“If you would have visited 11 years ago, it was like a scene out of a movie,” said Mario Escalante, a Border Patrol agent who used to work in the Douglas area but has since moved to the headquarters in Tucson. “We were overrun. People were coming across in groups of 30 or 50 or 100 or more. We were catching thousands of people a day.”
As darkness fell on this border town in the southeast corner of Arizona, the radio inside Mr. Escalante’s Chevrolet Suburban indicated the different reality that now exists — with illegal migration down, but not out.
“Three bodies approaching the fence,” an agent reported over the radio in clipped language, using the Border Patrol slang for migrants.
“TBS,” the same voice said, reporting that the three potential crossers were now “turning back south.”
There were radio reports — all of them encrypted to keep smugglers from listening in — of people on the Mexican side climbing up the fence and peering over, only to shinny back down when they spotted the authorities.
Potential crossers were seen carrying a ladder to the fence, only to retreat once the Border Patrol made its presence known.
A night with the swing shift in the Douglas area, which used to be one of the major crossing points in Arizona, illustrated the cat-and-mouse nature of catching crossers, the permeability of the much-ballyhooed border fence and the fact that, no matter the dire rhetoric often heard in political circles, crossings at this stretch of border are nowhere near what they once were.
The radio traffic talked of “ones,” which are single crossers, and “twos,” pairs of people hustling over the fence and making their way north, and occasional “threes.”
The large groups that Mr. Escalante recalled as a junior agent were not spotted.
Fencing is part of it. Douglas used to have a modest barrier right around the port of entry. Smugglers took drugs and migrants around the edges and just ran north, playing the percentage game.
Over the years, the fences near Douglas and along the rest of the border grew in both length and height, with the United States trying various materials, among them recycled scrap metal from the military, mesh and the steel beams used today.
Some older-generation barriers blocked the view of Mexico, but the Border Patrol found those frustrating because agents could not see the migrants amassing on the other side. The new generation of border walls allows one to see across, and even reach across, into Mexico, permitting the Border Patrol’s surveillance to begin even before prospective migrants set foot on American soil. Such openness has its drawbacks though, since drug smugglers are now suspected of passing contraband across from Mexico to the United States.
Although 21 feet high in some stretches and designed to be difficult to scale, the barrier can be overcome, sometimes with ladders or ropes and sometimes by just holding on tight and climbing.
“When you say ‘wall,’ I say ‘fence,’ ” said Mr. Escalante, who grew up along the Texas border but has spent the bulk of his career in southern Arizona. “When you think wall, you think Berlin, China. You think of a big structure you can’t get across.”
The young man the authorities say was caught with the marijuana had approached the fence with two others. A package was hurled over. Two of the three people were seen turning back south. There was confusion among the agents over the whereabouts of the third man.
Agents in SUVs scrambled over the area in search of him. Agents on foot sought to cut him off at the pass. Agents on all-terrain vehicles swarmed the rugged wilderness farther along, where he would probably be headed.
Finding him was both a high-teach exercise and a low-tech one. Agents used flashlights to look for footprints in the dirt. They also dragged a device behind their vehicles to smooth out the ground and make it more obvious if someone crosses on foot. Sometimes there was confusion, as agents radioed one another to ask what the imprint was like on their boots so they did not waste time tracking a colleague.
The smugglers know all about these techniques. The young man who the authorities say was caught with the drugs had booties over his sneakers, the soles made of fluffy cloth so as to leave minimal tracks. “You like them?” he asked the agents, who stared down at his feet after arresting him in a thicket about a mile from the border.
He did not know it, but he probably would have been caught no matter what he was wearing on his feet. He was picked up on an infrared tracking device installed in a Border Patrol vehicle. An agent saw him clear as day on a monitor inside the vehicle and called out instructions to the pursuing agents, who were working in pitch dark. “You just passed him,” the agent called out to his colleagues. “He’s under that tree to your right,” he added. Eventually, the suspect was cornered.
The man was somewhere around the 325,000th illegal crosser apprehended along either the Mexican or Canadian border in the fiscal year that ended last month, the authorities said. Back in 2000, when Mr. Escalante was patrolling the line, 1.6 million people were caught trying to enter the country illegally, and an untold number got away. Over that period, the number of agents has more than doubled, which means these days that sometimes it may be six or eight agents pursuing a single crosser.
“When you get one person and he says: ‘You’re everywhere. It’s getting hard to get across,’ that’s what you want,” said Mr. Escalante, clearly relishing a break from his desk job as the agency’s spokesman for a night at the border again. “That one person could, once they are sent back, change the minds of many.”
