“We’re there, but we don’t see anything.”
It’s been over an hour since the ground surveillance radar flashed, since the agent at the control room in Tucson communicated the signal to the patrols, since these officials alerted the rest of the patrols by radio, since the agent glued to his binoculars jumped up to the roof of his SUV, feeling the bite of the cold despite his gloves, hat, and heavy jacket stamped with the name US Department of Homeland Security–Customs and Border Protection.
It’d be impossible to see anything from this mound without infrared technology. The only thing that can be spotted, in spite of the huge, full moon, is a dark lopsided plain, some desert bushes, and the shadowy scrub. The only thing that can be heard is the whistle of the wind whipping against our skin. My lips are chapped, and when I open my mouth to stretch my jaw I feel as if my skin might break like an old rubber band.
The agent with the binoculars and those deployed over the ground check in to tell each other the same thing: “No contact.” “Nothing here either.”
Simple logic tells us at least one thing: the operation is complicated. Maybe one of the thirteen OH-6 helicopters will appear behind Diablito Mountain and flood the plain with light, letting the three agents on foot move more easily and take off their infrared goggles to spot those eight red dots that would turn into either eight scared people hiding in a thicket, or eight narcos dropping their load and running back toward Mexico.
But here routine is routine, and the rules of the job are applied the same every night. The agent gets down from his SUV. The three trucks are started and Marroquín tells us we’re leaving.
Edu Ponces and I look at each other, surprised. These fifteen agents have been following those red dots with all their technology for over an hour.
“Where are we going?” we ask.
“To see what else there is,” Marroquín answers.
But she realizes that neither Edu nor I understand what’s going on, that we’ve forgotten what she said earlier: “We have to get used to losing at this game. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. It’s like that every day and every night.”
She warned us of this some twelve hours ago, when we met at the Tucson headquarters. They’re not going to let fifteen agents hunt the same target for two hours. This desert fills with too many targets every night. That’s part of the game.
TRACKING
“Ready to play?” she said. It was the first thing Esmeralda Marroquín, a dark, short, and partly indigenous-looking Mexican-French-American said to us when she came through the station doors at the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, Arizona.
We didn’t respond.
She insisted. “Ready to play cat and mouse?”
Esmeralda Marroquín and the other 18,000 agents who guard the US borders are, of course, the cats. Those who carry thousands and thousands of pounds of marijuana and cocaine, as well as the estimated 3,000 undocumented migrants trying to cross the border every day, are the mice.
We arrive by three in the afternoon, twelve hours before we would start the chase between Diablo Peak and Diablito Mountain.
The planning for this ride-along took a long time: two months of telephone calls and emails, negotiating back and forth. The Border Patrol offers ride-alongs every month, during which reporters visit a few migrant crossing corridors, interview a few patrol agents, and then call it a day. “Tours,” the press agents call them. We, however, asked for an atypical tour. We wanted to see the full routine, how agents work on a daily basis. Only after consulting the Border Patrol center in Washington DC did the Tucson sector give us the go-ahead for a full shift tour.
We first started calling the Border Patrol after we’d already gotten to know some of the busy crossing points on the Mexican side, which included Ciudad Juárez, the most violent city on the continent, where one in every four of the 5,600 narco murders occurred in 2008. We had also spent time in Nuevo Laredo (on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande from Laredo) where drug traffickers, mostly Los Zetas, control the migration routes and direct the kidnappings that take place in the southern part of the country. Then, besides Tijuana, we also got to know Altar and Nogales (the closest Mexican cities to Tucson), where since the 1920s Mexican marijuana has found easy entry into the United States. And where, since 2005, more undocumented migrants have been crossing than at any other point along the border.
The question we wanted to see answered, on the US side, after witnessing all of these Mexican sites controlled by narcos, was if the wall, the helicopters, the cameras, the underground sensors, the horses, and the off-road vehicles were sufficient to control a border that had thousands of people wanting to cross it every day. We wanted to know if the message from the US government was for real.
Is your wall really unpassable? Is your wall (in all of its forms) sufficient to stop the waves of people and drugs?
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security during the Bush administration, often emphasized that the border situation was “an enormous challenge that couldn’t be solved in thirty minutes.” Yet he also repeated numerous times that the government efforts to secure the border would herald a “final victory,” the “definitive blocking” of the flow of drugs and undocumented migrants.
We wanted to know if the declarations made by the suits in Washington were making any actual difference on the desert dirt.
~
The agent we were paired up with was a ten-year veteran currently working on the busiest sector of the entire border, the Tucson sector. Esmeralda Marroquín, thirty-seven years old, daughter of a French father and a Mexican mother, was born in Arizona. Her mother came to the country legally, she told us, with papers. When I asked her why she had wanted to work for the Border Patrol, she responded emphatically: “For the love of my country. To give back to something that has given me so much.”
For the love of her country she spent six months in training, as well as taking Spanish classes and doing physical conditioning. For the love of her country, she affirms, she also spent two years on Operation Disruption—a team working to break down the coyote networks responsible for locking up migrants in safe houses for ransom. Though Marroquín doesn’t speak very highly of coyotes, “those traffickers that trick a migrant and leave them stranded in the middle of the desert just to make a buck,” she has a better view of undocumented migrants, considering them simply “people looking for a better life.” Yet the constraints of the job remain at the forefront of her mind. “I can’t let them pass,” she says. Then she adds, leaning back toward her natural sympathies, “I know how poor a lot of these people are. My grandma was indigenous. I know how they live.”
Marroquín switched on the radio transmitter and our night began. “We’re going to look for some action,” she said. “We’ll scout for migrants first, what we call tracking. But as soon as we hear anything on the radio we’ll jump on whatever it is. Sometimes we get a lot of drugs and no migrants. Sometimes a lot of migrants and no drugs.”
She drove with her head jutting forward, her gaze fixed on the passing asphalt. Half an hour in, and the radio hadn’t made a sound. Marroquín resorted to telling anecdotes.
“I remember the only time I had to draw my weapon. It was in my first year with the agency. I came across seven drug mules. When I approached, one of them picked up a big stick. I flipped off my safety and thought, here we go. But thankfully the guy dropped the stick and booked it. We’re only allowed to open fire if someone has the intention and possibility to cause harm or death. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rock, a blade, or a firearm. If I think my life is at risk, I can open fire.”
We drove in her SUV for miles and miles, cutting through the desert. The sun beat down and the cold wind whipped in through the open windows and against our skin. Nothing seemed to be moving.
Agent Marroquín, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and tied off with a bow, kept giving us warm smiles, trying to diffuse the silence around us. “It’s often like this,” she said. “S
ometimes there’s a lot to do and sometimes you don’t hear a thing in the whole desert. But don’t worry, any minute and we could see some action.”
“There,” she pointed as we arrived at the checkpoint between the small towns of Amado and Arivaca, “is a pickup spot for polleros. We’ve detained a lot of migrants waiting to catch a ride along the side of the road here.”
The only difference I noticed between that and other desert spots was that three Border Patrol agents (two of them of Latin American descent) had marked it off with fluorescent cones. These hotspots aren’t recognizable except to the eye of experts. They know that six miles straight into the desert from this road there is a trail that is out of reach of Border Patrol cameras, where migrants can walk at ease without even having to climb any hills.
But despite agents’ sensitive noses, which can help them pick up on migrant trails, it’s still mostly a question of luck. “There’s simply not a pattern to this,” Marroquín explained. “You can’t say where they’re crossing. Every day we find new routes.”
We chatted with one of the agents at the checkpoint for a few minutes, asking him if he’d seen any action. “No. We’ve got nothing today so far,” he responded. The popular idea of the border created by film, music, and popular myth looks nothing like the reality we were seeing. The area did not look like a war zone, and we learned it would be rare to spot uniformed men haring after ragtag Latinos or narcos in pickup trucks firing machine guns. This area of the border was, more than anything, empty. Empty and silent. In the Tucson sector there are 275 miles covered by 3,100 agents who take turns patrolling the seemingly endless plains, hills, mountains, and thickets. In these hundreds of miles of border there is always movement, but it’s rarely seen. There, that day, between the towns of Amado and Arivaca, the agents were reporting a whole lot of nothing.
And Agent Marroquín took it in her stride. “That’s how this game plays,” she said.
We continued on our drive. “We’ll head towards the Nogales wall. There they sometimes ferry drugs over at night.” She drove for an hour before we finally arrived and parked in a lot filled with trailers.
Agents often spend an entire boring night inside of their SUVs, with nothing but coffee and cigarettes and the still desert out their windows to occupy them. And then sometimes an agent gets killed, as happened to Luis Aguilar on January 19, 2008, run over while laying down tire-puncturing strips. Aguilar is the last agent to have died in the line of duty.
The parking lot we reached was empty except for seven trailers and a lone agent on a bicycle who reported movement shortly after we arrived. The lot sat on top of a tall hill from which you could see thirty miles of wall dividing northern Nogales from southern Nogales, the United States from Mexico, houses on one side from houses on the other. All of it separated by the blank gray of the wall, by twenty-five-foot bars driven and locked by cement five feet into the ground, much of it constructed from leftover war material. Combat material put to a new use. In the Tucson sector there are sixty-six miles of wall and over 160 miles of vehicle barriers.
Marroquín chatted for a minute with the agent on his bike, then took his binoculars. She peered toward the Mexican side. “There they are,” she said. And there they were, two men, camouflaged and hunkered into a bush, shaking with cold. They were watching us the same as we were watching them.
“They’re hawks for either narcos or migrants, watching for movement on this side, trying to decide when people should cross or when they should ferry the drugs.”
Marroquin’s game started becoming clearer to us. The migrants, they’re waiting to cross. And the agents, they’re waiting to catch them. And the two groups look at each other, waiting. Those on the Mexican side get to make the first move.
CALM INTERRUPTED
“It’s about to get dark. That’s when the movement begins. They know how to wait,” Marroquín explained, before suggesting we continue driving along the wall.
It was 5:40 p.m., the sun casting its last orange flashes and the radio starting to sputter directions. With the efficiency of a factory, everyone immediately responded to the orders coming in on the radio. The next thing we heard was: “We have a small car trying to cross near Sásabe.”
And then: “There’s a chase close to Abraham Canyon. It’s two different groups.”
Marroquín, glued to her radio, explained that all the action was far from Nogales. “This is a peaceful season. Other months around this time, it seems like every Mexican and every type of drug is trying to cross.” The comment seemed to have urged the radio on. The transmissions poured in.
“They’re launching drugs,” said a crackly voice, “in virtually every nearby location.”
“That one is for us,” Agent Marroquín said, stepping on the gas.
Another patrol car was parked on a street running parallel to the wall. The line of houses between the wall and the street prevented the narco hawks on the other side from spying on the Border Patrol. With the lights turned off and the radios set at the lowest volume, two patrol cars followed two agents on bicycles sent to intercept packages thrown over from Mexico.
“The seizures by the wall are always dangerous,” Marroquín whispered. “Sometimes they shoot at us from the other side, trying to stop us from catching the pickup guy on this side.”
An agent came down the street. He was sweating. All of the patrol agents have twenty-pound belts around their waists, to which they strap their pistol, tear gas, flashlight, water, firearm magazines, and pocket knife. The agent set a package down on the ground: a backpack covered in electrical tape.
I stuck my head out the window and asked one of the bike agents what had happened to the narcos seen trying to collect the packs.
“They ran off,” he responded, as he started pedaling back uphill.
Sure, they’d run off, but I didn’t see anyone go after them.
“That’s how this game is,” Marroquín insisted. “We don’t endanger ourselves with a chase that involves risks. If we seize the drugs but they run and get to the other side, we let them go. We don’t know if they’re armed. We take care not to get involved in any shoot-outs and not to follow anybody who could be armed.”
The border agents came back with two more backpacks, twenty pounds between the two of them. It’s hard to understand why the guys on the other side throw any packages around this area, knowing that most of the Border Patrol’s surveillance cameras are set up around the wall, but everything has its explanation in this game. There’s a strategy to it all.
“Sometimes,” Marroquín explains in whispers, “they throw their drugs around here and in two other key places to tie our hands and distract us from other sectors where they’re crossing with vehicles. It’s the same tactic used when drug traffickers send large migrant groups for us to catch, so we’ll leave another sector empty while we take that group to the station. But what can we do? Even if we know this happens, we can’t let these packages cross. We don’t even know how to get to the empty sectors where they’re supposedly crossing bigger loads.”
It can be a gamble trying to differentiate between getting work done and walking into a trap. As Marroquín said, sometimes it seems that all of Mexico’s drug loads are being thrown over the wall and all of Mexico and Central America is trying to cross. And the SUV radios blare on.
7:12. Escaped subject now picking up packages thrown from Mexico, feet away from where his previous pack was seized.
7:21. Two migrants detained some miles from the wall. One of the screens flickers with a man seen on the Mexican side walking away from the wall with two backpacks identical to those just seized, apparently deciding to hold off on crossing until the scene cools down.
7:24. At checkpoint on Interstate Highway 19, five undocumented Mexicans discovered hiding under a truck’s false floor. Driver, upon seeing the checkpoint, flees.
8:03. Man jumps over the wall in downtown Nogales. Classic desperate attempt. He tries to hide in a crowd, but two border agents
follow him.
“They’re almost never successful crossing like that,” Marroquín says. In the same area, some young men throw more drug packages.
8:31. Fifteen pounds of marijuana seized.
“And the drug mules?” I asked.
“They escaped, they walked into those woods,” an agent explained, pointing to a thicket of trees ten feet away. “They got back into Mexico.”
Rather than a deadly game, the activity here is one of routine. A routine with many interruptions. If drug smugglers escape, they escape. If they lay a trap in order to divert agents, agents have to fall for it, even when they know they’re going after bait. Marroquín said it well—in a game, the same player can’t win every time. The goal is to hinder the drugs, not to stop them.
“That’s impossible,” Marroquín said as we left the site of the backpacks. “If we build a wall ten feet high, they’ll make an eleven-foot ladder. The Border Patrol’s mission is to gain operational control over the area. We know they’re always going to come in. You have to learn to lose. After 9/11, our mission changed. Now the priority is to detain terrorists. Migrants have been demoted to second priority.”
What is surprising, however, is that they’ve never reported the detention of a single terrorist along the US–Mexico border. That is, if by “terrorist” we understand what the United States usually defines as a terrorist: a bin Laden–appointed individual, a member of Al Qaeda, an Iraqi insurgent who works for Muqtada al-Sadr and has dedicated himself to combating the foreign soldiers in his country.
But the definition of a “terrorist” is always changing. “Of course we’ve detained terrorists. Narco-traffickers are terrorists,” Marroquín argued without taking her gaze off the highway.
“They live off breeding terror,” Marroquín continued, sounding like a Border Patrol spokesperson, while on our way to to the Tucson detention center. “And we don’t want them to do here what they’ve been doing in Mexico. That’s why we have 18,000 agents on the border and why we’ll keep raising that number.”
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 23
