EDGE OF THE LINE
Out here, chasing a border-crosser can take days. Agents face the challenges and duty of securing a remote border.
Unknown stories. Unintended consequences. Out here, a whole night can come and go without seeing another living being. But even when the wait seems endless, there’s more to watch. The way the desert dirt reflects the light after a footprint has been brushed away. The way the trail can tell you whether crossers are small children or heavily burdened drug runners. To patrol the New Mexico line is to watch, wait and follow. And even when there’s no one else to be seen, there’s one person to watch out for: yourself. If the border crossers don’t put you at risk, the desert will. Columbus, N. M. A green-and-white SUV rumbles through a small desert canyon and spooks a herd of deer. The sleek animals trot up a hill, dozens of yards from the Mexican border. They will prove to be the most interesting sighting in Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Jose Romero’s shift.
The evening hours are lit by a full moon, once a popular time for border crossers to make their attempts.
“During a full moon, you were almost guaranteed to be seeing something,” says Romero, a Navy veteran who’s been with the agency 11 years. “Lately, not so much.”
This stretch of New Mexico border was in the midst of an unusual nine-day stint in which agents had apprehended no traffickers or border crossers, continuing a trend since the beginning of 2017 along New Mexico’s 180-mile international border.
In the Bootheel — the chunk of land so called because of its downward jut on the map — Border Patrol agents’ work has tended, even in busier times, to be of a different nature than in urban areas.
It’s slower-paced and more solitary. And the distances to patrol are much greater. Hidalgo County, which makes up the bulk of the Bootheel, is about three times the size of the state of Rhode Island.
In El Paso, the agency has a span of seconds to apprehend border crossers before they escape into the most densely populated U.S. county along the Mexican border. In the expanse of the Bootheel, which also is in the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, the agency has hours — or sometimes even days.
Agents’ focus is to arrest border crossers before they reach Interstate 10, a major east-west corridor that can carry people, or drugs, far away from the highly patrolled border region.
For Romero, who grew up in El Paso, working in the remote New Mexico borderland is “a little bit different.”
“You can be out here for hours and never see a living soul,” he says. “All you’ll hear are the animals around you. You may spend a whole shift and not see a single person.”
In a city like El Paso, an agent is assigned a narrow slot of border to patrol, and he or she doesn’t have leeway to deviate from it, Romero says. In an area such as southwestern New Mexico, however, an agent must cover broader areas of land. In a vast desert, the job can feel like looking for a proverbial “needle in a haystack,” he says.
Assigned a patrol vehicle, border agents typically work alone. Horseback and ATV agents work in pairs. They’re in frequent radio communication with bases in Deming and Lordsburg, the two nearest small cities, but mountain ranges can interfere with that signal. And cellphone service is nonexistent in some places.
They spend hours a day driving and hiking mostly uninhabited grasslands and mountain ranges, carrying out the art of “sign-cutting.” The ground itself tells the story of what the agents can’t see.
Periodically during their 10-hour shifts, agents hitch old tractor tires to the backs of their patrol units, dragging the tires across miles of dirt roads paralleling the border. Later, they slowly drive the same routes, scrutinizing the ground. Any new tracks that appear will trigger a search.
Often, the first signs of border crossers aren’t obvious footprints, which many times have been obscured. Rather, Romero explains, agents look for changes to the appearance of the desert ground. Left untouched, the dirt reflects sunlight with a slight sheen. But even if someone tries to hide the signs of a group’s passage, the ground remains disturbed. There’s a break in that reflected light. After following the disturbances for a while, agents soon find footprints.
Chases can last minutes, hours. Or in the Bootheel, they can last days.
On foot or horseback, agents start following a trail of footprints, attempting to assess the group they’re pursuing. Are there children? Do the footprints seem especially deep, which can indicate people are hauling backpacks of drugs? Is there any trash left behind and, if so, how fresh does it seem to be? Are there any impressions left behind by weapons, such as a rifle butt that touched the ground? All the while, they relay the latest information — when there’s radio signal — to the nearest headquarters.
In this region, depending on where precisely a person crosses from Mexico, an immigrant can face a roughly 70-mile trip to reach I-10 that can take days to traverse on foot. Sometimes groups get lost in the maze of desert terrain and wander, making the journey even longer. One Border Patrol agent may pick up the trail, track it the duration of his or her shift, hand it off to another agent, and then pick up the trail of the same group again the next day, miles away from the original point.
Sometimes, Romero says, the immediate goal of an agent isn’t to apprehend a group, especially if people could be armed. Having information about which direction the group is headed allows other agents to intercept it from the opposite direction. If someone is hauling drugs, agents may wait for the person to drop off the load near a highway to see who picks it up. Then they nab both parties.
The harsh climate of the Chihuahuan Desert — 100-plus-degree heat in the summer and sometimes below-freezing weather during winter nights — poses a continual risk to agents and immigrants alike. Hazardous terrain and sometimes dangerous wildlife abound.
“Inherently, any time you’re working out here, especially at night, tracking a group of people, there’s always going to be a danger,” Romero says. “Again, it could be from the individuals; it could be from the terrain. It could be from snakes or coyotes or mountain lions — whatever it might be. There’s always a danger and everyone here understands that, but you still do the job.”
Romero once discovered a trail of immigrants and began tracking them by foot, leaving his vehicle behind. He says he got caught up in the work, forgetting his water and hat on a hot day.
“It took me about five hours; I finally caught up to the group and arrested them,” he says. “With that sun beating down on my head, my head was just blistered. That was foolish on my part, because I put myself in danger knowing that at any point, I could’ve been the victim.”
Stuart Harris, vice president of National Border Patrol Council Local 1929, the union covering the El Paso Sector, says the danger is real.
“In El Paso, we had five people who lost their life trying to cross the canal,” Harris says. “In the desert area, they encounter more of the people who were left out in the desert by their smuggler to die.”
Romero has witnessed tragedies, as well. A special unit called Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue, or BORSTAR, can be flown in to offer emergency medical aid to migrants suffering medical distress, such as heat exhaustion. But sometimes it’s too late.
“I’ve picked up a group of people where the mom was holding her dead infant,” he says. “She didn’t want to believe the infant was dead. And my guess, I don’t know, the baby may have been dead a day and a half. I know she couldn’t let go; she was still hopeful.”
Back in his Border Patrol vehicle, Romero drives south on New Mexico Highway 81, the only paved road that reaches the Bootheel’s southernmost edge, the border with Mexico. The SUV zips by a rattlesnake warming itself on the pavement and slows for cattle that wander freely across the road because of a lack of fences in the area. The two-lane highway winds between a break in two small mountain ranges and enters the Playas Valley. To the left, the 8,300-foot Big Hatchet Peak rises like a stony monument out of the desert floor. And to the right, the much smaller jags of the Little Hatchet Mountains trail off into the distance. To the west, still more mountains are visible. It’s in these ranges, Romero says, that smugglers at times stage personnel, who relay reconnaissance over the radio waves to their counterparts.
The highway winds to an end at Antelope Wells, an international crossing point. It’s not so much a community as it is a tiny cluster of federal buildings, one of which is a two-story stucco building. The tan-and-brown structure, dubbed Camp Bounds, is one of three Border Patrol bases in southwestern New Mexico that are known as forward operating bases, or FOBs.
Visiting border agents from throughout the sector join everyday patrols alongside agency personnel based out of the Lordsburg and Deming stations. A combination of 16-person living quarters and Border Patrol operational hubs, the FOBs are a noticeable federal presence. They were built to give faster deployment at the border itself, rather than having agents always travel from their nearest duty stations in Lordsburg and Deming.
Inside, the building and its tiled floors have the feel of a tiny hotel, equipped with a kitchen, living room area, men’s and women’s bathrooms, a dormitory and internet access. In the living area, brown sofas are arrayed in front of a television mounted on the wall. On this day, only one person — an off-duty agent from El Paso — is in the commons area watching TV. As Romero explains, staffing at the FOBs has dropped along with the trend of declining apprehensions.
Outside is a small tire-repair station and a fueling station — one of the few locations for agents to fuel up in the Bootheel. Farther to the west, in the Animas Valley, another FOB includes a helipad.
Border Patrol administrators may have embraced the FOB concept, but not all agents have, citing concerns about security and safety at the sites because of their proximity to the border, among other reasons.
“It’s eight days away from your family and friends,” says Harris, the union representative. “You may be working in territory you’re not familiar with. And quite frankly, they’re not effective.”
The bases were part of a ramp-up in the agency’s operations that began more than a decade ago under President George W. Bush. The expansion included a sharp personnel increase, the construction of a border fence and the installation of infrastructure and surveillance technology.
According to the Border Patrol, there are 2,200 agents patrolling the El Paso Sector now, more than double the number in 2004 and more than triple the staffing in 1994.
Romero is based out of an El Paso office most of the time. But, like almost all other agents in the sector, at least once a year he’s assigned an eight-day stint at an FOB in New Mexico. His current assignment is at the third FOB, Camp Ramsey, about 20 miles west of Columbus. That compound is just off a two-lane state highway, within a few miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, amid a sea of spindly yucca stalks and creosote, a drabgreen-tufted shrub.
A U.S. flag, with an agency flag just beneath it, flies from a flagpole on the grounds. Tall fencing encircles the property, and a passcode is required to enter.
While agent enforcement has stepped up, yearly apprehension totals have fallen across the sector since 2005, when more than 122,600 immigrants were arrested. Last year, apprehensions were about one-fifth of that.
Harris says agents have “a long ways to go” before the border is secure. But on Trump’s border wall, he says there’s little reason for controversy.
“What people are sort of missing is: What is the wall? What actually does he mean by the wall?” Harris says. “The wall is a combination of infrastructure, technology and boots on the ground.”
In past years, an agent could apprehend dozens of people at one time, because of the volume of immigrants attempting to cross, Romero says. Now, a big group is considered to be five or six people.
“And that’s a positive thing,” he says. Romero doesn’t comment about the planned wall, but he acknowledges he has sometimes taken heat from people he knows who’ve challenged him about his role arresting migrants by saying: “How can you do that to your own people?” Romero is Hispanic, but he says he doesn’t feel a conflict because the law is clear.
“I am doing this because of my people,” he says. “My own people are the people that live in this country. If tomorrow Congress changes the laws and says, ‘OK, from now on, we’re going to do this.’ Then that’s what we do. If you don’t like the immigration system, change it.”
From her ranch in the Bootheel, Meira Gault recounts that drug traffickers in trucks years ago would blaze paths across the international line, and across cattle fences, often winding up in chases with law enforcement. A Normandy-style fence, built by the federal government in 2008-09 across a key plain, curtailed that.
“It did some good,” she says. Gault, however, took issue with the federal government’s placement of one of the forward operating bases about 20 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, contending it should have been closer. And a major concern now is the lack of an improved road reaching to the border in her area. Now, there’s a central dirt road used heavily by Border Patrol agents.
“The issue is: Who should be responsible for maintaining this road?” she says. “It needs upgrading and maintaining.”
The county government, with more than 400 miles of dirt road to maintain countywide, says it can’t afford to maintain one road regularly. National Guard funding might help, but the many agencies and land-ownership issues complicate any immediate improvements. With the Trump administration’s emphasis on border security, Gault argues basic infrastructure — a road to the border more so than a wall — is needed. She has contacted Customs and Border Protection officials and lawmakers, but has hit dead-ends.
As the sun begins to set, desert hills cast lengthening shadows. The land fades from brown to purple and finally to black. A two-man team parks off to the side of a road at the Bootheel’s eastern edge, unloads two ATVs and prepares for a night of patrols.
Romero is once again driving the highways, awaiting any reports of possible crossing attempts. Occasional chatter from his Border Patrol radio is heard alongside the country music that’s playing on the vehicle stereo.
An array of motion sensors is buried in the ground on the U.S. side of the international border. Often, as darkness falls and immigrants begin to cross the border fence, the sensors begin signaling. Each one must be “cleared” by an agent who investigates the cause. Sometimes the devices malfunction. Animals also can trip them. Other times, they’re signs of actual crossing attempts.
As Romero continues driving, another agent checks out a sensor that’s been triggered. But it turns out to be a false alarm. Aside from that, the work radio is mostly quiet. There are no arrests this night.
Apprehensions have dropped in the Bootheel, but the area is still leading the sector in marijuana seizures. There are still some places vehicles get across.
Although border security has been boosted over the past decade, Romero says the agency hasn’t filled all of its vacant positions. The sector has about 200 openings. Infrastructure shortcomings exist, too, he says.
“There are still gaps that we are still trying to address,” he says.
The nine-day stint of no apprehensions in southwestern New Mexico will be broken later, when Romero and two other agents seize a marijuana-filled vehicle near a forward operating base.
While some have chalked up the recent lull to anti-immigration rhetoric by Trump, agents note there are other factors that can contribute, such as cartels that control trafficking routes on the Mexican side. Traffic can move from one sector to the next.
“If history shows us anything, things are cyclical, and eventually activity will start picking up again in this area,” Romero says.
As Romero’s vehicle approaches Camp Ramsey late one night, a stark white glow stemming from the facility’s lighting array sets the compound apart from everything in the surrounding desert. As Romero notes, it is hard to miss.
“To have a footprint of a forward operating base such as this one right in the middle of that area — it definitely lets people know we’re there,” he says. “And we’re here to conduct business and protect the border the way we’re supposed to be doing.”