female officers going aboard a ship
me 18 miles from the U.S.–Mexico border—we are looking for “sign.” That’s Border Patrol–speak for physical evidence of human disturbance in the crumbling West Texas dirt. In this instance, the sign is three sets of footprints. “Two prints made by boots, and the third looks like cheese graters,”
This is protocol: Multiple agents assemble at different points along a line of footprints and leapfrog one another until they intercept the path of the prints’ owner. Sometimes, the markings are nothing more than those of local residents. Other times,
Two other agents follow the prints behind a line of barbed-wire fence several yards from the rest-stop bathrooms. Moments later, a voice crackles over Martinez’s radio: “We got them.”
Martinez and I follow behind them, ambling to the Border Patrol SUVs parked at the rest-stop pull-off. Two of the men are shirtless; one’s ribs jut impressions through his sun-scorched skin as clear as his footprints in the dust.
The Van Horn Station, where Martinez works, is just one of more than 70 along the nearly 2,000 miles of the U.S.–Mexico border. The vast swath of land is divided into nine sectors, each made up of several patrol stations, checkpoints, and monitoring
technology (towers with radar and infrared cameras, trucks mounted with laser range finders, underground sensors, as well as helicopters and unmanned drones). In total, there are some 17,000 agents manning these stations, out of the more than 21,000 who make up the U.S.