WILL A WALL STOP SMUGGLING?
Narcotics smuggling, and the endless battle to prevent it
In the middle of a peaceful green valley where the salt air drifts in clean and fresh from the ocean, it can be hard to remember the chaos.
Drug shootouts. Smugglers scrambling down the canyons. When congressmen wanted tours of the area, they’d have to see it from the window of a helicopter because Border Patrol couldn’t guarantee their safety.
Then came the fences. One perimeter, then a secondary. The fences helped the Border Patrol reclaim this little sliver of the country.
But the fences did not stop the drug smuggling. With a near-infinite supply of money and resources on the other side, drugs continue to move under, around and through anything the country builds.
No wall will stop them.
Mike Unzueta remembers. San Diego
“It was the Wild West,” the retired federal criminal investigator says.
He’s standing in San Diego’s International Park, the smell of the ocean in the air and the sound of crashing waves in the background.
It wasn’t always like this. “There would be shootouts over drug loads,” Unzueta says. The retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent spent 30 years trying to stop drugs from coming into San Diego, as an undercover agent and later as a top criminal investigator.
“This area used to be so dangerous that we couldn’t do what we are doing right now,” Customs and Border Protection Agent Joe Hernandez says. “We couldn’t just drive into this area, we would’ve been assaulted within seconds of being here.”
Fences went up, but drugs kept moving.
After the government built fences in San Diego, drug smugglers turned to the ocean, underground tunnels and, most commonly, the ports of entry. Last year more than 90 percent of the drug seizures happened in the port of entry, where millions of cars drive into San Diego from Mexico every year.
David Shaw is Unzueta’s successor at Homeland Security Investigations. The unit investigates cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, money laundering and drug smuggling.
Cartels “operate like a business,” Shaw says. “If you put up one wall, they find a way to get around it.”
The USA TODAY NETWORK spoke with current and retired law-enforcement experts who have patrolled the border on a daily basis. Asked about President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, they seem to agree: San Diego, at least, would benefit more from additional personnel, training and investment in investigative tools like wiretaps and paid informants.
Drug smuggling along the border is like a balloon, experts say. If you squeeze one part, the air simply shifts to another.
40 seconds to find it
The San Ysidro Port of Entry, which connects Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego, is the busiest land crossing in the world. Every year, more than 14 million vehicles and 23 million passengers cross through one of 26 inspection lanes to get into the United States.
“We probably lead the nation as far as smuggling attempts from aliens and narcotics, so we are very dynamic and very busy,” says Acting Port Director Robert Hood. “It’s a fun place to be if you’re an officer. Something is always going on.”
During the 2016 fiscal year, Border Patrol agents in San Diego confiscated nearly 83,000 kilograms of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin from the three ports of entry in the area. The next closest border sector in terms of drug seizures was Laredo, Texas, which covers twice as much land and where agents confiscated 10,000 fewer kilograms of drugs, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
The San Ysidro port is a giant bottleneck that funnels a seemingly endless flood of traffic to inspection booths. There, Border Patrol agents have about 40 seconds to find signs of smuggling.
Agents look for anything that could point to drug smuggling, such as custommade compartments, uneven tires, a nervous driver or a weighted-down trunk. Inspectors do this while knowing that drivers have been in line for hours and that those drivers contribute millions to the U.S. economy.
“When I worked the primary lanes, my goal was to look at the folks as they are coming at me and to determine which one of all this traffic is not like everybody else,” Hood says. “It’s kind of like when the Secret Service identified counterfeit currency. They know what legitimate currency is like so well that when the bad one comes, you go, ‘That’s it.’ ”
When drug smuggling moved to the ports of entry, it was by design.
The idea was that fences would divert drug trafficking to one area: the ports. Here, the agents have the advantage of lights, drug-sniffing canine patrols, Xray machines and other high-tech equipment.
In this sense, the fencing has been a success. But there have also been unintended consequences.
An entryway underground
Since 2001, the San Diego Sector’s Tunnel Task Force has found more than 60 smuggling tunnels in the county.
“With the advent of the infrastructure between the ports of entry, one of the unintended consequences were the huge narcotics tunnels that were created that went over 100 feet deep and ran seven or eight football fields in length,” says Unzueta.
Most of those tunnels are in Otay Mesa, a massive warehouse district just north of a commercial truck port of entry.
The warehouses are the perfect spot to dig exits from Mexican tunnels. The constant truck traffic keeps the noise levels up so that much construction goes unnoticed. Subleasing of warehouses makes it difficult for law-enforcement officers to keep tabs on who is renting them out.
The Tunnel Task Force finds and seals tunnels. Its members call themselves the “tunnel rats,” in homage to the tunnel rats of the Vietnam War who cleared the tunnels the Viet Cong used to run their guerrilla warfare operations.
San Diego’s soil, at least along certain stretches of the county, makes the area ideal for building tunnels. The soil is strong enough to support the weight of a tunnel but soft enough to dig through.
“We just happen to be in the right place at the right time where most of the tunneling activity takes place,” says Lance LeNoir, captain of the tunnel rats. “We’ve developed a niche. We didn’t have a script to go off in here so we borrowed from the fire department, from geologists, from everything.”
While the majority of smuggling attempts happen in the ports of entry, the biggest loads of drugs enter San Diego through tunnels. The ones equipped with rails can carry packages as big as 35 tons.
It can take more than a million dollars to build one of these tunnels, but the drug-smuggling organization can get a return on its investment after two successful shipments.
“Even if you put every single resource you have on something, I’m not sure you stop it because the other side has a lot more resources to actually move it along,” Shaw says.
A waterway around the edges
Smuggling in the ocean has evolved from Jets Skis dropping off packages on deserted beaches near San Diego to multiday expeditions taking ships 150 miles west into the ocean and as far north as San Francisco.
A group of about 50 border patrol agents, mostly former military, patrol an area that’s larger than the state of Connecticut but has no roads and only a handful of visual landmarks.
“They are going so far out of our area of operations that we can’t even cover that area,” says Kurt Nagel, a marine interceptor for Customs and Border Protection’s air and sea patrol. “We are trying to set up task forces in San Francisco to give us a hand.”
After the border fences in San Diego were built, law enforcement noticed more pangas — small, open fishing boats that run on outboard motors — abandoned on the city’s beaches.
“We were completely overwhelmed,” says Unzueta, the retired ICE investigator.
When agents focused on pangas, the smugglers began using expensive recreational vessels that blend in with the boats San Diegans use for weekend fishing or scenic cruises.
Border Patrol agents have to figure out which ones are coming from Mexico.
“A lot of it is just knowing the people, knowing the seasons, knowing what fish is in season, what kind of tackle you use to go sea fishing as opposed to lake fishing,” Nagel says. “Smugglers sometimes mix that up.”
Old-fashioned investigations
If a wall is built, don’t expect it — or the Border Patrol — to stop the flow of drugs.
“It would be like trying to say that a police department isn’t successful unless they stop 100 percent of the shoplifting,” says Hernandez of Customs and Border Protection. “People are going to shoplift no matter what you do. You can put security guards at the door, you can put security guards at every aisle and people are still going to shoplift. Same principle here. We can put barriers and we can slow them down, but no matter what we do people are still going to try.”
Border Patrol agents in San Diego agree that they need more people and funding for investigative work.
“It’s old-school police work,” Shaw says. “That’s where I think our best money is spent.”
Wiretaps and paid informants are among the unit’s most effective tools for uncovering the inner workings of drugsmuggling organizations, he adds.
“You can have all the technology you want and all the infrastructure you want, but if you have nobody to make an arrest when someone comes across illegally, it really doesn’t do you any good because they are going to get right past that technology eventually,” Hernandez says. “And if you have all the agents you want but no technology to help you find them, people are going to get away anyway. We want to try to find the right balance.”
And any wall that is built can’t wall off the bustling border ports. Sealing San Ysidro would decimate a multimillion dollar, trans-border economy.
“Some of our better tools are the officers’ skill and the canines’ ability,” says Hood, the ports chief.
Beyond that, their work is done with intelligence, paying informants in Mexico and building cases so that they know what is approaching the border before it gets there.
“I think what we are likely to see with the border wall is probably increased levels of smuggling going on within the ports of entry, potentially increased levels in narcotics tunnels,” Unzueta says.
And, he adds, one thing more: “Maybe some new smuggling venture that we haven’t seen yet.”