Word: manjarrez
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...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 Manjarrez, 37, top agent in the Naco station. "I think we in the border patrol are getting better at what we are doing. But with a Third World economy to the south and a First World economic power to the north, you will always have this problem...
...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...
...Manjarrez's father crossed 50 years ago and began a life that matches that of many people his son is trying to apprehend today. Victor Sr. made his way to Tucson, Ariz., worked as a dishwasher and a meat cutter and every month sent money back to his family in Nayarit. They teased him about how proud he was to be an American and nicknamed him Eisenhower. He raised his two children in the U.S. and sent his eldest--Victor Jr.--to college, then saw him join the U.S. border patrol. Its ranks are filled with agents who have similar...
...first time I did this," Manjarrez says in his office a mile from the border, "it felt like I was chasing my own family. Detainees often say to me, 'You are one of us. Why don't you let us go?' I tell them I am just doing a job. But it gives me a bit of insight, a different degree of compassion." If he forgets, his father is quick to remind him. When he visits his father's home in Tucson, Victor Sr. sometimes yells out the front window, "Viene la Migra!" (the ins is coming...
...ALIEN Tonight Manjarrez's agents caught 709 illegals. One was Aurelio Gonzales, 52, a farmer from Durango. He had crossed with his 20-year-old daughter, intending to link up with a sister who lives in Phoenix. Gonzales paid smugglers $800 for each passage, up sharply from the $300 it cost before the border patrol put in all its lights, cameras and extra agents. The father and daughter had been walking for two days, though their coyote had said it would take less than an hour to cross the border. "They lied to us," said Gonzales, sitting, exhausted...
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