NOGALES, Ariz. - Seven suspected illegal immigrants were on their knees, guarded by Border Patrol agents, a few hundred feet from the fence that delineates the United States border with Mexico.
The suspects were apprehended in mid-July by agents whose efforts are being helped these days by members of the National Guard. The Citizen-Soldiers are relaying information obtained from border surveillance devices and observation posts to the agents.
About 200 people said to have crossed the border illegally are processed every day at the Nogales Station in the Border Patrol’s busy Tucson Sector, Border Patrol officials say. That may sound like a lot, but it is significantly fewer than the 600 a day tempo of just four months ago – in March.
Although apprehension rates typically vary with the season, Border Patrol officials attribute the latest drop to the arrival of National Guard troops for Operation Jump Start, the initiative President George W. Bush announced in mid-May to help the Border Patrol secure the U.S. border with Mexico.
Up to 6,000 troops participating in Operation Jump Start are expected to be performing duty along the 1,300-mile border from Texas to California by Aug. 1. The $770-million operation in support of Customs and Border Protection could continue for up to two years.
Officials say the decrease in apprehensions is striking in areas where the Guard has been deployed.
“We’ve seen dramatic decreases in the numbers of entries and apprehensions,” said John Fitzpatrick, patrol agent in charge for the Nogales Station. “They’ve basically come in and overnight shut down those areas where they’ve been deployed. We’re gaining ground that much faster now that we have the National Guard here.”
The Tucson Sector patrols more than 280 miles of border, 32 miles of it within the Nogales Station’s territory. The border terrain is as difficult here for the agents who police it as it is for the human smugglers and drug traffickers who try to negotiate it for profit.
Much of it is in remote, rural areas, but eight miles of it runs through urban landscape. The elevation varies from about 4,000 to 9,000 feet. The terrain varies from desert to mountainous, all of it sweltering hot in the summer and subject to violent storms with frequent lightning strikes.
“Our entire border area for the most part is mountains and canyons,” Fitzpatrick said. “Desert heat is a challenge as well.”
Human smuggling, drug trafficking and terrorists seeking entry to the United States are concerns for the Border Patrol here. “Anybody looking to do harm to this country, and the illegal aliens are part of the equation,” Fitzpatrick said. Agents say illegal immigration is accompanied by crimes such as vehicle thefts, robberies and assaults.
More than 500 Border Patrol agents are assigned to the Nogales Station. Nogales is directly across the border from the Mexican city of the same name. The agents use everything at their disposal. They ride horses, bicycles, motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles to patrol the border. They use cameras that can “see” by day and night, sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles.
“If we can put enough pressure on the border so that it’s not feasible and not economically viable for these smugglers to continue to smuggle people across, that allows us to then focus on everything else that’s going on,” Fitzpatrick said.
Nogales is one of the nation’s peak places for human crossings. Other numbers obtained from the Border Patrol illustrate the extremes of Nogales:
- About 800 pounds of marijuana are seized each day; 160,000 pounds since Oct. 1.
- More than 260 assaults of Border Patrol agents have occurred in the Tucson Sector since Oct. 1, most in Nogales.
- Some 450,000 people were apprehended in the sector last year, including 30,000 criminal aliens, some of them rapists and murderers.
Fitzpatrick credited the National Guard with boosting the Border Patrol’s already spectacular drug seizures in the Nogales area. He credited a Guard unit’s work with helping the patrol make a significant drug bust during the second week of July.
“We seized well over 600 pounds of marijuana as a result of their observation,” Fitzpatrick said. “Those are very immediate and direct impacts that they’ve had. The long-term impact is going to be huge.”
Fitzpatrick said the Guard is building a road in rugged country that will improve access to the border for agents. Guard members are erecting vehicle barriers along the border. “They’re putting up hundreds of feet a day and covering areas that we’ve never really been able to address with infrastructure,” he said. “And it’s happening at a rapid rate. So there’s significant and immediate impacts.”
Guard members also are relieving agents who could not perform their law enforcement duties because they had to carry out other tasks.
“We had agents in here that were answering phones,” said Jose Maheda, a field operations supervisor. “Working in dispatch. Working as administrators. Working as mechanics.”
The Guard took over some of those positions in June. By early July, the Guard established observation posts along the border.
People unfamiliar with the borderlands along the 1,300 miles between the U.S. and Mexico might be surprised by the nature of the border and the pace of activity in hotspots such as Nogales.
“I was amazed when I got here and I saw the border,” Staff Sgt. Justin Zulueta said. “You always hear it’s nothing. But when you actually see it, it’s just one strand of wire. It’s mind-boggling.”
While substantial fences run through the heart of urban areas such as Nogales, “You go a half mile either way and it’s just this,” Zulueta said, pointing to a broken down barbed wire fence on a ridge above Nogales.
Fitzpatrick said the Guard’s arrival is an important contribution to improving border security.
“It’s important because Nogales is an extremely busy and dynamic place with regard to immigration and border security,” he said. “The Tucson sector as a whole has been the busiest for several years. The busiest in the country. We need to hit it where it’s hitting us, and this is where it’s at.
“I’m not sure that people in the interior of the United States necessarily see and understand the magnitude of the problem that we have and the threat that we face along our border and the potential vulnerabilities that we may have.”
Alpha Company of Arizona’s 1st Battalion, 158th Infantry, 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team was in the final days of annual training on July 19 – taking its turn fulfilling the border mission. The 1st battalion was the first National Guard unit in Arizona to establish entry identification teams on the border.
The teams observe border activity and report it to the Border Patrol using a traditional infantry format.
“No longer will we have areas of the border that are wide open; that we have no vigilance on,” Maheda said. “We’ll be able to have people out there who will call out the stuff to us and say, ‘Hey, I see something,’ and we’ll be able to respond and make that arrest.”
Maheda said that’s important because Nogales is a strategically significant location. “Within an hour, you’re in Tucson,” he said. “In three hours, you’re in Phoenix. Theoretically, if you cross this morning and you get away, you can be in Chicago this evening. So we are the front line. If we don’t stop them here, then who knows where they can be.”
Troops who have worked 24-hour shifts with 24-hour breaks said challenges include the flies, the 115-degree heat and the lightning that accompanies the ferocious summer storms that surprise newcomers to the desert.
But squad leaders said the biggest challenge may have been how fluid the situation is on the border. “You have everything from Mexican families just trying to make a better life for themselves to drug runners,” said Zulueta.
Figuring out which is which led to “a lot of hard decisions at the lowest levels,” Zulueta said, meaning that enlisted leaders at individual observation posts needed to make quick judgments about the nature of threats and what to report to the Border Patrol.
Some observation posts, including Zulueta’s, experienced what squad leaders felt was testing or probing by people from the Mexican side. Those people apparently approached the Guard positions in a defiant manner to find out how the Soldiers would react and how quickly the Border Patrol would respond.
Guard members have upbeat attitudes about the mission.
“It was perfect,” said Staff Sgt. Desi Hermosillo. “It couldn’t have gone any better. It’s great that we’re supporting the Border Patrol, that we’re serving our country this way.”
“We feed off of each other,” said Fitzpatrick, the chief Border Patrol agent. “The enthusiasm is there. We know it’s important, and they know it’s important.”
Capt. Jeremy Cook also understands the importance of the Guard’s mission. When he’s not commanding Alpha Company, he’s a senior Border Patrol agent at the Nogales Station.
“It’s alleviated a lot of pressure on us,” said Cook. “It’s helpful, very helpful. The mission is going great. They’re doing a really good job. Morale is really good.”
Making Operation Jump Start the unit’s annual training mission gave squad leaders a chance to lead a real-world mission, Cook said. The unit was recently transformed from field artillery to infantry, and Jump Start was its first real-world mission since World War II.
Troops practiced listening and observation procedures, intelligence reporting, radio procedures and the use of range cards, among other infantry skills, Cook said.
“It’s good training,” said Sgt. Gabriel Foist. “We definitely got some good stuff out of it, plus even having a real threat. We had to make sure we pulled really good security. Something could go wrong.”