Drop in illegal crossings leaves border agents bored
Read it all. Look at a map. The border has a lot of variation in its great length.
The border fence ran right in front of Jeff Byerly’s post, a straight line of steel that stretched beyond town and deep into the desert.
As a U.S. Border Patrol agent on America’s front line, Byerly’s job was to stop anyone from scaling the barrier. Hours into his midnight shift, his stare was still fixed, but all was quiet.
He pounded energy drinks. He walked around his government vehicle. On the other side of the fence, the bars in the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado closed, and only the sound of a passing car broke the silence. Byerly, 31, switched on his DVD player. Minutes later, a supervisor knocked on the window: The slapstick comedy “Johnny English” was on; Byerly was fast asleep.
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Perhaps no area has more action-starved agents than the Yuma sector, a vast expanse of desert and agricultural fields straddling California and Arizona that shares a 126-mile border with Mexico. In 2005, it was the border’s most trampled region, a place where immigrant rushes, called banzai runs, sent hundreds of people into backyards and lettuce fields, and teams of drug smugglers shot across the Colorado River atop sandbag bridges.
Outnumbered agents resorted to spinning doughnuts in their vehicles, trying to kick up mini-sandstorms to disorient the hordes. Agents had to prioritize pursuits, focusing on the groups closing in on front lawns. “We were overrun,” said agent Jeff Bourne, 34, but “your brain was always working. We were always doing something.”
Then double and triple fencing went up. Stadium lighting was installed. Every arrested immigrant, instead of being returned to Mexico, was jailed. Outside town, workers laid steel barriers on previously wide open borders to block drug-smuggling vehicles from driving through.
From 2005 to 2010, apprehensions of immigrants dropped 95 percent, from 138,460 to 7,116. Vehicle drive-throughs fell from 2,700 to 21 during the same period.
-Farmers are now able to plant crops in once-trampled fields. And residents don’t find immigrants hiding under their cars or in their living rooms anymore.
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I can’t find it now, but a couple of years ago I posted a news report about a six year old in Yuma who got off at the wrong bus stop and accidentally ended up in Mexico.