INS Agents Flock Southwest for Winter

Border Patrol agent Eldon Hurst has put away his parka in favor of summer-weight uniforms.

He’s working 1,237 miles south of his usual post on the Canadian border in Idaho and for a while he’ll be a lot warmer--and a lot busier. The agent has been reassigned to the Mexican border as part of a U.S. crackdown on illegal immigrants and drug smuggling along the nation’s southern boundary.

“I did not want to come down here,” Hurst said, “but now that I’m here I’m enjoying it. I’ve been telling people that they had to pry me off my snowmobile to get me here.”

Fifty-two veteran agents from around the country are in southern Arizona for up to three months to bolster the 400 permanently assigned Border Patrol officers here.

Federal officials announced plans to tighten control of the whole Southwestern border--with 300 additional agents in Arizona and California.

For officers like Hurst, who ran a three-person station at Bonners Ferry, Idaho, contrasts between north and south abound.

The southern Arizona region, the nation’s second-busiest in illegal immigration behind San Diego, had 227,000 arrests during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The Bonners Ferry station arrested about 100 in all of last year.

The agents coming from the North are “just not accustomed to the numbers,” said Ron Colburn, assistant agent in charge of the Nogales part of the operation. “And they may be a little bit amazed by it.”

“We find groups of 20 or so coming across all the time,” Hurst said.

Drug seizures abound too.

During a recent 24-hour period in the Nogales area, agents seized 240 pounds of cocaine in a parked van and recovered 1,000 pounds of baled marijuana that backpackers had brought across the border through a canyon.

At the Bonners Ferry station, Hurst had no drug seizures last year--none. The worst he sees is contraband alcohol and cigarettes headed to Canada. A year and a half ago, agents seized a truck with 240 cases of liquor.

“It’s not easy at all,” Hurst said of the vastly different setting and tempo in Nogales. “This is the first time I’ve been down here.”

John France, sent from Casa Grande in central Arizona to Nogales for three months, said another difficulty has been isolation.

“I drive through the drive-through, I eat fast food, we work long hours and the rest of the time I’ve been in a motel room,” he said.

Hurst, who is used to the frozen North in midwinter, spent two days with an agent who showed him the area--a small downtown with hilly desert to either side, separated from Mexico by a 10-foot-high steel fence. Then he was on his own.

“We just had to get out and become confident in being able to find one location and another,” Hurst said.

Some temporary-transfer agents see it as a nice break in routine and most enjoy the work level, Colburn said. He said most agents’ attitude is: “If you’re going to be away from home for a long period of time, you may as well be busy.”