Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  The acquisition of some perspectival advantage is the core goal of most technologies of surveillance and control. The cartels have the advantage of surprise and secrecy, as well as a ruthless indifference to human life. The night I arrived in Laredo, two bodies were fished out of the river. They were tied up with barbed wire; one was missing a head. The cartels also have an enormous funding advantage, the leisure to develop new strategies and tactics, and freedom from the sometimes inconvenient oversight that a constitutional system of government imposes on its law-enforcement agencies. The pursuit of superior viewpoints has thus led to the deployment of ever more sophisticated surveillance and control technologies at our ports of entry as well as in the immense territories that lie between them.

  In Laredo, home to the busiest commercial land port in the United States, the World Trade Bridge processes more than a million northbound trucks a year and almost that many going south. Each vehicle passes through a layered enforcement procedure. The first layer is the mandated submission of an electronic manifest, as well as other pre-arrival information, that must be received at least one hour in advance of the truck’s arrival at the port. A team of analysts, using software known as ACE, short for “Automated Commercial Environment,” then scores the shipment using a variety of criteria, including the carrier’s prior record and the importer’s history of compliance with U.S. laws and regulations. Every vehicle passes through a radiation portal, large yellow towers that have been modified to accommodate the largest eighteen-wheeled tractor-trailer rigs. Shippers who participate in the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism or the Free and Secure Trade program get priority service, because their vehicles and drivers have submitted to a special vetting process. Such vehicles are still scanned, but they get to cut in line.

  All the trucks pass through primary processing lanes, where drivers are interviewed by a customs officer. All vehicles then pass through what’s called secondary express, where K-9 units are heavily deployed, and then, depending on their cargo, the trucks are directed to different stations within the port. Almost everything undergoes some kind of scanning procedure, either X-ray, gamma ray, or high-energy X-ray. Certain high-risk commodities such as pottery and wooden furniture, and most agricultural products, are off-loaded and inspected by hand—the first because they are so often the bearers of contraband, and the second because the pests and diseases that the ag specialists are looking for can only be seen at close range.

  When I visited the World Trade Bridge, the facility was nearing the end of an expansion project that would double the number of primary processing lanes. Acting Port Director Jose Uribe gave me an overview of the port’s operation as he drove his official car across and against oncoming truck traffic, dodging and weaving like a veteran player of Grand Theft Auto. To my inexpert eye, the scene was a chaotic riot of monstrous trucks and looming scanners, huge barnlike structures, and long lines. As the tour progressed, however, structure and pattern began to emerge in the apparent chaos, and I could see that the operation here was a miracle of logistics. Each vehicle, as it passed through the layered enforcement process, was tracked from station to station, and at any point a customs officer can create an “issue,” tagging the shipment for more intensive scrutiny, which could mean anything from a higher-resolution X-ray scan to off-loading the complete contents of a shipment.

  Five thousand trucks a day on average, laden with every conceivable commodity, from consumer goods to auto parts destined for just-in-time delivery to a factory in Tennessee, pass through this facility. “I’ve been in Laredo for thirty-four years,” Uribe told me. “I can remember back in the late ’70s, we had mostly curios, some heavy steel.” Then came NAFTA. “Now you name it and we see it. Everything from laptops to three-piece suits. Mexico produces just about everything nowadays.”

  I was curious to know more about the scanning technologies, about the differences between gamma ray scanners and backscatter, between low- and high-energy X-rays. The technicians were only too happy to explain everything, especially about the underlying technology, but my public affairs handler, a former reporter named Richard Pauza, was more circumspect about the criteria governing their use. The arms race with the cartels is unceasing, and CBP field officers are loath to give away their tricks of the trade. What was clear, however, is that the density and structure of a target is the primary determinant of which scanning technology is best suited for it. I was especially impressed with the high-energy X-rays used to scan the most challenging commodities. The resulting scans are marvelous, almost gallery-quality works of visualization. Strong-edge enhancement of a large tractor-trailer rig permits one to see its structure with hallucinatory clarity: everything inside was made visible, clean, and clear—the gears inside a transmission, the pushrods in the engine. I saw scans of a steamroller, the kind used to compress hot asphalt on a newly paved street, and inside the large dense roller wheel were packages of narcotics; a load of gypsum board Sheetrock was laden with marijuana, the voids inside the pallets revealed by the scan. Another scan, of a southbound truck carrying rolls of fabric, revealed suspicious areas of density; using software enhancement tools, the scanning technician was able to see that it was a large quantity of cash: as it turned out, $1.2 million, a small fraction of the estimated $18 to $39 billion that the cartels smuggle south every year. I was told about someone who showed up without a manifest, in itself a tip-off, with a load of refrigerators. A dog alerted, and the load was brought in for additional scanning. Close inspection revealed contraband inside the compressors of each unit, cocaine and crystal meth. Another scan I was shown, of a truck brought in for scanning by ICE, showed packages of cocaine stamped with the logo of the Gulf Cartel.

  At the Laredo port and at ports serving the public, like the much smaller but extremely modern crossing in Del Rio, security measures are directed not only at the endless stream of commodities that pass through these facilities but at the bodies of the individuals presenting themselves for entry, their facial expressions, postures, affects, clothing, and emotional dispositions. Sharon Ansick, a tactical logistics officer who went to high school with my sister, gave me the grand tour of the Del Rio facility. Video cameras were everywhere, 150 in all. Doors and windows were secured, and passage in and out of facilities, as well as from one area to another within a compound or a building, was tightly controlled, though this was not always necessarily evident, especially to routine travelers. This was termed “passive security.” All who enter this facility, whether they know it or not, have entered a panopticon in which their every move is registered, recorded, observed, and controlled. No one leaves without being cleared. Border runners are met with road spikes that jut up from the pavement at the push of a distress button. Only the unlucky criminals ever realize the degree to which their liberty has been constrained.

  Border fence, Del Rio, Texas

  All incoming and outgoing license plates are photographed, as are the drivers. All recently issued passports, green cards, and day-entry cards contain radio-frequency ID chips that broadcast the identity of a traveler at the primary checkpoint, and the Del Rio port was the first to deploy a special RFID lane to speed processing. When I was there, traffic was slow and lines were short, but there was a sense of high alertness throughout the facility. ICE agents armed with M4 tactical rifles loitered near the secondary station. Supervisory agents, in a glass-encased control room overlooking the traffic lanes, kept watch over the whole proceedings, monitored the video feeds, and maintained radio contact with personnel all over the port, making certain that what happened in 1984 to Richard Latham, in this very port, never happens again.

  Unlike the shipments that pass through the import lot, the port’s noncommercial traffic, which amounts to about two million vehicular travelers and about fifty thousand pedestrians annually, is not routinely scanned. CBP officers interview drivers in a primary lane and use special angled mirrors to inspect the underside of all vehicles, and if a K-9 alerts or the driver or one of the passenge
rs seems nervous, or if something about the car seems unusual, or perhaps simply because the vehicle originates in an area of interest such as San Luis Potosí, the state where Jaime Zapata was murdered, the officer pulls the vehicle over for a secondary inspection. At that point, dogs, density meters, mirrors, X-ray scanners, and the whole repertoire of what CBP terms nonintrusive inspection techniques comes into play. Nowadays few cars are dismantled or drilled without evidence derived from one of these methods. One recent seizure came about because an officer manning the primary lane noticed that a vehicle, driven by a lone male, was uncommonly clean. Not only was the body of the car clean, but so were the wheels and the inside of the wheel wells. A trip to the VACIS X-ray scanner revealed a suspicious space behind the firewall of one of the wheel wells, whereupon agents started probing and chipping away at some relatively fresh Bondo, thus revealing a compartment containing twenty-eight and a half kilos of heroin, plus two and a half kilos of meth. Over the previous five years, this port had seized thirty thousand pounds of marijuana, thirty-five hundred pounds of cocaine, ninety-five pounds of heroin, and thirty-seven thousand units of steroids and other restricted drugs.

  Meanwhile, the routine business of inspection and seizure continues all around us. Officer Ansick points out that CBP enforces the regulations and laws of forty-four different governmental agencies, including the FDA, the EPA, and the USDA. Cars are turned inside out after dogs signal they have found something of interest. Inspectors go through agricultural loads by hand, searching for tiny insects, egg casings under leaves, and other stowaways on legitimate imports. Palo Verde wood borers show up in stacks of firewood. Cattle must be examined for Rocky Mountain spotted fever ticks. People arrive with juicy, stinky fermenting cheeses, deer heads, oranges, cowboy boots made from endangered species like sea turtles. The guy with the sea-turtle boots was a recent case, a native of San Luis Potosí, and the officer interviewing him just happened to notice the boots; the poor man, who naively admitted what they were, left in his socks, and the boots went into a freezer. An agricultural specialist named Tara Elliott, a vigorous young woman with neatly penciled eyebrows, showed me a horned toad that had been salted and dried, with a rattlesnake rattle clattering in its open belly; it was a good-luck charm. Herbal teas for Lenten intestinal cleansing were an object of particular scrutiny at that time of year. The next day a load of big horned sheep was scheduled to come through, headed back home to New Mexico; they had been sent south to help repopulate an area where the species had been wiped out by poaching. Nowadays cattle get scanned by an X-ray machine; in the old days, all cattle were off-loaded and counted at Darrell Hargrove’s commercial pens, where at age twelve I broke my pelvis working my first summer job.

  Eggs, potatoes, and chorizo are strictly forbidden entry, as are all birds, because of diseases such as exotic Newcastle disease and avian influenza. Indeed, the port has a special room where seized birds are kept before they’re gassed. One notable bird seizure involved some very rare and valuable African gray parrots. A woman bought the birds in Mexico and wanted to smuggle them into the United States, so she went to a vet and asked him to anesthetize the birds so they’d be asleep and quiet, instead of talking and squawking, when she passed through the port. As it happened, a CBP officer was at the veterinary office with his dog, and he witnessed the whole exchange and saw the woman take the sleeping birds to her car. So he called the port and gave the woman’s license plate number. Sure enough, she showed up not long after, the parrots hidden in little sleeves, and was arrested and prosecuted in federal court for smuggling the rare birds. Those parrots were not euthanized, however, because they were so valuable, but were donated to a zoo. Ansick also told a story regarding an educational video about agricultural import regulations that includes a photograph of some birds that had been seized. “They’re real pretty little blue parakeets, but they’re dead, because they forgot to take the picture before they euthanized them. So they propped them up in each corner of the little cage, you know, like they’re trying to get out. It’s hilarious!”

  —

  Everywhere I traveled along the Rio Grande, I asked about the striking emphasis, in all the security arrangements I had seen and in the public relations literature I had read, on terrorism. Had there ever been a significant terrorist apprehended along the Mexican border? Nobody could think of one. What about the politicians who thump their podiums and list all the people from terrorist countries who are crossing our borders? Yes, many people from countries like Iran and Syria have been apprehended trying to enter the United States, along with people from more than seventy other countries, including Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, and Russians. They were all normal undocumented immigrants, economic and political refugees, trying to get to the promised land. Crossing the great Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts is far from easy, and for a potential terrorist it’s probably much more efficient to just get a standard tourist or educational visa and enter the country legally, like Mohamed Atta, though admittedly that procedure has become more vexing for everyone in recent years, including both tourists and terrorists. Radiation detectors are ubiquitous, and every vehicle that enters the United States passes through one. Had there ever been a case in which a dirty bomb or some other dangerous radioactive substance was detected along the Mexican border? Nobody could think of one. It would probably be easier and cheaper to acquire radioactive materials for a weapon inside the United States; it’s certainly easier to purchase a gun over here. Conventional explosives are another matter. Mexico has a large mining industry, and explosives are not well controlled. But whether or not the threat of terrorists crossing over our purportedly wide-open borders is credible, as politicians and agitators of various political stripes like to claim, there can be no doubt that the various departments of U.S. Customs and Border Protection are working very hard to make sure that they don’t make it across the line.

  The other question I put to my various guides and companions among the Border Patrol, the Office of Air and Marine, and the Office of Field Operations had to do with unmanned aerial vehicles, the Predator drones that have been the subject of so much media coverage. Yes, the OAM does operate a Predator drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, as well as others in Arizona and elsewhere, but agents in Brownsville and Del Rio were not aware of a drone being used as air support in their areas. In Laredo, on the other hand, Agent Narcizo Ramos said that a drone had been used in his area, at least occasionally. When I asked Mark Borkowski, assistant commissioner for the Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition, about drones as we sat in his office in Washington, D.C., he laughed. “I knew you were going to ask me about that.”

  Patrolling the no-man’s-land along the Rio Grande, El Paso, Texas

  As Borkowski explained it, the UAVs have a very limited role in border surveillance. “With something like SBInet,” he said, or the RVS systems and unattended ground sensors in the Rio Grande valley, “I want to watch a big area, with just a few people sitting at monitors, rather than having an agent every one hundred yards. I want to watch a big area all the time. Now, a UAV can get somewhere fast, and can stay there, but it looks through a soda straw. Different purpose. Different mission.” There’s just too much territory to watch for the drone to be an effective instrument on routine patrols. If, however, you have intelligence that tells you something is going to happen in a particular area, especially a remote or rugged area where deploying a ground system isn’t practical, the nice thing about a drone is that you can send it out there and have it loiter, at high altitude, for twenty hours, far longer than a manned airplane or a helicopter.

  The week before I spoke with him, Borkowski had testified before Congress on the demise of SBInet and its replacement, the Alternative (Southwest) Technology Initiative, which sounds an awful lot like the systems that are already in place in South Texas, with the addition of ground radar. I asked him what had gone wrong with the Boeing project, because many of the field agents I spoke with in Texas, some of whom had spent time in
Arizona, thought it had been effective. “Well, they liked it after we fixed it,” he said. The problem with SBInet, Borkowski explained, was that the project was ill-conceived and poorly executed, and there was plenty of blame to go around, for both DHS and Boeing. Borkowski’s candor about the failings of SBInet was remarkable, and it was clear that he had no illusions about the ability of technology, by itself, to solve problems with deep political and economic roots.

  As Borkowski tells the story, SBInet was destined to fail. When the contract went out, DHS was a new agency, inexperienced with managing major government contractors, and the problems initially flowed from that source. He also pointed to a pervasive naïveté—among the general public, the media, and the government—about the ability of technology to solve a vexing political problem. In the years after 9/11, the border suddenly began to be viewed with a new sense of urgency. There was a strong sense that something had to be done to secure it and that technology, which everyone agreed was a good thing, was the answer. Unfortunately, no one had a clear theory of what exactly technology was supposed to accomplish. But instead of figuring out what needed to be done and then deciding the best way to go about achieving those goals, DHS decided to let industry tell us what needed to be done. And that led to the attempt by Boeing to build a comprehensive system of surveillance that not only would include radar towers, camera towers, unattended ground sensors, and satellite communications but would integrate drones and hooks for everything else that might come into play. “Boeing had charts talking about the calculus of border security” and all kinds of very impressive claims about its security networks, said Borkowski, “and it really wasn’t a bad concept,” but the execution lacked discipline. SBInet tried to do everything from the beginning. “Everything was going to plug in to this common operating picture,” he said, “and you remember how technology is good—well, a common operating picture is really good.”