Hard Line Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Chapter One Sitting on an X U.S. Border Patrol agent Araceli Garcia gunned the truck's engine and reached the top of Spooner's Mesa, a broad field of daisies overlooking the ocean surf and the lowering sun. A sprawling wetlands stretches north toward San Diego's downtown, about fifteen miles in the distance. It is a stunning spot, providing the sort of wide-open coastal panorama that rapid development and protective landowners have rendered all but nonexistent in modern southern California. But in May 1999 we came for a different view. Spooner's Mesa happened to be an ideal vantage for seeing, up close, just how drastically the U.S.-Mexico border had been transformed along its westernmost stretch, as it slices between San Diego and Tijuana and kisses the Pacific Ocean here at Imperial Beach. Atop the mesa, the change could be measured in the expensive new hardware installed in recent years. A mile-long row of border lights, mounted on poles and as powerful as those that illuminate sports stadiums, now extended to the rugged canyons on either side of the mesa. A ten-foot-high border fence provided a formidable barrier where a decade earlier immigrants had gathered by the hundreds in preparation for nighttime dashes to the other side. Buried in the ground at our feet were dozens of high-tech sensors that could detect movement and then transmit signals instantly to border agents in a control room at the Imperial Beach station. The signs of change were also evident in what wasn't here. As Garcia showed me around the Imperial Beach region, she checked out the narrow canyons, washes and culverts that once were favored crossing points for migrants. All were deserted today. She wheeled onto the beach at Border Field State Park and pointed out the very spot where her mother had sneaked into the country illegally from Mexico twenty-seven years before. (Her mother was now a U.S. citizen.) The beachside park is just across the fence from a pleasant middle-class neighborhood on the Mexican side. In between stands the first stone border marker erected after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S.-Mexican war in 1848, granting modern-day California and much of the rest of the Southwest to the United States and creating what in these parts was the contemporary international boundary. Aside from the two of us, the park was empty. The border fence had been labeled in orange paint with the names of nearby landmarksa lighthouse, a yogurt shop on the Tijuana sideto help U.S. agents guide Mexican authorities on the south side when crowds gathered on Mexican soil and troublemakers heaved baseball-sized rocks over the fence at the American agents. Such cooperation was among the reasons officials in both countries insisted that crime on the border had dropped noticeably in recent years. We slowly cruised along dirt roads where canyons finger across the international divide, undeterred by political boundaries. In the brushy reaches, the agent scanned sandy paths for footprints using a cobalt blue penlight. There were only squiggly snake trails and rabbit tracks, although a cluster of plastic water jugs told us that people had passed through recently. In a sobering reminder that serious trouble had not deserted this area altogether, Garcia pointed out the spot where a border agent had fatally shot a migrant the year before during an alleged rock-throwing attack. No charges were filed in the case. The radio crackled, bringing word from the station's control room that someone had tripped one of the motion sensors. Garcia zoomed off to check. It was a false alarm, the first of several tripped by sunset strollers or children riding bicycles near their San Ysidro neighborhood. On this night the only radio call approaching urgency was a query from an agent who discovered a child locked in a parked carEllingwood, Ken is the author of 'Hard Line Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375422430 and ISBN 0375422439.