In Texas counties, cops are 'the wall'
Local officers issue a plea for backup on the front lines of the border crisis
LA FERIA, Texas — Joe Adalpe III wants the border wall.
The 32-year-old captain of the Cameron County Constable, Precinct 5, has been fighting crime in this small city of 5,000 nestled among onion and corn fields on the banks of the Rio Grande — “ground zero” in the migrant border crisis — for more than a decade.
“We are the first line of defense here,” Adalpe told The Post.
After he and his colleagues apprehend traffickers or migrants crossing the border, they contact Customs and Border Patrol agents.
The Mexican-American cop says he has seen crime spike in the area over the past few years, with an increase in drug trafficking from Mexico and sexual assaults against women migrants who are forced into sexual slavery when their families can’t pay the thousands of dollars to the traffickers who bring them over the border.
Wearing dark glasses and a sharp blue suit, with a pair of handcuffs dangling from his belt, the mustachioed investigator has found bundles of marijuana stashed in places such as a pump house on an onion farm near the meandering Rio Grande.
He also regularly cracks down on dealers pushing “Xanax bars” — prescription drugs traffickers buy over the counter in Mexico for $20 a bottle and peddle through south Texas for $5 a pill.
But with a staff of only three constables to patrol an area of 254 square miles, Adalpe said he is afraid that a lot of “bad guys” may be getting away.
While there are currently 60 miles of border fence, erected under the Obama administration, there are still large gaps in the barrier, allowing drug smugglers and undocumented migrants to cross into south Texas.
Last year, the federal Department of Homeland Security signed off on a project to install 35 electric gates in the region, a welcomed boost, the cop said.
But President Trump’s promised wall needed, he said.
“We feel the fence or the wall will slow them down. It’s a tool to help us intercept these people,” said Adalpe, whose unit gets some state and federal funding to provide overtime pay for staff.
“We are the boots on the ground, and we are asking for resources.”
Over the past week, The Post accompanied three local law-enforcement officers, including Adalpe, in ride-alongs in three different counties.
Two of the counties — Hidalgo and Cameron — are on the border with Mexico. The third, Brooks, is adjacent to a Customs and Border Patrol inspection station nearly 75 miles north of the border. All traffic must pass the inspection station on its journey north.
In Mission, a city of more than 77,000 in Hidalgo County, Constable Lazaro “Larry” Gallardo, 55, has seen 60 to 100 migrants coming across the border in a single six-hour period, he told The Post. is
“Our job is to make sure that drugs and bad guys don’t come over the border,’’ he said. “We are the wall.” He said his group receives a $90,000 grant from Homeland Security and the same amount from the state every year to pay for overtime for the constables who patrol the border area. But his precinct is still stretched thin, he said.
Among his main concerns is offering protection to the women and children who come over the border, trying to prevent them from being taken to “stash houses” where they are sexually assaulted. He told The Post that he has seen migrants who have escaped traffickers with marks on their wrists from captivity.
On Wednesday, The Post went on a ridealong near the Aznalduas Dam, which has dozens of cameras and motion sensors installed to monitor migrants and traffickers crossing this part of the Rio Grande, where the water is relatively shallow.
The patrol apprehended two migrant families from Central America who were wandering lost among the cactus and brush near the US side of the dam.
The families — one from Guatemala and the other from El Salvador — carried nothing but a single bag for each group and seemed dazed after their harrowing journey. They said they waited two days to cross the river, paying the equivalent of $5 each to cross over in a raft.
“We’re so relieved to be here,” said Julie Guadalupe Duran, 25, explaining that she traveled on foot and by bus with her 2-year-old daughter, Marjorie, and her 11-year-old niece. Duran said she left her home in San Salvador on March 9 after she received numerous death threats from the Calle 18 gang, a rival of MS-13.
Duran had gone to police to tell them that the father of one of the gang members sexually assaulted her niece, who lives with her. Gang members soon paid her family a visit and “said if we didn’t take back our testimony, they would kill us,” Duran told The Post, adding that she hopes to join family members in Houston after she is processed by Border Patrol agents.
Eighty-three miles north, in Falfurrias, a city of just under 5,000 surrounded by a rugged terrain cut by brush and cactus dotted with blue barrels of water that local volunteers leave for migrants, Elias Pompa, 42, puts in 16-hour shifts patrolling an area of more than 1,000 square miles.
He is one of five deputies who goes on patrol alone.
“We can’t afford to have more than one deputy patrol at a time,” he said.
The Brooks County sheriff’s deputy has been involved in 250 vehicle pursuits in his 10 years on the beat.
His fellow cops have christened him “Chicken Hawk” for his sharp-eyed observations that have led to seizures of drugs and migrants.
He watches for new footprints on the sandy terrain and ranch fences that are slightly bent where migrants and traffickers have crossed into the brush on the sprawling ranches that surround both sides of Highway 281.
The area, known as “Death Valley,” is the site where more than 600 migrants have been found dead in the past 10 years, their grisly remains picked up by the Brooks County Sheriff’s Office and sent to the medical examiner’s office in Hidalgo County.
“It’s always the little details that give them away,” Pompa told The Post, sipping on a large cardboard McDonald’s coffee cup.
Pompa once apprehended a work truck because he noticed there was no ladder on the back. There were 21 migrants stuffed into the back, and when the truck came to a screeching halt, the migrants scrambled in a “bailout.”
Some of them were only able to crawl because their legs and feet were so numb from being cramped up in the truck, he said.
“I have a real curious mind,” Pompa told The Post when asked how he is able to spot smugglers so well.
For example, he said he noticed that most traffickers modify the rear suspension of their vehicles so that they don’t sag under the weight of the many people they are cramming in.
He often seizes trucks that have no rear passenger seats, which allows them to accommodate dozens of migrants lying on top of one another. He once captured a Dodge Neon with only the driver’s seat intact and several migrants crammed in the back.
“They keep doing this over and over again,” he said of the smugglers who modify cars and trucks to spirit drugs and people across the Texas frontier.
Among the trucks he has seized at the Brooks County Sheriff’s evidence lot are brand-new pickups that retail for more than $70,000.
“It shows you how much money these traffickers have when they can afford to lose one of these trucks,” Pompa said.
Another time, he noticed a pickup truck with a young couple in the front. It was the middle of winter, but the windows were open. When he pulled them over, several migrants ran out, and he later found a wig in the passenger seat, indicating one of the migrants was posing as a woman.
In another chase, in 2016, it was the rearwindow wipers that gave the bad guys away. There was no rain, yet the distracted driver of the pickup he was monitoring had the wipers on. When he stopped them, 12 migrants bailed out.
Three years earlier, in 2013, a Chevrolet Suburban smuggling migrants crashed through a house, killing an elderly woman who was asleep in her bed.
In 2015, the driver of a Chevy Trailblazer hit a tree at 90 mph, killing the seven of nine migrants who were in his vehicle. The 19-yearold driver, who survived the crash, was illegal, Pompa recalled.
Pompa said he often finds pocket Bibles in Spanish in trucks along with 10-pound bundles of marijuana and knives that migrants carry with them. He once found a pile of women’s underwear in one truck, he said.
“We have generations of smugglers here,” he said, surveying the scrub. “We deal with their criminal mischief every day, and we need help.”