Rare look inside Arizona's border battle

CASA GRANDE, AZ - Politicians say the U.S.-Mexico border is the most dangerous it’s ever been, but Border Patrol agents in the field disagree.

Their office is the rugged terrain known as the Tucson Sector, ground zero for drug and human smuggling.

“I’ve lost friends and we all know people and agents that have lost their lives on duty, so it’s a dangerous area,” said Supervisory Agent James Richard Gonzalez, who works out of the Casa Grande substation.

“As we see our effectiveness increasing, then we’re also going to expect to see more violence against agents,” said Border Patrol Public Information Officer Agent Eric Cantu. FBI statistics corroborate that claim.

But while agents say they are more at risk doing their jobs than in the past, Cantu says border communities are the safest they have ever been.

Checkpoints are stationed at every major corridor in the Tucson Sector, the busiest Border Patrol area in the nation. But it’s the vast area beyond them where agents see the action.

“We have guys whose only job is to monitor the traffic that goes around our checkpoint,” says Jeremiah Richardson, who mans a checkpoint halfway between Phoenix and Mexico, looking for suspicious vehicles and behavior.

On the day ABC15 rides along with agents, there is an off-road chase with a stolen Hummer headed north, covered in mud, camouflaged in the desert sand. Three people are arrested, and as the vehicle is loaded onto a tow truck, another call comes in.

“We’re hearing a call that some agents close to the forward operating base have just seized some drugs and possibly some smugglers,” Cantu says.

An agent working in an area known as a drug drop-off point finds several hundred pounds of marijuana. Agents working out of that base say they seized similar loads every day that week.

Cantu says drug seizures have gone up in the last decade because agents are able to patrol and monitor more remote areas with more manpower and better technology. They have set up nearly a dozen forward operating bases—small buildings in remote areas to hold detainees temporarily and weigh drug seizures before they are sent to the nearest station to be processed.

Still, the signs of migration are everywhere. Water bottles and other garbage is strewn around the desert just outside of the forward operating base. Cantu says it’s a sign Border Patrol has stationed it in the right location.

Sometimes the best way to find people, drugs and weapons, is the old fashioned way—“cutting sign,” or tracing footprints through the blazing desert sand.

“That’s all you have to go on sometimes, is just follow those little pieces,” says Cantu.

But it’s the technology, fencing and agents on the ground squeezing smugglers—and the people who follow them—out into more remote and dangerous areas.

“In the urban areas, you have seconds to minutes to apprehend somebody,” says Cantu. “Out here, as you can tell, you can walk for days. Out here, time is on our side.”

What the government considers better protection of the homeland, human rights groups think of as militarization that is causing more deaths than ever before, as desperate people try to get through.

Cantu says they are shifting the blame in the wrong direction.

“It’s the smugglers who are pushing the aliens out here,” he says. “The smugglers know that it’s dangerous out here. They know that there’s no water out here.”

Often, he says, agents trained as first responders become the people crossers run to.

“There’s a lot of instances where they lose all hope and they will just walk in a straight line and just hope and pray that they find a road,” says Cantu. “When they find a road, they just sit there and wait.”

In the Tucson Sector that is usually on the Tohono O’odham Nation Native American land the size of Connecticut, split between the United States and Mexico.

Border Patrol attributes the decline in arrests in part to new fencing straddling the border, which prevents cars from crossing freely, replacing a mangled remnant of barbwire and thin, bent metal posts. Still, the spaces between posts of the vehicle barrier are wide enough for people to easily squeeze through.

As daylight turns to moonlight over the parched desert landscape, agents prepare for action.

“They get ready to cross right around sundown,” says Cantu.

An invisible agent uses infrared goggles to detect a group’s body heat nearby. GPS lasers then trace their exact coordinates, which he relays to Cantu.

Minutes later, Cantu is tearing through the desert on roads that didn’t exist until recently, allowing him to get to a group of migrants faster and with less warning.

Four illegal immigrants are apprehended and cleared for weapons and drugs. Border Patrol agents empty their backpacks and confiscate the belongings inside them, throwing the men fruit to eat as they sit cross-legged on the ground answering questions.

Cantu says smuggling season is tied to agriculture, and the immigrants say they came from Mexico to work the fields in California. They say they