. The people on that side have no incentive to clear it and many incentives to let it grow. We observe no signs of human activity. An eerie quiet reigned. Such appearances are deceptive, however, because Matamoros is right there; people live and work and perform their daily routines just a few hundred yards away. Down here, the cartels often employ spotters to watch the river. Sometimes they fish, but often they just sit and watch from the bank, staring with impunity and insolence or maybe just boredom. Attempting to counter the smugglers’ natural advantages, a Border Patrol camera tower looks almost pretty against the evening sky as it peers up and down this broad bend in the river from a height of sixty feet. The spotters, I was told repeatedly, study the cameras and try to ascertain the pattern in their movements. The spotters watch the agents in their vehicles, and they watch the agents on foot. They were no doubt watching us right then as three men in their olive-green uniforms, a writer with his notebook, and a dog with her toy all picked their way along the riverbank.
Border Patrol agents can’t be everywhere, all the time, and the cameras have blind spots. The cartels choose when and where to cross; they control the other side, the “Mike side.” And nowadays the cartels—by which I mean the infamous Mexican drug-trafficking organizations, also known as transnational criminal organizations, who scatter dismembered body parts along commercial streets, fill mass graves with the bodies of economic refugees, kidnap gringo tourists who venture into border towns, and hang decapitated bodies adorned with political messages from highway bridges—own the monopoly on human traffic just as they do the traffic in dope. No one freelances anymore. No one crosses without paying the ferryman.
A seismic sensor buried alongside an active trail detects foot traffic and transmits its radio signal to a high-tech command and control center at the Border Patrol station in Olmito, just outside Brownsville. Such unmanned ground sensors have been used for decades, and the technology keeps improving, reducing the size and increasing the sensitivity of the devices, which greatly enhances the ease of deployment for sensor technicians. Border Patrol agents constantly shift some eleven thousand sensors along the southwest border, depending on traffic patterns on the infinite forking paths that radiate outward from the line like capillaries. They must identify a promising trail, one that shows signs of recent traffic, and haul the equipment in. Once a suitable spot has been found, they must dig a hole, deploy the sensor, conceal it with dirt and vegetation, and then test it to make sure the transmitter has a good connection to the nearest radio tower. If not, the sensor must be dug out and moved to another spot. And, again, it must pass the test. It is difficult, frustrating, highly physical work.
Camera tower, Rio Grande valley
Twenty large screens lined the front wall of the control room; a television in the middle of the wall had been tuned to Fox News. Glenn Beck appeared to be delivering one of his curious history lessons, but the sound was off and everyone ignored him. Four agents sat at desks, scanning the monitors and occasionally speaking on the radio with agents in the field. Behind us were three sector enforcement specialists, whose duties include the coordination of radio communication for the sector. Radio communication among agents in the field is constant and vital to their mission. My attention returned to the screens and the bird’s-eye point of view they provide of the border zone.
The Brownsville sector employs dozens of remote video surveillance systems, or RVSS, most of which are on fixed towers. Others are attached to preexisting infrastructure such as water tanks, cellphone towers, bridges, or buildings. Each RVSS is composed of four cameras, two for daytime and two infrared cameras for night duty. The agents who are assigned to camera duty in the control room zoom and pan the cameras as needed; at night they can manipulate the contrast of the infrared video, shifting from “black hot” to “white hot,” rewinding and forwarding through the digital file as needed to identify what is often merely a fleeting glimpse of an unidentified animal, possibly human. The big screens constantly flicker from one river camera to another. Sources of thermal energy abound. Rocks, concrete blocks, even the plants, radiate heat, but warm-blooded animals stand out most vividly, and they move. I have been here before, during daylight hours. There’s more action at night.
Agent José Mancillas received the signal from the ground sensor, glanced left to a small screen displaying the current locations of his “bugs,” then quickly typed a few keystrokes. One of three large flat-screen monitors at his desk instantly displayed a river camera’s infrared image. Using a joystick controller that would be familiar to almost any American child, the agent panned the camera and zoomed in. Eight ghostly white bodies sprang out of the Carrizo and sprinted in an awkward hunkered-down posture toward the eighteen-foot black steel pickets of the border fence. They had activated the sensor about fifty yards south of the levee; the river at this point was three miles away, so the group has probably been lying up in some dense brush, waiting for the right moment to hit the fence. Sometimes it seems that the groups all come at once, Mancillas told me, as if they were timing their incursions. As soon as he confirmed that he had traffic on the move, Mancillas was on the radio, alerting a unit he knew was standing by just around the bend. “I’ve got eight bodies going over the levee,” he said, giving a shorthand code for their location along the fence. Several of the bodies were up on the fence; apparently, the lead man got down on all fours, and the rest stepped on his back for a boost. The agents then came into view and the aliens retreated; one man leaped from the top of the fence and hit the ground hard. We all winced. Eighteen feet is a long drop. But he got up and ran south toward Mexico with the rest of his group.
Suddenly all motion stopped; then the file ran backward as Mancillas worked the controls. I glanced up at Glenn Beck, who gestured at his own camera with great sincerity. We watched the footage again—Mancillas explained that the group had made it back south
to try again another day—and then he showed me more footage of recent traffic. Often you just get a flash of white, and it takes an experienced eye to determine whether to respond. The cameras are a good tool, but they can’t see everything, and the harsh South Texas weather degrades their performance. In January, during a severe cold snap, the cameras simply froze in place. Some won’t focus properly even in mild weather and really should be replaced.
Another location, another incursion—four luminescent human bodies loped directly toward the RVSS, apparently assuming the cameras won’t pan straight down. What the guide didn’t know was that he and his little group had already tripped a bug. The eyes of Texas were upon them. Four demure Spanish goats glowed ghostly white on the screen before wandering off to nibble elsewhere, in private. Line agents, in one of those white and green patrol vehicles that are ubiquitous in the border country, were already on the move, driving fast along a dirt road that curved down through the cane and mesquite to run parallel to the border security fence. We gazed at the screen as the truck pulled up fast. The four bodies were already over the fence. The lead man was probably the guide, and he ran swiftly in the direction of a nearby neighborhood, juking and zigzagging before he finally disappeared offscreen, eluding the pursuing agent. The others just gave up and waited; once they’ve lost their guide, they usually have no idea where to go. Later that evening a call came in from a citizen advising of an agent in need of assistance; it turned out that the agent was in a scuffle with the very guide we had watched escape, a juvenile well known to the Brownsville agents. Such minors are valuable assets for smugglers, because authorities in the United States typically don’t prosecute them for repeated offenses, even when they’re caught with narcotics.
Texas Blood Page 18
