On The Texas-Mexico Border, Migrants Are Overcoming Every Obstacle In Their Path

...In the meantime, U.S. Customs and Border Protection employs every conceivable means to stop migrant smuggling and drug trafficking here. More than 3,000 Border Patrol agents are assigned to the sector — and they don’t just patrol in trucks and SUVs. They also use ATVs, dirt-bikes, bicycles, horses, and K-9 units, all of which are supported by riverboats, helicopters, blimps, and a tactical command center that monitors sensors and cameras scattered across the sector. To avoid all that, smugglers and traffickers are constantly trying to draw agents away from the river. To do that, they exploit weaknesses inherent in U.S. law enforcement. Rodriguez and I weren’t out long before an anonymous “concerned citizen” call came in reporting ten to twelve people being loaded into a brown Chevy Envoy in a neighborhood near the river (in small towns like Hidalgo and Mission, tucked between McAllen and the Rio Grande, some neighborhoods come nearly to the banks of the river). The border agents know that calls like these are often fake, but they have to respond as if they’re genuine. We race toward the reported location of the vehicle, passing by other agents and an Hidalgo County Sherriff’s deputy, all searching the same general area. This goes on for about a half-hour and no one sees a brown Envoy. Eventually everyone goes back to their patrols. If the purpose of the “concerned citizen” call was to draw Border Patrol away from the river, it worked. A similar thing happens the next day while I’m riding along on a patrol with Customs and Border Protection in a Blackhawk helicopter. A 911 operator radioes the crew about a “lost subject” call that came from about 12 miles north of the river. The pilots tell me these kind of calls are not uncommon. The smugglers know that rescuing a lost person takes priority over patrolling the river, so they’ll send someone out to a remote area to call 911 on a cell phone. The operator pings the phone’s location and transmits the GPS coordinates to the helicopter crew. Because the smugglers know where the call came from, they know roughly how much time they’ll have with no helicopters monitoring the river. It’s impossible to know if that’s what happened to us, but after flying 30 minutes north to the coordinates and circling the area for another half-hour, it’s seems likely that whoever made the call wasn’t really lost. This game of cat and mouse carries on day and night along the border. Rodriguez explains that the smuggling operations are highly sophisticated, involving vast networks of people on both sides of the border, including safe houses in upscale neighborhoods in McAllen and Brownsville. “If they can get across and get to one of those safe houses,” he says, “they essentially disappear.” Often the traffickers will send multiple groups across at once in different locations, wagering that one of them will likely get through. While I’m driving around with Rodriguez, a call comes in that a group of nine people are crossing on the east side of the McAllen Station area. A minute later, a call comes in from the Customs and Border Protection helicopter (an AS350 A-Star) that a group of four are crossing on the west side. We’re closer to the west side, patrolling along a dirt road atop the levee, so Rodriguez heads toward that call...more