"You can catch a group of 50 by yourself," Martinez said. "They won't run from you. In Arizona, they run. Here they don't. Why it is, I don't know."

Things aren't so quiet about 60 miles west in Deming, N.M., where border patrol agents are "getting hammered," Martinez said. He is told the processing center there can't handle all the people caught this evening. Twenty-seven of them were sent to the Santa Teresa station in his territory.

Martinez heads to the top of a hill about 300 feet tall overlooking the border. Agent Juan Hernandez is there sitting in a truck equipped with a thermal imaging camera. The green monitors shine in the darkness, illuminating shadows or silhouettes that might be humans.

"You're kind of the conductor of this orchestra up here," Hernandez said.

The camera often can't see all directions at once, so border crossers will hug the sides of the hill, wait until the camera rotates east, and then break for the houses below at a dead run.

"They're brazen, but they are desperate to get in (to the United States)," Martinez said.

So far this night, Hernandez hasn't had to direct any agents to an area where people might be trying to sneak across the border.

In addition to the all-seeing eye in the sky, the border patrol has other high-tech gadgets at its disposal, including thousands of ground sensors. Infrared beams and magnetic and seismic mats are hidden throughout the hills. Any movement across or over them trips a computer alarm and pinpoints the location. The sensors will come into play later in the night.

Martinez, a supervisor, decides to drive to the Santa Teresa station to check on the 27 detainees from Deming. He navigates the maze of dirt roads in the darkness without the least bit hesitation.

Some of the roads are surprisingly well-groomed, and Martinez says there is a purpose for that. Agents on each shift drag the dirt as if it were a baseball infield. Any northbound footprints will be obvious.

And in his 17 years on the job, Martinez has seen all kinds. Crossers have attached sponges or cardboard to their feet to displace as little dirt as possible. Some have tried crawling, while others walked backward. One fashioned a set of hooves to imitate the cows grazing in a nearby field.

"We have new technology, but we rely on old-fashioned detective work, too," he said.

At the station, the 21 men and six women from Deming wait in two holding cells for processing. They've come to the border towns from as far inland as Durango and Veracruz.