The river cameras are a relatively new weapon in the arsenal of the Border Patrol, part of the huge post-9/11 buildup of manpower and technological assets that has resulted from a 100 percent increase in the amount of money directed toward border surveillance and control, most of which has flowed toward the Mexican border. This large but finite stream of federal money has been directed to the southwest border with the aim of stopping the infinite river of illegal drugs and bodies that pours across a permeable international boundary. Other virtual rivers, both licit and illicit, converge on the border as well—steady streams of illegal money and guns heading south, and an enormous, scarcely quantifiable flow of legal imports going north by rail and truck. All this traffic must be scrutinized, questioned, examined, searched, and if necessary interdicted, apprehended, seized, or arrested. And then there is the flow of data—electronic manifests, lists of travelers’ names, dates of entry, and the like, but also untold terabytes of video footage—all of which must be analyzed, quantified, archived, and stored so that it is available to forensic investigators when something goes wrong, such as when a gun bought near Dallas is found near the body of an ICE agent in San Luis Potosí.
Border surveillance camera, Roma, Texas
Vehicles pass through the land ports with drugs stashed in a hidden compartment, or strapped to bodies, or secreted in some fleshy cavity. Speedboats drop bails of pot on the Gulf Coast, on South Padre Island, or on the beaches near Boca Chica, where the Rio Grande meets the sea. They do likewise along the beaches near San Diego. Ultralight personal aircraft make short flights across the border into New Mexico and drop their cargo. And hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and people “other than Mexicans” enter the United States illegally, either out in the remote scrublands or at the ports of entry, traveling with false documents. Many are caught, and some who enter have no intention of staying. Dedicated “mules” swim across the Rio Grande, sprint to a drop-off point, often wearing nothing but swim trunks, and then run back across. Agents know them by the bare footprints they leave behind. Larger groups trek through remote desert landscapes with fifty-pound loads on their backs; on their way home they burglarize ranch houses and other remote habitations.
In 2006, Congress mandated the construction of new “secure” fencing along the southwest border, and the result has been the subject of much heartburn in the border zone and beyond. Since then, just under seven hundred miles of fencing has been constructed, at an average cost of $2.8 million per mile. Depending on whom you’re talking to, the fence is either a monumental boondoggle or a highly effective tool that should have been built long ago. Farmers, environmentalists, and cynical bystanders in the border communities all hate it. Farmers who are cut off from their fields resent the inconvenience. The people whose homes are on the wrong side of the fence feel sacrificed and abandoned. Ocelots and other wild creatures are said to be experiencing disruptions of their migratory wanderings. It’s easy to laugh at fencing that abruptly ends in a tangle of brush; surely, people say, the Mexicans can figure out how to use a ladder or simply walk around. In Sonora, comically, smugglers have used a catapult to hurl drugs into Arizona as well as a portable ramp that permits vehicles to drive right over the fence.
From the perspective of the Border Patrol, however, the fence is not so easily dismissed. Agents like Milian and others I spoke with in the Brownsville area appreciate the border fence because it increases an agent’s minimum response time, which in urban stretches of the Rio Grande valley must be measured in seconds. Immigrants, led by experienced guides, disrobe on the Mike side; place their belongings in plastic garbage bags; swim, raft, or wade across; quickly dress; and then make a mad hundred- or two-hundred-yard dash for the nearby neighborhood. Once that nearby haven has been reached, they will either blend in instantly, perhaps slipping into a giant H-E-B supermarket, or duck into a stash house or waiting vehicle. Whatever the plan, if the agents do not catch them during those first crucial seconds, they’re long gone. The border fence adds perhaps a minute to the equation, and that’s often more than enough. The fence, Milian told me, channels the flow of aliens toward the gaps. We’re watching those gaps, he said. They might not see us, but we’re there. The cameras are watching, too. The idea is to push the border crossers away from the populated areas, out into the brush, where the response time is measured in hours and days.
Border fence, Rio Grande valley
Upriver from Brownsville lies McAllen, a more affluent community where local pressure, in the form of height restrictions, coupled with natural obstructions such as the particularly heavy brush growing along the river, has prevented the deployment of remote video surveillance towers. Here the Border Patrol employs mobile surveillance systems that can be moved to hot spots as needed. Agent Jaime Medina joined us in McAllen and led an excursion into the broad fields that run alongside the levees that crisscross the broad fertile floodplain along the Rio Grande. Because the river meanders broadly through its valley, there are often bubble-like intrusions of Mexican territory into the United States, and vice versa, which are bounded on three sides by the opposite state. These broad bends in the river make a line agent’s mission extraordinarily difficult; lines of sight from any point near the river are severely compromised, and high ground is often distant. A riverbed is an ephemeral geologic structure; over time the river changes course as the meanders slowly drift downstream through the landscape, occasionally forming oxbow lakes, thus ceding territory from one country to another by riverine fiat. The levees are a vain attempt to stop that inexorable flow. Oxbow lakes testify to their failure.
Border Patrol vehicles prowl these areas day and night and use scope trucks, a mobile surveillance system, which are basically pickups equipped with retractable camera towers, to enhance their surveillance capabilities. As with the tower-mounted remote video surveillance systems, the scope trucks typically possess both conventional video cameras and thermal cameras. Scope trucks also have the ability to use a laser targeting system; the camera operator can guide agents wearing night vision goggles to a group by fixing them with a laser beam that is invisible to the naked eye but brightly apparent to anyone wearing the proper eyewear.
Driving along a levee at night is a disconcerting experience. The land drops away sharply into an abyss of chirping crickets, singing frogs, and other loud gregarious creatures of the subtropical night. I drove with Agent Milian through a night in which all fields were black and strained my eyes to find some landmark to ease my disorientation. I tried to imagine what it was like patrolling these fields and levees with nothing but flashlights and a good sense of direction. We finally came to a scope truck parked on a kind of promontory or juncture in the levee; in daylight we no doubt would have been treated to a spectacular view of South Texas’s agricultural production. Historically, most of these wide fields have been worked by Mexican migrant workers, many of them undocumented. Earlier that day I had asked Agent Milian whether the Border Patrol conducts raids of the local farms. He responded that such raids were not permitted, apparently for political reasons, and that anyway such matters fell within the jurisdiction of ICE.
After an impressive demonstration of the scope truck’s thermal camera, I was able to examine the individual night vision equipment used by the agents out on the field, such as the Recon Lite, a thermal binocular that is often mounted on a tripod and has a range of four miles, and the TAM-14, a thermal monocular with a two-mile range, as well as the standard night vision goggles that most agents carry. Such portable night vision equipment, which was in short supply in previous years, has now become standard issue. As Agent Mancillas told me in the Brownsville control room, “It makes a huge difference when you can see in the dark.”
From the relatively lofty viewpoint of a McAllen levee, we descended to a riverside boat launch at a lonely spot called Chimney Park. A small fleet of riverboats patrols the navigable portions of the Rio Grande; the boats are “owned” by the Office of Air and Marine but manned by Border Patrol age
nts. The shift was ending, and the agents prepared to haul the boats out of the water. I was supposed to go out on patrol in one of these so-called safe boats, but the Zapata murder had made the sector officials nervous, so I was obliged to content myself with a sky box, a somewhat more cumbersome mobile surveillance unit than the scope truck, and learned about its uses, both as a surveillance instrument and as a deterrent. Unlike the scope truck, which possesses its own means of locomotion, the sky box is basically a surveillance tower mounted on a trailer; a hydraulic lift raises and lowers an enclosed platform on which are mounted the standard combination of conventional and thermal cameras. Downriver, at a popular restaurant called Pepe’s, traffic had been pretty hot, so they deployed a sky box and the traffic moved elsewhere. Last summer’s big floods threatened to wash the sky box away, so they pulled it out. Inevitably, the traffic resumed, and so the sky box returned to Pepe’s; it wouldn’t do to have the restaurant’s patrons watching the immigrants run by as they sat eating their carne asada and listening to the nighttime song of the Rio Grande chirping frog.
Falfurrias checkpoint
Come daylight, after consuming plates of breakfast tacos, Agent Milian and I traveled to the Falfurrias checkpoint, which consistently maintains the highest seizure rate of any checkpoint in the country. Every agent carried a personal radiation detector, a small pager-like device on his belt. An agent demonstrated a device that identifies the particular radioactive isotope detected; almost invariably, a radiation alert turns out to have been the result of a medical procedure. Another agent showed me how to use a “buster,” a small handheld device that detects anomalous variations in the density of, say, a car door or a tire. I watched as a rented red Hyundai driven by a group of young people got worked over in “secondary.” The color of the men’s skin and their manner of dress suggested that they were not from the Rio Grande valley, where few African Americans live. But it was not their skin color that triggered the extra attention; something had alerted a K-9 search dog when the car passed through “primary,” the quick and simple interview conducted by an agent with every one of the drivers who pass through this busy checkpoint every year. The buster detected nothing along the perimeter of the vehicle or in the tires. Neither did a camera scope detect anything in the gas tank. I peered down that long, narrow passage and saw the intact wire mesh marking the aperture of the fuel tank. A new dog passed through the vehicle without incident. Perhaps the driver or one of the passengers had smoked a joint that morning, and the dog could smell the residue on his fingers. Nothing turned up; the red Hyundai went on its way.
I was shown into a locked container in which the walls were lined with neat stacks of dope, small bales of pot, mostly, awaiting pickup by the DEA. Some baggies of smaller quantities were hanging on the wall. One bag contained a quarter ounce seized from a young man who was planning to celebrate his eighteenth birthday that day but made the mistake of driving through a checkpoint while he was holding.
Meanwhile, I was attracted to the sight of a white pickup equipped with what appeared to be an extremely bulky camper driving very slowly by a large refrigerated truck that had been pulled over into secondary. It was a Z Backscatter Van, a mobile backscatter X-ray scanner similar in concept to those used for full-body scans at airports. Backscatter technology works by exploiting the fact that low-density organic materials, such as explosives, drugs, or human bodies, contain elements with low atomic numbers, which cause X-rays to scatter, whereas high-density, high-atomic-number elements such as metals are more likely to absorb them. By interpreting the ways in which X-rays, fired in a narrow beam that rapidly scans the target, respond to the materials under examination, and plotting the position of the beam relative to the target, backscatter scanners produce remarkably clear, photo-like images of organic materials that conventional X-ray techniques are unable to capture. Dense, metallic materials are grayed out and resemble conventional X-ray films. Agent E. Manzanares allowed me to sit in his cab as he slowly scanned a load of frozen broccoli.
As with the infrared cameras I’d already seen, Manzanares can manipulate the contrast of his scans, shifting from white hot to black hot, but his video display software has the added capability of applying different color scales. All of which permits the scanning technician to determine whether a given load is free of suspicious voids. Cube-shaped spaces in the middle of a pallet of cilantro might not necessarily be packages of dope, but the odds are good. The bad guys are often stupid, and sometimes they are just greedy, such as when they attempt to cram just one or two more packages into a well-concealed cavity in a vehicle, and those extra packages that don’t quite fit in the compartment are often the ones the scanner picks up. The smugglers are frequently ingenious, however, such as when they hid a load of narcotics under a large tank of used oil, which is organic and thus shows up as one big undifferentiated mass. These smugglers were perfectly aware of the limits of the scanning technology. What they were unable to defeat was the power of a dog’s nose, which every field agent I spoke with credited as the single most valuable asset in their arsenal. Dogs, at checkpoints like Falfurrias, have found people hidden in the engines of vehicles, sewn sitting upright into the backseat of a car, and wedged into a modified console so that when the hatch between the front seats was opened by a customs officer, there was a man’s face staring up. Because the dogs are such reliable detectors of concealed bodies, most smugglers will drop their human cargo before reaching the checkpoint and send them out into the brush to make the long walk to a pickup location. Once a group of immigrants has made it that far, past the gauntlet of high-tech surveillance cameras and scanners, the last line of defense is the art of sign cutting, the foundational discipline of all Border Patrol agents.
Perhaps you have witnessed the curious sight of a green-and-white pickup dragging a load of tires alongside a highway. It is a common spectacle in the borderlands. The object of that behavior is a clean slate, so that any foot traffic can be located in time and pursued in space. Sometimes, instead of dragging, agents will put down tire tracks and then check back periodically to see if any footprints have appeared. This was the technique used in Laredo, in an industrial park right on the edge of a bluff overlooking the river. There are no border fences in Laredo, and no RVSS towers, so sign cutting and old-fashioned stakeouts remain the essential techniques of the art of “hunting humans.”
Sign cutting at the border
Footprints, to one who knows how to cut sign, are eloquent testimony of the nature of the man, woman, or group of humans moving through the countryside. The tracker can tell you whether the body in question is fat or thin, fit or exhausted, his approximate age and height, how fast he is moving, whether he is carrying a load, and how heavy that load is likely to be. I’ve been told that at least one agent based in Laredo can cut sign from horseback at a gallop. Sometimes a group will walk in a guide’s footsteps in the vain hope of disguising its number; fatigue and carelessness invariably lead to self-betrayal. Drug mules will attach carpet to the bottoms of their shoes, and guides will lay down carpets when a group crosses a drag to hide their path, yet broken twigs, upturned pebbles, and ranch fences, the wire pushed down by the weight of bodies, bear silent witness to their passage.
Agents working a group will leapfrog one another, with sign cutters positioning themselves at different points along a probable route, communicating constantly by radio, describing the sign at one point as another agent a few miles farther along attempts to pick up the trail. Sometimes air support will be called in, and a helicopter or an airplane will try to locate the group from the air. The landscape is vast and filled with good cover; detecting a group led by an experienced guide is far from easy. On the very day when drug traffickers in Del Rio were being arrested as part of Operation Fallen Hero, organized in retaliation for Jaime Zapata’s murder, I was attempting to keep my lunch down in a Eurocopter AS 350 B3/2B1 helicopter as we watched agents on the ground work a group near Sycamore Creek, on land that my family ranches. Th
e group was out there in brush somewhere, in an endless expanse of live oak, mesquite, and other brush; no visual contact had been made and might not be made for hours.
Our helicopter was equipped with a Star Safire HD camera that was capable of zooming in on a target from miles away. As with the camera that took the video footage of the Zapata funeral, the Star Safire can carry out surveillance from so far out that the subject would never know he was being watched. The software that drives this camera is responsive and feature rich; point a laser at a house, and the monitor instantly gives you the address, the latitude and longitude, and a moving map that toggles from road-map view to topography to aeronautical chart. If you’re following a moving car, the camera will lock onto the vehicle and hold it in view. By fusing low-light video with infrared, which cannot penetrate glass, the camera can look right through the window of a suspicious car parked in the shadows of that undeveloped cul-de-sac down by the lake.
But when you’re looking for a group of people who know they’re being pursued, all that high-definition wizardry, supremely useful in surveilling a drug transaction, does little good, especially in the daytime. At night, on the other hand, these airborne FLIR cameras can pick up the thermal signature of the bodies, even if they’re hiding in brush. They are sensitive enough to pick up the ghost image of a body that was lying up in some high grass, long after it has moved on. The Star Safire comes equipped with a laser targeting system and a powerful infrared spotlight that can be slaved to the camera, thus either pointing the way to NVG-equipped agents on the ground or bathing a group of fugitives in light they cannot see.
Texas Blood Page 19
