Crossing Into U.S. Elusive for Boy

He paddled across the river yesterday, but he didn’t make it far. U.S. Border Patrol agents scooped him up as he waded onto the opposite bank.

So Jorge Garcia Contreras is back in Mexico, lurking in the cool shadows beneath the bridge.

“I’ll get over there someday,” he says, pointing to the tangles of bamboo and cypress on the U.S. side of the river. “I’ll try again soon--and one day I’ll make it.”

Jorge is 11 years old, and his feet are spattered with dried mud. He has no family--he won’t say where they are--and no home. He lives beneath the bridge that spans from the cow pastures and riverside farms of northern Mexico to the onion and pepper fields of South Texas.

While Jorge pauses in the shallows, farmers and tourists and day laborers trudge from nation to nation on the concrete bridge overhead. The bridge’s skeleton rattles under the steady footfall.

Jorge isn’t the only bridge urchin--a tribe of seven Mexican children swarms around the link fences and stone pillars this day. The bridge is their perilous jungle gym; the clay banks of the river, their bathtub.

Asked about the young beggars of the Progreso Bridge, U.S. Border Patrol agents don’t skip a beat.

“I imagine they’ve always been there,” agent San Juanita Luna says. “A lot of it is a phase--those kids are always of a certain age.”

They make their home on the Mexican sands hemming the Rio Grande, eat scraps tossed by tourists, beg passersby for loose coins.

A well-skipped stone can bounce ashore on U.S. soil.

“There are dollars over there,” Jorge says. “I can work; I’ll do anything.”

As he speaks, he gazes across the water. The sun is sinking, and the sleeve of a uniform is barely visible in the tinted window of a parked Border Patrol truck. Somebody sits within, watching.

Getting into the United States is no simple trick. The land rolling to the north is rife with Border Patrol agents. Even if Jorge makes it ashore, he will have to hide out, then persuade somebody to accept the labor of a skinny 11-year-old.

He doesn’t remember how many times he’s made land. At least 10, he claims. His visits, he says ruefully, have lasted just long enough for agents to toss him out.

The Border Patrol does not name the immigrants it detains or processes.

A wiry boy with oversized eyes, Jorge picks up extra money keeping watch for the “coyotes” who smuggle their human cargo north over the river. He scouts the riverbanks for agents. The smugglers pat him on the head, but nothing more. Jorge has no prayer of paying the steep fees they levy.

Sometimes, if a passing adult looks amenable, Jorge makes his case.

“Can’t you help me get into Texas?” he asks. “I just need to get over, and it’ll be different.”