Climate of Fear Surrounds Agents Too

Cecilio Banuelos and Blake Hanning are puttering quietly, their boat braiding a white tail in the darkened waters of the Rio Grande. They are out here most nights, slicing past Mexico, scanning the shores for bandits or drug runners--for trouble in all its shapes.

Peering into the darkness, the Border Patrol agents aren’t sure what hides in the shadows on shore. Smugglers lurk unseen. Children throw rocks and bottles. Bullets splash in the murky water.

“We’re easily outgunned,” Banuelos says. “And we hear a lot of stuff out here.”

At a time when illegal immigrants face greater risks trying to get into the country, the federal employees charged with keeping them out are also encountering more danger.

“The agents are increasingly facing rough customers,” says Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. “They’re more likely to be armed, more likely to be desperate and more likely to be willing to use violence.”

A decade ago, immigrants curled into car trunks, crossed their fingers and sneaked over the border into urban hubs such as El Paso and San Diego. Border Patrol agents endured sneers and some occasional rock-hurling. But it was mostly a cat and mouse game with few casualties.

Those days are gone.

The Border Patrol has more than doubled in size, spreading thick over quiet farms and sandy stretches from San Diego to Brownsville. Immigrants, desperate to skirt the wall of agents, have been pushed from big cities into desolate terrain, where they plod through deadly heat, burning sands and fast currents.

Migrants turn to “coyotes”--hired smugglers who may be armed and ruthless, as are the drug traffickers and bandits who haunt the border.

In March, Mexican soldiers on an anti-drug mission plowed through a border fence west of El Paso and shot at Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side. The Mexican government said the soldiers were new to the area and did not see the boundary markers.

Three months later, an activist in Reynosa, Mexico--across from McAllen, Texas--promised $10,000 to anyone who killed a Border Patrol agent. He later withdrew the offer, but its message could not be erased.

Nerves are dangerously rattled.

When Abraham Gonzalez crept out of the Rio Grande into the hot, dark American night May 21, he brought no gun, no knife. The 25-year-old father of three had worked his way north from Tabasco, Mexico, in hope of finding a job.

Instead, he was gunned down.

According to the Border Patrol, Gonzalez attacked an agent. After a struggle and several warnings, the agent opened fire. One bullet ripped into Gonzalez’s chest; another wedged in his side. The government is investigating whether the shooting was justified.

These borderlands are evolving--but into what? More uniformed agents arrive every year. Barbed wire, military floodlights and steel walls rise in sleepy pastures. Death scratches the spine of the Rio Grande, stronger with every season.

Krikorian argues that the U.S. government is partly to blame--ordering agents to block undocumented workers, even as the economy depends upon the flow of illegal labor.

“We are culpable,” he says. “We are luring people here and leaving the agents out to dry.”