Border Patrol agents use simple technique to track crossers

FABENS, Texas Some signs of the times go back centuries.

Agent Juan Galaviz recently started his morning patrol shift, then a Border Patrol dispatcher called.

A group of illegal immigrants had just tripped one of the thousands of underground motion sensors along the Texas-Mexico border.

Galaviz immediately drove toward a patchwork of fields, pecan orchards and irrigation canals in Fabens.

Other agents where already there, on foot, looking for "signs" left by the group.

Those markers _ footprints on otherwise untraveled dirt roads, water splashes along canal walls _ are the tools agents use for "sign cutting."

It's a centuries-old technique for tracking people.

Border Patrol officials say that in the El Paso Sector, which covers Texas and all of New Mexico, sign cutting has helped catch more than 220-thousand illegal crossers in the last two years.

Every Border Patrol agent is trained to track this way.

Rain and wind sometimes erase footprints, but other times they help agents determine the age of a footprint that's not completely obscured
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