Dale Brown: Edge of Battle

…With drug wars raging on both sides of the border—and law and order broken down in Nuevo Laredo to the point in which the army has been sent in—the U.S.-Mexican border has become a dangerous place.

CATCH AND RELEASE POLICY FREES ILLEGAL ALIENS TO MOVE FREELY ABOUT THE COUNTRY, © 2005, The Associated Press, July 4, 2005—…Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, more than 118,000 foreign nationals who were caught after sneaking over the nation’s borders have walked right out of custody with a permiso in hand.

They were from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil. But also Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Yemen, among 35 countries of “special interest” because of alleged sponsorship or support of terrorism.

These are the so-called OTM, or “Other Than Mexican,” migrants too far from their homelands to be shipped right back. More than 70,000 have hit U.S. streets just since this past October.

…The government has no place to put all the “OTMs” while they await deportation hearings, so they are released with a permiso, or notice to appear in immigration court. Over the years, thousands have failed to show up, disappearing, instead, among the estimated 10 million undocumented migrants now living in America.

…Front-line officers voice concern that so many who break the law to enter the country are systematically set free. “I absolutely believe that the next attack we have will come from somebody who has come across the border illegally,” says Eugene Davis, retired deputy chief of the Border Patrol sector in Blaine, Washington. “To me, we have no more border security now than we had prior to September 11. Anybody who believes we’re safer, they’re living in Neverland.”

STRATFOR: DAILY TERRORISM BRIEF—August 2, 2005, © 2005, Strategic Forecasting Inc.—CHAOS ON THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER: OP-PORTUNITY FOR AL QAEDA?—U.S. authorities closed the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, on August 1—four days after intense firefights rocked the town of more than half a million people across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas…

…The chaos on the border is increasing concerns within the U.S. intelligence community that al Qaeda–linked groups or other terrorists could exploit the situation and cross operatives into the United States. Al Qaeda, investigators fear, could use well-established smuggling routes to bypass the enhanced scrutiny of passengers on air traffic “no-fly” lists. From an operational security perspective, terrorists could be wondering why they should run the risk of having their documents scrutinized by outbound immigration and inbound inspectors when they can bypass all of that at the U.S.-Mexican border…

SUV CARRYING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, DRUGS CRASHES—San Diego, California, © 2005, The Associated Press, August 18, 2005—The driver of an SUV packed with suspected illegal immigrants and nearly 700 pounds of marijuana sped from police the wrong way on Interstate 8 before crashing head-on into a California Highway Patrol car, officials said. Authorities say the incident late Wednesday was part of a pattern by smugglers who try to evade border checkpoints by veering into oncoming traffic, often at night, sometimes with their headlights off. The SUV involved had been modified [with nondeflatable silicone-filled tires] to enable it to flee more easily…

ICE NABS THREE AT NUKE PLANT—INSIDE ICE: Volume 2, Issue 19—Blair, Nebraska—In the latest in a series of arrests involving illegal aliens at nuclear facilities, ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] special agents arrested three illegal aliens in Blair September 15 when they attempted to enter the outer secure area of the Omaha Public Power District’s Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station to perform contract work at the plant for the first time.

The three men, all citizens of Mexico, had been hired by an independent contractor to perform maintenance work at the nuclear facility. As they attempted to enter a secure area of the plant, the men presented identification documents that raised the suspicions of Omaha Public Power District employees. They contacted ICE special agents for assistance, who responded and arrested the men after determining that they were illegally present in the United States…

BORDER CROSSING DEATHS SET A 12-MONTH RECORD—By Richard Marosi, L.A. Times Staff Writer—October 1, 2005—A record 460 migrants died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the last year, a toll pushed higher by unusually hot temperatures and a shift of illegal migration routes through remote deserts.

The death total from October 1, 2004, through September 29, [2005,] surpassed the previous record of 383 deaths set in 2000, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Border Patrol.

The dead were mostly Mexicans, many from the states of Mexico, Guanajuato and Veracruz, but also from the impoverished southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. Migrants continue to die in automobile accidents and from drownings while crossing waterways into California and Texas, but 261, or more than half the total, perished while crossing the Arizona deserts, the busiest illegal immigrant corridor along the nation’s two-thousand-mile border with Mexico.

The migrants, herded across the border by smugglers, have been traversing increasingly desolate stretches of desert as the Border Patrol cuts off more accessible routes…

PROLOGUE

SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF GLAMIS, CALIFORNIA

MAY 2007

The youngest child in the group, an eleven-month-old girl, died sometime before midnight, a victim of a rattlesnake bite the day before, suffered when her mother set the baby down in the darkness near an unseen nest. The infant was buried in the desert of southern California, just a few miles north of the border that they had worked so hard to cross. Two other children, one a four-year-old girl, the other an eleven-year-old boy, wept for their infant sibling, but their bodies were too dehydrated from spending almost two days in the desert to shed any tears.

It was all the same to Victor Flores, the seventeen-year-old coyote, or human smuggler, escorting the group of twelve migrants across the southern California border. It was sad, of course, the baby dying—he prayed with the others for the baby’s safe deliverance into heaven, hugged the mother, and wept with her. But one less child meant one less cry in the night to alert the Border Patrol, one less reason to slow down on their long trek across the desert—and, of course, there were no refunds. It was five hundred dollars a head, Federal Highway 2 in Mexico to Interstate 10 in the United States of America—no refunds, cash on the table.

Besides, he thought ruefully, children had no business out here. He was seeing lots more mothers and their children these days on these trips across the border, not just the men. That was a frightening trend. Things were bad in Mexico, and probably had been forever, but typically the family stayed in Mexico, the father went to search for work, and he returned months later with cash; he stayed long enough to crank out another child or two, then departed again. The exodus of women and children from Mexico meant that things were only getting worse there.

Not that the economic, sociological, or political situation was looking any better in the United States these days, but it was a heck of a lot better than in Mexico.

The calendar said it was spring, but daytime temperatures had soared above ninety degrees Fahrenheit every day since the group was dropped off beside Federal Highway 2 about ten miles south of the border. They camped when Victor told them they needed to stop, crossed Interstate 8 on foot at night when Victor told them to—it was much easier to see oncoming cars at night than in the daytime, where heat shimmering off the pavement made even huge big rigs invisible until just a few hundred feet away—and stopped and made shelters with their spare clothing in dusty gullies and washes when Victor said it was time to hide. Flores had a sixth sense about danger and almost always managed to get his pollos (or “chickens,” what the coyotes called their clientele) into hiding before the Border Patrol appeared—he even somehow managed to evade helicopters and underground sensors.