The Border Fence, Brownsville 
The Battle for the Border
Illegal immigration is exploding in Maverick County, which will soon become the busiest crossing point from Mexico into the U.S. Ranches are being overrun by drug smugglers, houses robbed, cattle stolen. Men have been shot and killed.
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Dob plans to stay, though he no longer relies on the government to protect his land. Each morning he checks the perimeter of his ranch. When traffic is heavy, he hides in the brush with his shotgun and his binoculars, scanning the Rio Grande. From his perch, he warns crossers to turn back. If they have already reached the riverbank, he rounds them up and calls the Border Patrol. He keeps a vigilant watch, taking heed of what has befallen neighbors like Betty Shofner. The 71-year-old widow, who lives three miles downriver, estimates that several thousand illegal immigrants crossed her isolated property just last year. "Coyotes," as the people who smuggle illegal immigrants across the border are called, use her land freely, and she can often see their cars idling on the edge of her spinach fields. Ever since her late husband, Earl, a cotton farmer, was robbed—two Mexicans gagged him, bound his hands and feet with an extension cord, and locked him in the pump house—she has kept her curtains drawn and forbidden her great-grandchildren to wander far from the house. When she gardened, she took her gun. Her son Steven now carries a pistol with him, even to mow the lawn.
"The government has left this up to people living on the border," said Dob, rising from the kitchen table to make his morning rounds. "Out here, we're on our own." A storm had just rumbled off to the west, and the air was cool and damp, smelling of wet earth and sagebrush. He warmed up his old mud-spattered military Jeep, which held wire fencing, tools, and a sack of feed, and ascended the first of many rocky hills, with Runt in tow. As he drove along his fence line, he scoured the earth for fresh tracks. A footprint was, to his eye, as richly textured as a petroglyph. He could tell how old it was by knowing when the dew fell or if the dust inside it had been bleached by the morning sun. If the tracks were new, he pursued them through the brush by following telltale signs of passage: flattened blades of grass, broken twigs, stones that were darker on one side because they had just been overturned. Dob had come across an odd and sometimes tragic assortment of people this way: poachers, drug-smuggling backpackers, lost immigrants, a Mexican man who had been stripped and badly beaten by a coyote, a drowning victim whose body had glided down the river. He has even found discarded baby bottles and toddlers' footprints in the mud.
The Jeep lurched back up another rocky incline, winding along a rough road lined with prickly pear and yucca, before rounding a curve and finally descending into a small hollow. Here, a murky green canal wound past banks thick with carrizo cane. "This is where the shooting happened," Dob said, abruptly braking the Jeep and pointing toward the opposite side of the canal. "This is where Honeycutt shot that boy."
Looking down from a U.S. Border Patrol A-STAR helicopter on Maverick County, one can see its flat, bare expanses crisscrossed with foot trails and the remnants of countless journeys north. This is the land that Will Honeycutt once patrolled for the DEA, and the land that his victim, Abecnego Monje Ortiz, once hoped to cross with only a jug of water. From the air, it appears deserted, but the emptiness is illusory: At any time of day or night, illegal immigrants are furtively walking northward. Thin plastic bags that once held their possessions skip idly across the desert floor. Discarded T-shirts and underwear, some still soaked with river water, bake in the sun. Bailout cars, which illegals bolted from to elude pursuing Border Patrol agents, stand abandoned amid the mesquite, their dusty doors still ajar. Infrared surveillance cameras loom eighty feet above the ground, and hundreds of Border Patrol motion sensors lie buried below. The effect is eerie, as though one has stumbled across a forgotten battlefield. LocalsThe Borderhave even taken to calling this part of South Texas—made up of Dimmit, Maverick, and Zavala counties—the DMZ, or the demilitarized zone.The Border Patrol station in Eagle Pass, the Maverick County seat, consists of two small white buildings that stand unobtrusively on the outskirts of town along U.S. 277. Once a sleepy command post, the station is now a frenetic place, crowded with recent graduates from the Border Patrol Academy and veteran agents from places such as El Paso and San Diego, California, who have been sent in as reinforcements. Long hours together have forged an intense camaraderie among these agents, many of whom are Mexican American, and humor serves as the only relief from the pressures of a job that has become increasingly perilous. Reminders of the dangers they face are everywhere: A small stone plaque dedicated to Jefferson Barr, an agent gunned down along the river in 1996 by drug traffickers, stands outside the station house. Inside, posters urging agents to use bulletproof vests warn "You Are a Target." But agents have scant opportunity here to entertain doubts. At all hours of the night, their radios crackle with news of Border Patrol sensors along the river being tripped: "eleven hits . . . two hits . . . fourteen hits . . . nine hits . . . thirty hits . . ."
At the heart of the station house is the control room, which affords a sweeping view of Maverick County, displaying grainy images from surveillance cameras across a bank of television screens. At night the infrared images appear in negative: A man's white silhouette tentatively dips a toe into the river; a ghostly group of twenty slinks across the scrubland. Mexicans across the river in Piedras Negras sometimes wave at the cameras or hold their middle fingers up to them or take aim at them with slingshots. Once, a couple pretended to have sex on the opposite bank to distract the camera operators from seeing a group crossing the river. All day long the cameras relay the jarring images of poor Mexicans dashing across the lush, manicured greens of the Eagle Pass Municipal Golf Course, which runs along the Rio Grande. Some try to fade into the background, standing with studied casualness on the fairways, swinging stalks of river reeds as if they were golf clubs.
Eagle Pass Border Patrol agents, no matter how vigilant, cannot deter those driven to desperation by drought and the vagaries of the Mexican economy. Many Mexican farmers and laborers are faced with a terrible choice: cross the river or let their families go hungry. As the Border Patrol has clamped down on El Paso and Brownsville, people seeking to cross the border have flocked to Maverick County, which is sparsely settled, difficult to patrol, and easily accessible by an improved highway running from Mexico City to Piedras Negras. During the Border Patrol's past fiscal year, agents in the Del Rio sector—which ranges from the Pecos River to just north of Laredo—made 157,000 apprehensions, most of them in Maverick County. (In 1994 there were 50,000.) According to sector chief Paul Berg, who estimates that his agents catch 60 percent of the border crossers, apprehensions are soon expected to rise from 350,000 to 450,000 per year. "The border is like a balloon," he explained. "When you squeeze on it in one place, it expands in another. Right now Tucson is the hole. Once we get Tucson under control, they'll come here next." For all practical purposes, his agents can only try to slow the flow of illegal immigration here, not stop it.
Patrolling the river is a cat-and-mouse game. Some illegals walk backward, so they appear to be heading south. Others wipe out their footsteps with mesquite branches or affix horseshoes to the soles of their shoes to throw off agents who might be tracking them. Border Patrol agents search every front: They cruise the riverbanks, scanning the Rio Grande with night-vision goggles; they fly overhead in helicopters and rake the ground below with heat detectors; they chase down groups who have tripped sensors; they lie in the brush, waiting for the sound of twigs breaking beneath feet. Even with 250 agents, more than double the number the Eagle Pass station had three years ago, and an abundance of high-tech tools, the task is daunting. Something as innocuous as carrizo cane, the bamboolike reed that grows thickly along the riverbanks, can thwart the most determined of pursuits. The cane stands twenty feet high, grows so densely that it shuts out all sunlight, and is too tough to drive a car through. Illegal immigrants use it as cover, traveling through tunnels they have bored through its thickets. "We could miss an army walking through it," said Border Patrol pilot Mike Johnson.
Further complicating the Border Patrol's mission, which includes drug interdiction, is the fact that traffickers now have the upper hand in Maverick County. Smugglers are armed with encrypted radios, scanners, surveillance equipment, automatic weapons that are far superior to the Border Patrol's standard-issue shotguns and rifles, and an intelligence network on both sides of the border. "When we look through our binoculars, we see scouts on the other side of the river watching us," said supervisory agent Mike Moreno. The line that once divided the drug trade from the flow of people crossing the river has become increasingly blurred. Traffickers often send illegals across the Rio Grande as decoys, tying up Border Patrol agents while drug loads are ferried farther down the river. Lost in the mix are the people walking north, more and more of whom are from urban areas and are ill-prepared to walk for days, even weeks, across this forbidding terrain. Border Patrol agents often find them wandering the desert—dehydrated, delirious, and overcome by heat exhaustion. Some end up walking in circles for days. Many aren't so lucky; the bodies of 48 immigrants were found in the sector just last year.
Still, thousands of people continue to cross the Rio Grande, as they did on a brisk evening this winter, when Border Patrol agent William O. Willingham heard on his radio that a sensor downriver from Eagle Pass had registered twenty hits. Shifting his unmarked Ford Expedition into gear, Willingham sped down U.S. 277 and then turned into the brush, coming to a stop in the woods. Without a moment's pause, he leaped out of the Expedition, jumped a fence, and ran headlong through thickets of catclaw and huisache, ducking branches and brambles as he went. He scaled a steep creekbed muddied by recent rains and sprinted toward the sensor. When his radio crackled with the news that the group had split up and was heading for a nearby pecan orchard, Willingham, breathing hard, backtracked to the Expedition and drove farther down 277, cutting his headlights as he turned into the orchard. Steadying his night-vision goggles, he scanned the identical rows of pecan trees that spread out dizzyingly before him, looking for any signs of movement. Then his radio crackled again; two Border Patrol agents had apprehended the group nearby.
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