Video shows smuggler cutting wire at border

U.S. Customs and Border Protection released video on Wednesday showing what appears to be a human smuggler cutting through concertina barbed wire that agents had placed atop the border fence near Yuma just hours before.

The 30-second clip was taken on Nov. 7 at the border fence erected next to the Sanchez canal, which is located west of the San Luis port of entry near where the border juts up along the Colorado River.

As the video zooms in, a man in a yellow shirt appears in the screen. He’s hanging from the bollard fence with his left hand and is holding wire cutters in his right hand, which he’s using to cut through coils of barbed wire hanging down from the fence.

“We put up concertina wire in order to help sturdy the infrastructure that’s in the area,” Agent Justin Kallinger told

“We wanted to show as quick as we put that stuff up, there was a smuggler to cut it down.”

Kallinger said the agents working in a special-projects crew with the support of Arizona National Guard troops had installed the barbed wire just hours before, “maybe one day before they started cutting it down,” he added.

That differs from the work that active-duty soldiers have been doing along Arizona’s ports of entry. Starting this week, soldiers began placing concertina wire atop the border fence, but at the ports of entry, not in between the ports.

Kallinger said border agents had placed the wire atop the border fence through the populated areas of the cities of San Luis and San Luis Rio Colorado.

These areas have been magnets for large groups of migrants, mostly Central American families and minors, seeking to claim asylum in the United States.

On Wednesday, Border Patrol officials in Yuma said they had apprehended 654 migrants the previous two days near San Luis. Most of the migrants, they said, were families and minors from Guatemala who surrendered to border agents.