Border patrol searches the dark for signs of life

SUNLAND PARK, N.M. — So far, only jackrabbits are hopping the border along this stretch of desert between the United States and Mexico.

But the night is young, and it is a smuggler's moon — a half crescent that emits just enough light to travel but not enough to be seen.

Veteran U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent Jorge Martinez pulls his SUV through sagebrush-covered hills looking for any sign of humans as the sun sinks in the southwestern sky. The evening shift is typically the most active for border crossers, he says.

New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua come together here. A white statue of

Christ on the cross stands atop Sierra del Cristo Rey as a symbol of goodwill between the United States and Mexico. It is also a place where dozens of people play cat and mouse with the border patrol each day.

Martinez is among some 1,200 agents in the vast El Paso sector — 125,000 square miles including 289 miles of border — where the job is all about holding the line.

"We try to prevent them from getting in. That's our job," he said. "But they do get in."

Three hundred new agents are due to arrive soon.

The El Paso border patrol has detained 110,000 men, women and children, mostly younger men, in the past 11 months. It has made 1,184 drug seizures at a street value of $153 million.

"If you're not familiar with the volume of narcotics, it's kind of breathtaking when you see it for the first time," said Doug Moser, customs and border patrol spokesman.

On this night, Martinez has a tip from a confidential informant that marijuana smugglers are planning to dash across the line into a house in Sunland Park. There is no evidence of them or anyone else for that matter early in his shift. But it is early and still daylight.

Several Mexican children straddling a tall iron gate separating the two countries are the first people he encounters, though he keeps his distance. Another officer who took a closer look informed Martinez the young boys were throwing rocks.

A local church uses the gate to deliver food and clothing to residents of impoverished Rancho Anapra, a shanty town of squatters on the Mexican side, just feet from the border. The cinder-block shacks and wooden-pallet shelters lack running water and electricity. What power they do have is pirated from the utility lines overhead.

The boys aren't a threat, so Martinez moves on.