Word: patroller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...smuggler was surprised to see us. It's his business to monitor traffic along his stretch of the border, and he had just watched from his hiding place as a white-and-green patrol truck rolled slowly past on the U.S. side. The day shift was ending for "la migra," the border patrol, so it was time for him to move...
Something's Working Two years ago, Yuma Sector was the busiest jurisdiction in the entire border patrol. This 118-mile (190 km) stretch of border in western Arizona and eastern California was a well-known gap through which people and drugs flowed north while guns and money went south. The harsh desert on either side was crosshatched with smugglers' roads, trampled by the footprints of thousands of "walkers," some of whom dropped dead from thirst. In the city of San Luis, Ariz., so-called banzai runs were a near nightly occurrence. Scores of people would gather on the Mexican side...
...have learned this year to be wary of a subject that shows up in so many guises on so many different plates. What tastes like common sense to one voter--cracking down on illegal crossings--smacks of xenophobia to the next, and the same rumble of helicopters and border-patrol Jeeps in the Southwestern desert sounds to some people like America standing up for itself but to others like Emma Lazarus, poet of the Statue of Liberty, rolling over in her grave...
...hydraulic ramps to boost cars over for a quick dash into town. In the rolling pasturelands east of Nogales, the fence is a so-called Normandy barrier of crisscrossing railroad iron. Smugglers like to cut this fence with torches, then carefully put everything back in place so the border patrol won't notice. In parts of the sector there is still no fence at all. This includes a 28-mile (45 km) stretch near Sasabe where a multimillion-dollar pilot project to create a virtual fence of radars, sensors and cameras ended in failure earlier this year...
...ground. Steve McPartland leads one such force: the CBP's élite Air Mobile Unit operating out of San Diego. McPartland is a man of the world--born in Canada, raised in northern England and now an American citizen. After serving in the U.S. Army, he joined the border patrol 11 years ago. "Immigration was a natural for me," he explained, because having gone through the proper channels himself, he resented people who walk into the country illegally. McPartland's sector was the first to put up a border fence, as part of Operation Gatekeeper in the 1990s. Before that...