http://www.newsok.com/article/295253...late=news/main

By Judy Gibbs Robinson
The Oklahoman

DEMING, N.M. - For days, Staff Sgt. Lisa Marks peered through binoculars at an unchanging landscape of mesquite, sagebrush and creosote bush just north of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Occasionally, a rabbit kicked up a plume of dust or a truck bounced down the dirt road parallel to the border on the Mexican side. Marks watched closely, but none ever veered suddenly northward.

Operation Jump Start, the Bush administration's latest border-security initiative, was shaping up to be a ho-hum mission for the Oklahoma National Guard soldier from Lawton -- until one night when she spotted "specks" on the landscape.

"Sure enough, they popped up," she said later. Now she could see one of the "specks" was wearing a striped shirt and carrying a backpack. She and her partner called in U.S. Border Patrol agents.

"We guided them in, and they caught them in a bush right there," Marks said. "That was a rush, let me tell you. That was a high."

It also was a textbook demonstration of Operation Jump Start, which uses up to 6,000 guardsmen to act as eyes and ears for the understaffed Border Patrol for two years while the agency hires and trains that many new agents. With guardsmen manning the binoculars, cameras and sensors, Border Patrol agents are free to track and capture those who enter the country illegally -- like the trio Marks spotted last month.

So far, more than 300 Oklahoma National Guard troops have participated. The last group flew to New Mexico on Sept. 24 and will return Oct. 13. No further missions are planned, but that could change, said Lt. Col. John Altebaumer, a guard spokesman.

"It's not over by any means. Over the next year and a half, we'll do our best to answer the call on whatever they need," Altebaumer said.

Some of the Oklahoma guardsmen watched the border from Blackhawk helicopters. Others sweated under the desert sun building a concrete and steel vehicle barrier. But most served in two-member "Entry Identification Teams" in rugged outposts, south of Deming.

There, they scanned the landscape with binoculars and monitored cameras that cover areas outside the binoculars' reach.

"It's not super-exciting work, but if you keep on your toes, the time goes by and before too long, it's time to go home," Spc. John Kelly of Watonga said during a day shift at Radar Central. The outpost, an hour-long drive southwest of Deming, consisted of a Humvee swathed in camouflage netting for shade and a "skybox" -- a 25-square-foot room topped with a camera that raises a guardsman 30 feet above the ground for a better view.

Effectiveness
With just one shift left before returning home to his wife and baby, Kelly had yet to spot anyone crossing the border or walking through the desert. The same was true on Radar West a few hills over.

"There really hasn't been a lot of action in the day," said Staff Sgt. Trevor Deweese of Altus. "It's just long days sitting watching the grass grow."

The daytime boredom is due, in part, to the soldiers' presence, officials said.

All day, busloads of migrants head west on the dirt road on the Mexican side looking for a safe place to cross, Border Patrol Senior Agent Armando Martinez said.

"Hardly anybody stops here, and when they do, they can see the sites, and they won't even try" to cross. "It deters them a lot," Martinez said.

Along the southern border, apprehensions are down 8 percent in federal fiscal year 2006, the Border Patrol reports. Richard Moody, agent in charge of the Deming office, said National Guard support is one reason for the decline.

"A year ago, this station had 100 agents on the ground. Now we're up to 250. We've added agents. We've added technology," Moody said. "We do give credit to the National Guard, but they're not the magic pill."

Cat and mouse
Lacking manpower, the Border Patrol developed a sophisticated electronic net of cameras and sensors to help keep watch over the 1,254-mile border.

Some of the technology is fixed, but other components can be moved to keep smugglers guessing. Sometimes cameras are pointed at the border but unmanned.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game, and sometimes the cat puffs itself up to look bigger than it is," Border Patrol Senior Agent Cal Cook said.

Now guardsmen rather than agents monitor that equipment.

At the Deming office, two New Mexico guardsmen used joysticks to control 14 remote cameras that keep an eye on 28 square miles of border. Smugglers watch the cameras on their tall poles and make a run for it when the electronic eye turns away, Staff Sgt. Jorge Rubio said.

One camera sweeps New Mexico Highway 11, the north-south road between Deming and the border. On one side is Columbus, N.M., a farming community made famous when Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa raided it in 1916. On the other is Palomas, Chihuahua, Mexico -- a popular staging area for illegal border crossings, officials said.

"There's transient traffic that comes in there every day. Those are aliens coming up from the interior of Mexico," Moody said. "From Palomas, they'll meet up with smugglers ... and they spread out all along this line east and west to be smuggled into the United States," he said, demonstrating with a laser pointer on a wall map.

Palomas
Highway 11 ends in a massive port of entry, manned 24 hours a day by the Deming office of the Border Patrol.

In front of a concrete and stone compound on the U.S. side, a half-dozen Border Patrol agents direct northbound vehicles into different lanes, where a drug-sniffing German shepherd trots around them at the end of a leash. Agents peer through the windows: "State your nationality," they demand before examining driver's licenses.

Yards away, a pair of Mexican border officials sit on stools outside a small adobe building, waving southbound cars through, no questions asked.

Beyond them, the highway becomes the business-lined main street through Palomas, a town of about 10,000.

Increased border security on the U.S. side has hurt business, said Luis Angel Garcia Lopez, who has lived in Palomas all his 19 years.

These days, there are not many "turistas" in town, he said, referring to people from central Mexico who sometimes spend days in Palomas preparing to cross the U.S. border.

Still, life is better here than in Chihuahua city, where there are no jobs, said Guadalupe Valdez, working at an open-air delicatessen. Valdez said she moved to Palomas a few days earlier to take the job.

'It does tug at the heartstrings'
Border Patrol officials say about 95 percent of those crossing the border illegally are economic immigrants seeking work and a better life for their families.

Guardsmen got that message during five days of training at the New Mexico National Guard headquarters in Santa Fe, where they learned a few words of Spanish and a little about Mexican history and culture.

"The point of that training is to let everybody know these guys are desperate, and they're trying to cross the border to make a living, that's all," said Sgt. Ever Ochoa, a trainer with the New Mexico National Guard.

Sgt. James Rose of Lawton knew that before he volunteered for the mission.

"Even in Oklahoma, we have these people just trying to make a better living. It does tug at the heartstrings. But I have a job to do," Rose said.

Sgt. 1st Class Jeff Hansen of Altus said he felt no compassion for illegal border-crossers: "There are right ways and wrong ways of coming into this country," he said.

Cover of darkness
Some immigrants attempt the crossing despite the National Guard presence.

"They generally try to exploit the night -- use the cover of darkness to conceal their movements," Moody said.

That makes the night shift busier than the day shift at the seven guard-manned outposts south of Deming.

Spc. Roger Kime of Altus spent more than two hours visually tracking one group of 12 to 15 people one night in the Johnson Mountains.

The pursuit was still under way when his shift ended about 11 p.m., he said. Pfc. Ben Switzer of Olustee watched a group of 10 to 12 people cross sometime before midnight one night.

The guardsmen said the hardest part of their job was guiding Border Patrol officers to the immigrants using two-way radios.

The night-vision binoculars and cameras reduce depth of field, making it hard to judge distance.

“For me, that was the biggest challenge,” Marks said. “It’s pitch black and you’ve got to guide a Border Patrol agent in to find an alien. You’ve got to say, ‘Go to the left. Go to the right. No, go back 10 feet.’ ”

Pvt. Joshua Brittenham of Tulsa misjudged the distance one night as he watched people get off a bus and cross what looked to him like the border. When a Border Patrol agent responded, he found the bus and its passengers were still a mile in on the Mexican side.

Mistakes like that are common for guardsmen new to Operation Jump Start and easily forgiven, officials said.

“They’re down here working shoulder-to-shoulder with the Border Patrol, and we appreciate that,” Moody said.

In the never-ending battle to secure the border, “I’ll take anything — whether it’s equipment, more National Guard, more agents, more technology, more infrastructure.

“I’ll take anything,” Moody said