Bird's-eye border watch
Homeland Security's Air and Marine unit augments foot patrols
By Brady McCombs
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.15.2008
The radio call comes crackling into the headsets of four uniformed agents aboard a Black Hawk helicopter flying southwest of Tucson.
On a peak in the Patagonia Mountains near the Arizona-Mexico border southeast of Tucson, agents are calling for help to get confiscated bales of marijuana out of a remote area.
The helicopter crew has spent the past hour flying over rocky hills about 45 miles from Tucson, helping other Border Patrol agents search for bandits and marijuana.
Matt Bentson and Gavin Grisham, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine helicopter pilots, radio to agents on the ground near them to make sure they don't need any more help. With an "all clear" from them, the pilots turn the powerful Black Hawk helicopter to the east and head toward the Patagonia Mountains.
About 20 minutes later, the UH-60 Black Hawk has covered about 30 miles, and Grisham and Bentson are landing it on a slope on the 6,000-foot peak in the Soldier Basin area in the Patagonias. Abel Flores — an agent with the Border Patrol's Search, Trauma and Rescue team, known as Borstar — jumps out and helps three fellow agents haul six burlap bales of marijuana up the hill and onto the helicopter.
The assistance with the bales of marijuana on this hot June day proves a big help to the agents who found the drugs hidden in brush about an hour earlier. The trio of agents had been following footprints since the night before as they hiked up the rugged mountain about six miles north of the border.
Without the helicopter, it would have been a long and arduous four-mile trek down to the nearest road. The helicopter flies the bundles, weighing a total of nearly 300 pounds, and one of the agents to the Nogales International Airport, where they drop them off.
Along Arizona's stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border — the busiest for illegal immigration, drug smuggling and border deaths — a fleet of helicopters and small planes flown daily by Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine pilots plays an important role in security, law enforcement and rescues.
"It's just a huge part of securing the border," said Jose A. Gonzalez, Border Patrol Tucson Sector spokesman. "These guys are too often the overlooked part of securing the border."
The Air and Marine Tucson branch is the busiest in the nation, said Lavon Duncan, Air and Marine operations supervisor in Tucson.
Even though the 262 miles of international border the branch covers — from the New Mexico-Arizona line to Yuma County — is a fraction of the total miles the agency patrols along the southern, northern and coastal borders, nearly one-third of all flight-hours logged by Air and Marine pilots nationally occur here, Duncan said.
The Sikorsky Black Hawk and Eurocopter AS-350 A-Star helicopters are two of the most commonly flown aircraft by the Air and Marine unit. With the ability to cover long distances quickly, the crews track down smugglers, find illegal immigrants and look for illegal border crossers in distress, especially during the summer.
In addition to a pilot and co-pilot, one or two other agents usually are aboard the copter to observe and get out to help if needed. In the summer, Borstar agents often are aboard.
The Arizona fleet also includes a Hughes OH-6 helicopter, a Cessna C-550 Citation interceptor plane, a Cessna C-210 surveillance plane, a Piper PA-18 Super Cub observation plane and the MQ-9 Predator B unmanned aircraft system operated out of Sierra Vista.
Three-way assistance
The Air and Marine helicopters and planes help the border-security effort in three main ways, Border Patrol officials say:
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