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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The two older Monje brothers had previously crossed into the U.S. from Tijuana and Matamoros, where they had ducked under fences and walked straight into the outskirts of American cities. But the Border Patrol had since clamped down on those places, and so Abecnego and Cacho, after traveling to the border, were advised to cross at Piedras Negras instead. To cross, a coyote told them, they would have to ford the river, hike for several days past the Border Patrol checkpoints, and then meet up with a driver who would take them to Houston. They agreed to pay the coyote's rate of $1,000 each and gathered with twenty or so other Mexicans by the river, downriver from Piedras Negras. The coyote instructed them to strip off their clothes, and though Abecnego was modest in the presence of the group's women, he followed orders. Holding his clothes high above the frigid water, he began to wade across the Rio Grande. He did not know how to swim, and the icy river frightened him, but at last he reached the opposite bank. Shivering, he dressed hurriedly as the coyote urged the group on. Sometimes walking, sometimes running, they forged through thickets of catclaw and huisache that ripped at their clothes and tore at their skin. Finally, they came to the canal near Dob's ranch.
Honeycutt would later offer varying accounts to Texas Ranger Brooks Long of why he fired his gun along the canal, saying first that he saw a light that appeared to be gunfire on the opposite bank, then that he heard a noise sounding like gunfire, and then that he had simply panicked. Despite hearing a cry of pain, Honeycutt left the scene after apprehending one of the Mexicans but felt compelled to return to the canal twice that night to search the area. He would not find Abecnego until roughly three hours after the shooting. On his third visit to the canal, Honeycutt scanned its banks with his flashlight, then headed up into the brush. After crossing a small clearing, he saw a jean jacket ahead of him, crumpled on the ground. He took a few more steps and saw that a boy was sprawled out before him. Honeycutt nudged the boy but there was no response. Kneeling down, he saw blood. Honeycutt turned the boy over and then pulled his shirt up, seeing the raw bullet wound in his shoulder. Abecnego was still alive. Honeycutt knelt by him in the dark and wept. "No se preocupe. Estaré bien," Abecnego assured him, though Honeycutt couldn't understand. "Don't worry. I'll be fine."
Dob awoke that night when his dogs began frantically barking and scratching at the front door. Honeycutt was standing at his gate, inconsolable. "He was crying, distraught, incoherent—he'd lost it," Dob recalled. "It was hard to understand him. He said he'd found a guy who was shot. He said, 'Tell me what to do.'" Earlier that night, Honeycutt had casually told Dob of firing his gun at a "flash" by the canal, but now the rancher felt a sense of dread as he realized that Honeycutt had in fact fired at people. Dob would later learn that the off-duty agent had failed to tell authorities of the shooting or to radio for an ambulance even after finding Abecnego. Instead, Honeycutt had carried and then dragged Abecnego to a clearing before running back to his car and leaving the boy in the brush. Only when Honeycutt unexpectedly ran into two Border Patrol agents as he drove back to the ranch, did he explain what had happened. As Dob absorbed the news that night, he felt ill. "I was disgusted at Will's incompetence, at the DEA, at myself for being fooled."At Honeycutt's trial last October, he pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated assault by a public servant and deadly conduct. He received a fifteen-year sentence. The evidence presented during the punishment phase suggested that Honeycutt had tried to cover up the shooting: He had returned to the scene of the crime to throw his spent shells into the canal. He had initially failed to seek medical assistance for Abecnego, a fact that left room for speculation about the boy's fate had Border Patrol agents not run into Honeycutt. And the testimony of Mario Morales Romero, who had crossed the river that night with Abecnego and was the only one in the group Honeycutt had caught, was particularly damaging. He testified that Honeycutt had cursed the "pinches mexicanos" ("damn Mexicans") as he had handcuffed Romero and threatened to cut the man's feet off with a machete so he couldn't cross the river again. Not entered into evidence was the fact that Honeycutt had failed a polygraph test and had admitted to a polygraph examiner that he had shot at illegal immigrants before. "Honeycutt let his gun do the talking," said Texas Ranger Brooks Long.
Perhaps the most startling revelation was what Long brought to light after doing a simple background check on Honeycutt. Criminal records in the East Texas town of Freeport showed that Honeycutt had been charged with assaulting his first wife in 1977 and making terroristic threats against her in 1979. The assault charge had been dismissed, but Honeycutt was convicted of the latter offense and served three days in jail. Federal law dictates that people with domestic violence convictions cannot be licensed to carry firearms and so cannot serve as peace officers. It was a detail that had eluded the Maverick County district attorney's office, which commissioned DEA task force members, and the agency itself. From the very beginning, Honeycutt was never qualified to work for the DEA—a fact so troubling, and so embarrassing, that it undoubtedly contributed to the agency's decision this January to settle quietly the civil suit brought by Abecnego Monje Ortiz, which was scheduled to go to trial before Judge William Wayne Justice in February. With the assistance of San Antonio attorneys Clem and Sean Lyons, Abecnego won a settlement of $1.75 million from the DEA, a tremendous legal victory, but scant recompense for a teenager who will never walk again.
From his vantage point, Will Honeycutt sees himself as a scapegoat, laying much of the blame for what occurred at the feet of the DEA. One morning this winter at the Maverick County jail, Honeycutt railed against the agency's lack of training and supervision, handing over pages of handwritten notes detailing the ways in which the DEA had failed him. But he was at a loss to explain his own actions. "About this whole event, I don't have an answer and it's haunting me," he said. "Putting me in prison is nothing compared to what's going on in my mind." He expressed deep remorse for the suffering of Abecnego Monje Ortiz and vehemently denied that he harbors any hatred of Mexicans. His wife, he said, is Mexican American. He came short of accepting full responsibility for the shooting, instead spinning theories about how the bullet could have ricocheted or how a black pickup truck seen near the canal that night presents a "shadow of a doubt." He seemed increasingly unhinged: His hands visibly trembled when he spoke about the shooting, and he claimed to have scrubbed every inch of his cell with his toothbrush. "There is a struggle with my own sanity and depression," he said.
Abecnego is paralyzed from the waist down and will forever be confined to a wheelchair. His mother, Dolores, has been granted a temporary visa by the INS and helps him with his physical therapy in San Antonio, a painful and often grueling program that occupies much of his time. Abecnego now looks more like a man than a boy; his face has filled out and grown more serious, its contours stripped of their innocence. He holds his chin up, almost defensively. Of Will Honeycutt he said simply, "I have nothing against him." But in his voice there is a trace of bitterness and of opportunities lost. Abecnego, who came to this country to help his mother, is now solely dependent on her care. She puts on a brave face about her son and only once during our conversation did her voice falter.
"He had ambitions," Dolores said. Then her eyes filled with tears.
The shooting of Abecnego Monje Ortiz was the first of six shootings that have reverberated through this lonely corner of Texas. In June and then November of 1999 an Air Force mechanic in Del Rio fired at Mexicans who had waded across the river by his house. The second shooting left sixteen-year-old Luis Armando Chavez Vaquera dead. Last April a Rocksprings rancher shot at three illegals crossing his land, striking one in the back. Last May a Brackettville retiree shot in the direction of two immigrants, killing Eusebio de Haro, 23. As recently as January, an immigrant was shot in the leg outside Barksdale. All the shootings have been committed by newcomers to the border, whose numbers are rising as old-time ranches become subdivided into hunting leases and ranchettes. All of the shootings had an element of rage, which will surely heighten as more and more people begin crossing through here from Mexico. "It's just a matter of time before this happens again," said Dob.The rancher sat at his kitchen table with a worn, tan notebook spread out before him. He had filled hundreds of its pages with his small, precise capital letters, making daily entries in black ink. This was the logbook in which he recorded every footprint, every new trail, every suspicious movement across the ranch. Alongside the notes that anyone who worked the land might keep—full moon, first frost, heavy rain—were notes detailing the license plate numbers of suspicious cars, the movements of lookouts, the precise location of Mexican military units who appeared to be guarding drug loads across the Rio Grande. There was an entry marking the day a group of 45 people crossed the ranch and the day Dob saw a rifle pointed at him from the other side of the river. It was an extraordinary record, a catalog of the reasons nearly all of Dob's longtime friends and neighbors in the Quemado Valley have moved on—most notably the Wipffs, who were among the first families to settle Maverick County, 130 years ago. "When Sonny Wipff moved his last load of cattle, he sat there and cried," said Dob, who looked small and tired in the morning light. "One day I'll be dead and gone too. We're the last ones."
On a late-January night in Eagle Pass, it was clear and cold when a green-and-white Border Patrol bus, filled with Mexicans who had been caught illegally entering the country, pulled up to the international bridge. Fingerprinted and photographed, the group had been duly entered into the agency's database and now had only to walk back across the bridge to Piedras Negras. A blond Border Patrol agent in his twenties waved the group of fifty-odd Mexicans off the bus and watched as they began to disappear into the crowd. The last passenger, a short, barrel-chested man wearing a Chicago Bulls cap and a weary expression, appraised the long walk before him and then stepped off the bus.
"Hasta mañana," the Border Patrol agent said, smiling pleasantly.
The Mexican man turned his head and grinned. "Hasta mañana."
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