Border Agents’ Daily Cat-and-Mouse Game

Felipe Barrios was checking a hole in a chain-link border fence when the call crackled in on his radio.

“We’ve got a group,” agent Geoff Povinelli said. “I just dragged and was cutting sign. They’re heading northeast toward the state park. Looks like maybe five individuals.”

Barrios, a supervisor at the U.S. Border Patrol’s Deming office, turned his 4-wheel-drive around and joined the hunt, translating radio traffic for a reporter.

“Cutting sign” means tracking footprints. “Dragged” means a heavy timber was dragged along a dirt road to wipe out previous prints. Once agents drag a road, they immediately begin checking the surface for fresh incursions.

Povinelli, Barrios and agent Mary Stevenson set up triangulated positions to try to head off the intruders. Povinelli described the shoe prints over the radio. One was a “Flying W.” Another had horizontal lines. A third seemed smaller, possibly a child’s.

They were fresh prints, made less than an hour earlier. Povinelli decided he was following three people, not five.

A fresh print is sharp, like a photograph. But they quickly decay in the dirt, and an experienced eye can judge their age.

Barrios received second-by-second radio updates as Povinelli tracked the prints through three miles of thick, thorny brush between the border and a residential area of Columbus.

At one point the tracks doubled back south.

“I think they’ve seen us here and they’re just trying to get away,” Barrios said.

Barrios moved his Ford Expedition slowly along a dirt path bordering the thicket, focusing his powerful rooftop spotlight on the brush and playing a smaller flashlight beam on the dirt immediately alongside his vehicle.

“We’re chasing this group out here, and there’s about 20 more trying to cross behind us,” he said.

From his moving vehicle, Barrios spotted one of the footprints. A closer look found the others as well. Barrios radioed their location and direction to Povinelli. The quarry had turned west, and the search followed.

They were just south of Pancho Villa State Park, named for the Mexican insurgent who invaded the United States briefly in 1916 at Columbus, a sleepy village that still has only about 400 residents.

Barrios drove ahead to a Columbus motel often used as a hide-out for illegals. “We catch aliens with keys to Room 5 all the time,” he said.

Alien-smugglers provide the keys and directions before the immigrants cross. A water tower near the motel with a red light on top is used as a beacon.

Barrios found blankets and other provisions in a drainage culvert beside the motel--but none of the telltale footprints. They never got that far.

Povinelli followed them to an abandoned house around the corner. Two women and a girl with shoes matching the footprints seemed relieved the chase was over. They smiled and joked with Povinelli, who displayed scratches on his arms from the thicket.

Back at the Columbus port of entry, one of the women, Paula Estrada, 35, said they came to neighboring Palomas, Mexico, a week earlier from Chihuahua City awaiting their chance to cross. That night, they found a place west of Palomas where the barbed wire fence was knocked down, and they just walked into the United States, Estrada said.

As Stevenson typed biographical information into the Border Patrol computer database along with their photographs and fingerprints, the other woman, Ramona Garcia Loza, 32, said she had wanted her daughter, Annette, 10, to attend school in Deming.

For years, schools in Deming and Columbus had legally enrolled students from Palomas. But last year, Congress banned free public education for nonresident aliens--adding motives for illegal enrollment and immigration.

Despite hopes for Annette’s schooling, her mother had been uneasy about crossing. But separated from her husband for the last two years, she’d hoped for a new start in New Mexico.

As she, her daughter and Estrada were led to the gate, a smiling Mexican customs official came to meet them. A Border Patrol agent handed him their paperwork.

As she passed through, Garcia Loza turned and gazed wistfully at her fading American dream.