Ranger staff grows in response to drugs, immigration problems at Padre Island National Seashore

Park rangersrugs, people coming ashore

By Sara Foley
Corpus Christi Caller Times
Posted April 2, 2011 at 11:13 p.m.

CORPUS CHRISTI — The miles of sand dunes and undeveloped beach at Padre Island National Seashore attract more than 600,000 sportsmen, tourists and campers each year.

But some visitors don't come to enjoy the natural resources.

The park, as the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world, gives seclusion for those trying to smuggle people and drugs into Texas.

"As land borders get stricter, some will try to sneak around," said park spokesman William "Buzz" Botts. "It takes a group effort to police that."

The park's 65.1 miles of beach run along a mainland with two border checkpoints in Falfurrias and Sarita. The soft beach gives most visitors little incentive to drive too far south, so the park is one way to sneak drugs and immigrants past the checkpoints.

The problems are part of what prompted the National Park Service to add park rangers to the staff and park superintendent Joe Escoto to ask for funding to build a new office for park rangers.

In a letter sent to government agencies and members of the public in December as part of an environmental impact study for the new building, Escoto said smuggling spiked in the past few years, posing an increasing threat to visitor and staff safety.

Whether smuggling has increased is difficult to measure. The park's outdated computer system doesn't give rangers an easy way to track trends, and no one has kept independent data on problems since 2007. Older data indicate the problems were significant and drug traffic was becoming worse.

The rangers noticed the drug problems in the early 1990s when one employee started tracking the bundles of marijuana washing up and later tracked the numbers of immigrants found entering the country through the seashore on rafts and boats.

Those numbers spiked in 2003. By then, drugs that most often had washed up in 3- and 5-pound bundles became massive hauls of marijuana weighing as much as 1,800 pounds. The National Drug Intelligence Center detailed the problems in a 2008 report about drug trafficking in the region.

According to the report, drug traffickers load small boats with cocaine, marijuana and immigrants, often leaving from Playa Bagdad on Mexico's east coast. They approach the seashore and toss drug shipments toward the shore or let immigrants swim or float on rafts. Someone usually is waiting to pick up the drugs or people on the beach.

The problems don't pose a serious threat to visitors, Park Ranger Supervisor Tim Thompson said. But visitors can help notice suspicious activity, he said.

"Drug smugglers' and illegal immigrants' main concern is keeping a low profile," Botts said. "Because of that, the park has historically had very little violent crime. The main thing we need to get across is to use common sense. Report something if it looks like it doesn't belong."

Immigration Gateway

People trying to enter the United States illegally through the seashore typically swim across the Mansfield Channel, sometimes arriving to the seashore by raft or boat, Thompson said. There often are people waiting for them at a particular spot on the beach with dry clothes and food.

Sometimes, discarded wet clothes are the only clue rangers find that someone may have come ashore recently.

Rangers referred 1,223 people to immigration officials between 1998 and 2007, according to records park rangers collected.

If park rangers spot suspected immigrants, they may stop and question them. Sometimes, fishermen or beach visitors report them as suspicious.

"They just don't fit in at the beach, and it's obvious," Thompson said. "They're walking down the beach with no car that got them there."

Immigration traffic peaked in 1999 when rangers filed 42 immigration cases and found 240 people they thought entered the park illegally, according to park data. The most recent year in which the case volume approached those numbers was in 2003, when rangers filed 23 cases on 141 people.

More recent information is difficult to track. In the rangers' computer system, Thompson could find six immigration cases filed in 2008, one in 2009 and none in 2010, the years that weren't covered in the database kept by the former park employee.

The lack of cases doesn't mean the immigration has stopped, Thompson said.

Rangers have seen footprints in the sand that indicate a large group of people walked up the dunes and into the vast sand hills. It could be a group of people who went for a walk, but rangers don't think that's likely.

Drug trafficking

Years ago, rangers saw more problems with immigration than drugs. That trend started to reverse in 2005, when immigration cases slowed down and drugs started washing ashore in larger quantities.

Sometimes, it's just a few pounds of drugs wrapped in plastic that rangers guess might have fallen off a boat or been tossed overboard when a Coast Guard ship got too close.

Between 1991 and 2007, park rangers found and seized nearly 15 tons of marijuana and cocaine — enough to fill a dump truck. The majority of the drugs, 12 of the 15 tons, were found between 2003 and 2007, the last five years for which data was collected.

Some packages wash ashore, and others are planted in the expansive miles of sand dunes, left for someone else to pick up.

Last year park rangers caught a group of men who were monitoring a 50-pound stash of marijuana near Mile Marker 25, a remote area of the beach that takes park rangers more than an hour to reach on a day driving conditions are good.

Arrests are rare. Between 1997 and 2001, 1,137 pounds of drugs washed ashore, and no arrests were made. In the entire 15 years records were kept, about 31 percent of the drug cases resulted in arrests.

What Thompson could see in the computer system suggested there haven't been as many drug cases since 2007, when the detailed tracking stopped.

Addressing problems

The drugs and immigration problems, along with post-Sept. 11 emphasis on national security, prompted park staff to double the number of rangers patrolling the beach. In 2009 the National Park Service increased the park's law enforcement budget by $500,000 and added five staff members to help combat immigration and drug problems.

But even if the park had dozens of rangers patrolling at one time, it could take a day to make one trip down the long stretch of soft sand.

Data collected by the rangers indicate drugs washed up on shore most often at Mile Marker 60 — a three-hour drive from the ranger station in the winter when speed limits are higher or four hours in the busy summer season.

"That's one reason we beefed up the staff," Botts said. "We need more patrols in remote areas. If you're going to be out there patrolling in a remote area, you need another ranger not too far behind for backup."

The growing ranger staff also prompted park officials to seek federal money for a new building. The staff works out of a trailer in the parking lot it shares with the visitors' center. The room intended for six people serves as an office for 12. The rangers' evidence room, interview room and holding areas are miles away.

The new building would be built in the spot the trailer sits.

Chief Ranger Travis Poulson, who came to the seashore in March after working as a ranger at a national park on Arizona's border, said he's evaluating what the seashore needs to become safer.

"We want visitors to know there is a potential threat there," Botts said. "By and large, we've been pretty fortunate and have been safe. We hope to keep it that way."

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