Published: 04.24.2008
Pima County works to catch smugglers en route to Mexico
Sean Holstege
The Arizona Republic
Green Valley - Thousands of border agents, dozens of checkpoints and hundreds of miles of barriers are set up to stop contraband and illegal immigrants getting into the United States.
But little more than a chance roadside inspection stops smugglers going the other way.
That imbalance shows no sign of changing soon, but it has given rise to a novel experiment under way in Pima County. There, the Sheriff's Department has set up an 11-member unit to disrupt southbound smugglers and bandits who steal drugs and hijack people coming north. The sheriff's Border Crimes Unit, established a year ago, added a second full-time squad in December.
"For every load that comes north, something goes south to fund that activity," said Lt. Jeff Palmer, who is in charge of the team. "For as much as we are catching, there is tenfold getting through. It's a war zone."
There is a growing recognition among Arizona criminal investigators that choking off southbound guns and cash can effectively disrupt Mexican drug- and human-smuggling cartels.
The logic goes like this: Seize a ton of marijuana, and cartels grow another crop. Arrest an illegal immigrant, and he'll try again. But if investigators stop the southbound smugglers, they can seize the profits that make smuggling worthwhile and the guns used to protect the profits.Investigators estimate that thousands of firearms and hundreds of millions of dollars are smuggled from Arizona to Mexican cartels every year.
To put a tiny dent in that, Palmer's group cruises the highways by day to pull over suspicious southbound vehicles, looking for gunrunners and cash couriers. At night, the officers camp out in the deserts south of Tucson scouring the brush with night-vision equipment looking for bandits, who rob immigrants and smugglers.
When deputies arrest and interrogate bandits or gunrunners, they pass along any intelligence about northbound smuggling operations to federal investigators.
Ambushing ambushers
On a recent night, under a waxing moon and stiff breeze, Jeremy Butcher dons his deputy's jacket and peers through a thermal scope on a tripod. The unit's Bravo Squad is perched on low bluff overlooking the desert near Green Valley.
In grainy hues of gray, the scope picks up the bright outlines of the still-warm saguaro cactuses. Blurry images of rabbits and deer come into view. Watching animals helps find humans because they get spooked when people approach.
Suddenly, after two hours of feet-shuffling boredom, Butcher sees a line of people picking its way down a footpath. A check through the night-vision scope confirms that 10 people, less than 100 yards away, are headed straight for Bravo Squad.
"You never know who you are dealing with. They blend in. They're chameleons, and that makes it dangerous," said Sgt. David Rodriguez, Bravo's commander.
This group looks like illegal immigrants. No sign of weapons or heavy backpacks often worn by pot-smuggling mules.
The group disappears in an overgrown wash. About an hour later, Butcher glimpses someone's head peering over the rocks about 50 feet away.
It's the last contact of a slow night, but Rodriguez doesn't report the activity until the shift is over two hours later.
"It's a tradeoff. They are here illegally and broke U.S. law. But we don't want to give away our position, and we have a mission to fulfill," Rodriguez said.
He had to negotiate access to the private property, which hadn't been patrolled in months, and doesn't want to lose the vantage point. The night before, his team saw blacked-out trucks driving through the brush there. The vehicles were stopped and yielded weapons, camouflage and five suspects.
Deputy Sharlene Tzystuck was the first to catch a bandit. She was parked last month in a marked patrol car near Arivaca when she spotted a truck with a cracked windshield and a nervous-acting driver.
"I got behind them and lit them up, and they didn't stop. Their hands were going and they were talking, and I could just tell they didn't know what to do," Tzystuck recalled with a wide grin.
After driving through somebody's yard, the occupants bailed out and ran through the desert. They left behind a van with blankets, ski masks, backpacks, food and AK-47s. The truck belonged to a Mesa woman who told Tzystuck that her son "takes off every month for a few days" but that she never asked questions. The arrest has led to a federal investigation of a suspected bandit ring.
In another bandit case, deputies found plastic water bottles filled with rocks and suspended from fishing line across a busy smuggling trail. When illegal immigrants or mules trip the wire, the rattling alerts the bandits, who ambush them.
It was a string of violent ambushes near Tucson in 2006 that led to the creation of the Border Crimes Unit. Palmer reports the unit has made about 60 arrests since December, resulting in 40 referrals for prosecution and about 80 opened investigations.
The numbers aren't large, but deputies on the new unit say that they are still perfecting their tactics and that their work has opened important investigations.
Stopping guns, money
Gun and cash seizures also have been small, Palmer said.
"We are still looking for that big haul. We know they are out there," he said, reporting about $5,000 in cash and a couple of dozen weapons seized since December.
That load included a .50-caliber rifle, which is designed to pierce tank armor. Mexican cartels have been buying them in Arizona to attack the army and to assassinate high-ranking officials who travel in armored convoys.
Rodriguez's team found little on its recent patrol of Interstate 19 in the Green Valley area.
Deputies pulled over a Chevrolet SUV after they saw it tailgating a commercial truck. Sgt. Greg Bargar led his drug-sniffing dog, Rudy, over to the truck and the dog began pawing at the windows and wagging his tail. Ultimately, he found a concealed auto-parts box containing a plastic bag of marijuana. The driver was cited and released.
Rudy is not there to find somebody's personal stash but to establish a legal cause to search vehicles. Drug money is often steeped in drug residue, and Rudy can find it. In some cases, better-equipped U.S. customs agents are brought in with density meters to find hidden compartments where drug money is hidden.
It's all part of the learning curve of the new experimental team, funded by the county budget and federal Homeland Security grants.
Putting it all together
Don't expect to see a flurry of southbound checkpoints on Arizona highways anytime soon.
Simple checkpoints cost about $15 million, and the Fourth Amendment protects citizens against unlawful searches and seizures.
Some state and federal agencies conduct random traffic stops and targeted inspections on southbound smugglers, based on investigative leads. But those agencies have broader missions mandated and limited by law.
Customs agents have the authority to stop southbound traffic, but only at ports of entry and only if they suspect that export laws are being violated. To screen all Mexico-bound traffic, Customs and Border Protection would have to build facilities at each port of entry, and each facility would cost tens of millions of dollars. It also could disrupt the flow of commerce and tourism.
"Our main focus is to stop threats entering the country," said Brian Levin, a Customs and Border Protection agent.
For now, Pima County's Border Crimes Unit remains a thin line of defense against southbound smugglers and the violence they perpetuate.
Key to that defense is the partnerships the unit has forged with other agencies and the information they share. It leads to more precise patrols and stakeouts, which generate more leads to break apart smuggling rings.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department is one of a dozen agencies that belong to a regional border-crime task force of investigators.
"This has got to be a regional approach," Palmer said. "It's bigger than any agency. . . . It's a huge, huge problem."
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/brea ... /83347.php