Word: agente
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Border-patrol agent Nate Lagasse is sitting quietly in his Toyota Land Cruiser about three miles west of a small Arizona town on the Mexican border, following a group of 12 immigrants through his night-vision goggles. He radios directions to three colleagues, who are out in the mesquite on foot and closing in on the aliens. "They don't even know we are here yet," whispers Lagasse, who has turned off his headlights and allowed his truck to roll to a halt without hitting the brakes. "It's just like hunting...
...soon as the sun goes down, hundreds of men, women and children, armed with water bottles, toothbrushes, toilet paper and perhaps phone numbers in Phoenix, or Denver or Los Angeles, come walking, running and crawling north across the border. Each night border-patrol agents round up roughly 500 and next morning return them to Mexico, only to have them start all over again the following evening. It's a never-ending drill, often with life-and-death stakes. The border patrol says 383 people died last year attempting to cross the border from Mexico. "Is this problem solvable?" asks Victor...
...AGENT Manjarrez knows what it means to want to come to the U.S. His father did it on foot at the age of nine. Victor Sr. illegally crossed into Arizona after traveling 800 miles from his hometown of Te-pic, Nayarit, in west-central Mexico. He had only a second-grade education and spoke no English. "I have a 14-year-old son now," says the border patrol chief, "and I cannot imagine him doing the same thing. [My father] didn't have a childhood, but when I ask him why he did it, he says, 'I didn't have...
...peace between local clergy and the U.S. border patrol. It was the feds who guided Hoover's group to the best sites for the tanks, at the confluence of three popular trails coming up from Mexico. "We are allies in that effort," says David Aguilar, the patrol's special agent in charge in Tucson. And no wonder. As border-patrol agents shut down safer avenues through cities and towns, coyotes and their charges are pushed farther into the desert to cross, taking greater risks. That has discouraged some immigrants from making the journey; it has also killed hundreds...
...border patrol's informal ties to his group. Fife says it's "the moral equivalent of starting a forest fire and then going in to rescue a couple of people." The clergymen say they will not turn in to the INS anyone who comes to them for aid. Border agent Aguilar sounds just as wary of the partnership. Saving lives is one thing, he says. Helping aliens get across is something else. Says Aguilar: "There is a line they must not cross...