http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/08/1 ... 634264.php

Outmanned and overwhelmed

By PEGGY LOWE
The Orange County Register

CALEXICO – The fresh footprints ran along the muddy riverbed, scampered across puddles of chocolate-brown water, took a turn into the next bend and finally fell out of sight.

U.S. Border Patrol senior agent Miguel A. Hernandez looked at the tracks as he stopped his unmarked white SUV on a bridge connecting a rocky road in the Yuha Desert about a mile north of this Imperial County border town. The police radio squawked, then Hernandez sped up, ending up on a dusty ridge above the New River.

There, two more agents appeared, climbing up the steep cliff from the polluted riverbed below, their green shirts and hats growing black from sweat in the midday 95-degree heat. They had already caught two "bodies," what agents call people suspected of crossing the U.S.-Mexican border illegally. A third was somewhere along this brown river that foams with contamination or was hiding in the dried riverbed covered in thick salt-cedar brush.

Agent Martin Aguilar, a fourth agent standing by with search dogs, could only shake his head, knowing the search for the missing man was futile.

"This is more like fishing for an eel in a haystack," he said.

Searches are more gumshoe than GPS for the border agents posted on this 76-mile stretch of international border here in the Imperial Valley – a situation a top Homeland Security official says makes California and Arizona vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.

The 725 agents who work out of the El Centro office defend one of the most rugged and diverse areas of the U.S. border with tactical wireless systems federal officials acknowledge are 15 to 20 years old. Agents' radios often can't reach the dispatch center, wireless phones go dead in remote canyons, and without radar, agents have no hope of finding that "body" hiding in the heavy brush of a riverbed.

Agents here and in the Yuma, Ariz., area wouldn't comment on a report by the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., on a whistle-blower's claim that $60 million set aside by Congress for better technologies to secure the southwestern U.S. border was misspent.

Charles Cape, a Homeland Security manager in this region, told the Tribune, a sister paper of The Orange County Register, that money was supposed to be used for weather balloons to carry radio repeaters for reliable radio service, wireless computers for agents' vehicles and wide-area radar.

The agents' task is huge by geographical standards alone. The El Centro sector defends 23,400 square miles of land in four counties, reaching from Calexico's port of entry in the south to the Jacumba Mountain Range in the west to the Valley Sand Dunes in the east and north to the urban landscape of Riverside and Los Angeles counties.

They ride trucks, Hummers, horses and bikes along the dangerous, fast-flowing irrigation canals and into the tough barrios of Calexico, where smugglers often battle agents who try to stop people from jumping the 16-foot-high steel fences along the border.

And agents say they are happy to have the binoculars, cell phones, sensors, GPS and digital police radios to help keep straight what they call the "thin green line" of protection. They point to the cameras posted on a couple of dozen 50-foot poles in Calexico and the nearby desert, noting the night-vision capabilities they say are immensely helpful in tracking would-be terrorists. Those tools only do so much. Agents here and in the border-patrol sector around Yuma, which runs to the west through the rocky hills of Andrade on the California side, lack some of the basic capabilities on which city police departments rely.

Dead spots in communication are a safety problem, allowing for the possibility of a lone agent coming face to face with a large group of immigrants, armed drug smugglers or terrorists, Michael Gramley, a supervisor in the Yuma office, said.

"You've still got a job to do. Clearly, calling for backup is not an option," he said. "You go after them. There will be runners, and you take the ones that you can into custody. Most are good people. They're not here to kill people or sell drugs, but you never know who it's going to be."

Agents lack computers in their vehicles and instead must do all license-plate, immigration and criminal-history checks by radioing dispatchers, Gramley said.

Another technology, wide area radar, could be invaluable in tracking suspects in the meandering arroyos, sighting a body in the tall green squares of sugar-cane fields or picking up someone hiding in the many junkyards and car lots in the barrios.

"See all those ridges," Hernandez said as he looked out over the washed-out roads, rocky cliffs and sandy, snaking canyons in the area leading up to Mount Signal, which sits on the U.S-Mexican border west of Calexico. "Perfect concealment for them."

Even if the agents don't want to get involved in the politics of arming the border, they know the more technology they have, the more effective they will be. Since the cameras were put up and more agents went on duty, this sector of the border patrol became 40 percent more effective in the past four years, with a decrease in attempts to cross the border and deaths of those trying, Hernandez said.

U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Santa Ana, who sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security, would agree.

The committee is investigating the accusations uncovered by the Tribune, and Sanchez said Democratic staffers have already begun making inquiries into Cape's allegation that money that should have gone for reliable radios and radar was spent elsewhere.

Sanchez said she is concerned about the miles of unprotected border.

"Because of the long borders we have, we can't physically check them all the time," she said. "We need to rely on the new technology we have to help us."

Cape, who was put in charge of wireless communication in the Southwest region in 2004, says he grew frustrated when he learned he couldn't fund basic systems to enhance border security. He ultimately learned that the $60 million had been spent on other projects in violation of congressional directives.

If the House Committee on Homeland Security finds validation of Cape's claims, there will likely be a congressional hearing, Sanchez said.

Back at the ridge above the New River, agents are talking about apprehending the two suspects. Although they found clothes and belongings, they never found the third person.

That single person who slips through the cracks in the border is always the toughest to find, the agents say. They prefer larger groups, which move more slowly and are not as hard to track.

"As funny as it sounds," Hernandez said, "it's easier to catch 20 than one."
East Valley Tribune staff

CONTACT US: 714-796-2221 or plowe@ocregister.com

Pictures:

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-7498.html