All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) operates more than a dozen permanent checkpoints in the Texas borderlands, but this particular one located seventy miles north of Mexico is known as the “chokepoint.” When I visit one sweaty summer morning, agents had already seized 177,657 pounds of illegal drugs there that year.

  “We get more cocaine than any other checkpoint in the nation, and the second most marijuana,” Cabrera says. He is my handler today, a policeman turned Border Patrol agent turned public affairs officer. Flat-topped and mustachioed, he is wearing the trademark patrol uniform of sunglasses and jalapeño greens. “It might seem like we’re in the middle of nowhere out here, but we’re in the middle of everything.”1

  We’re parking his Chevy Tahoe stamped CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION at the checkpoint station. “We’ve gotten a little rain,” he says as he points at the nearby brush climbing nine feet high. “Thank God for GPS. All that brush looks the same. If anybody says they’ve never gotten lost, they’re lying.”

  Three lanes of eighteen-wheelers, buses, trucks, campers, SUVs, minivans, sedans, Jeeps, hatchbacks, and motorcycles line up twenty-deep at the checkpoint, their engines reverberating beneath the canopy. Between the honking of horns and the barking of the K-9 patrol, a migraine seems imminent. We duck inside the station, which has a barebones military feel. Front and center is a cell capable of holding seventy-five people inside its transparent walls. It’s empty at the moment, but a dozen computer terminals surround it as if a scientific experiment were under way.

  “Not too busy, are you?” Cabrera asks an agent with a deep set of dimples.

  “¡Híjole!” he replies. “What are you trying to do, jinx us?”

  More agents file in, the epitome of virility. None are especially tall, but they all seem capable of dropping to the floor and giving fifty. They greet one another in the Mexican fashion (a half-hug with a slap on the back) and smile more than you’d think a Border Patrol agent would. Thirty agents work this station at any given moment, half manning the checkpoint while the rest patrol the highway or the brush. Cabrera introduces me to Yip, the station’s K-9 coordinator, who offers to show me around. We step outside again. The temperature leaps thirty degrees while the noise escalates a thousandfold. Yip laughs at my reaction. “Yeah, it’s pretty chaotic out here,” he says. “Sometimes we wear earplugs.”

  We walk down a lane of traffic, the drivers looking either bored or ticked as they start, idle, stop; start, idle, stop. Neurotically switch lanes. Start, idle, stop. Occasionally, Cabrera says, a driver will “bail” by pulling off to the side of the road so his cargo can bolt. Agents chase after them, radioing their colleagues in the brush to get ready. Over the years, they have apprehended citizens of seventy-two different nations out here, with Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans being the most common. Lately, they have been catching quite a few Chinese, too. It’s always a surprise, as they pay so much for the journey—anywhere from $40,000 to $80,000 apiece.

  “We once found a truckload of twenty Chinese people,” Cabrera says. “We got ten out of the trailer, and then we found another ten right in front. They were pretty sluggish.”

  Smugglers have devised infinitely many (and often deadly) ways of maximizing loads. Human cargo has been found curled inside engine compartments, wrapped around gas tanks, clinging to the undercarriage of vehicles, and cramped inside all manner of containers stacked inside trailers. Once, a man even tried slipping through a checkpoint by being upholstered into the backseat of a van.

  Nodding at a nearby agent poking his head in someone’s window, Yip says, “We have to ask everyone what country they’re from. If they hesitate, we know something’s up.”2

  “And the American public is pretty rough,” Cabrera says. “They always ask, ‘Are you a U.S. citizen? What are you doing here?’”

  I turn to Yip for comment, but he’s taking in the traffic like a farmer surveying crops. Then he whips out a walkie-talkie. “Red Arrow, lane one,” he clips.

  Cabrera raises an eyebrow. “Scout,” he mouths.

  Which means spy, or someone coasting up and down the highway, waiting for a load to get seized so that he can radio his buddies to charge forth with their own cargo while the agents are distracted. No one knows how many traffickers make it through the checkpoint undetected. Some of the agents I’ve met say 5 percent; others shake their head and murmur 50 percent.

  Yip strides back to the station with purpose. Trailing behind, I nearly get sideswiped by a van switching lanes.

  “You have to be alert out here,” Cabrera warns. “Agents have gotten run over before.”

  Back inside the station, Cabrera introduces me to a thirty-something agent named Kooiman. Tall, bald, and competent, he looks brawny but elegant in his combat boots. Sipping from his Big Gulp, he escorts me to a back room so we can talk.

  My goal here is to grasp the motivation behind becoming a Border Patrol agent, a profession that, to me at least, seems ethically questionable, heartbreaking, and dangerous. Considering that an agent’s starting salary can scrape the upper forties and elevate to nearly six figures during a successful career, money is an obvious draw, especially given the dearth of alternatives in the region. But as Todd Miller documents in his book Border Patrol Nation, the CBP has found other ways of ingratiating itself into the public psyche since its formation in 1924.3 It boasts everything from a national museum in El Paso, where the gift shop sells sterling silver Border Patrol badges soldered into crosses, to countrywide youth “Explorer” programs, where recruits as young as fourteen are trained how to track down, handcuff, interrogate, and apprehend simulated “aliens.” Since 9/11, Congress has become an especially big fan of the agency, granting it a nearly $13 billion budget in 2014—more than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. This money has swollen ranks to more than 21,000 Border Patrol agents today (up from 8,500 agents in 2001 and 4,000 in 1994).

  I ask Kooiman why he chose this work. He says he gave college a try but didn’t last more than two semesters because of all the parties. He joined the army instead and served five and a half years, including a tour in Iraq. When he returned home to Texas, he started working at his family’s business but found it couldn’t quench his adrenaline.

  “In the army, you’ve got a lot of camaraderie, and I missed that,” he says. Though he isn’t a fan of Falfurrias—“there are some unsavory characters here, and I’ll leave it at that”—he likes the pace of its checkpoint. “It’s not as fun as chasing people, but you can catch mountains of dope.”

  His personal record is 8,451 pounds, which he found concealed inside a tanker. He had to call the fire department to retrieve it. “It was a suicide load. I talked to the guy and he was real nervous and didn’t make sense. He had $6 million worth of drugs on him, and he was going to get paid $6,000 for it. He didn’t have a criminal history either. He was a black guy, a little slow.”

  When I remark how skilled he must be at reading people, he shrugs. “You stand out there long enough, talking to six people a minute for four hours at a time, and you’ll start to notice when things are off. They might as well be wearing a sign that says ‘I have something in my car.’”

  Like the time he saw a kid who had tattoos all over his face and was dripping in gold jewelry yet wearing a pair of cowboy work boots. “Those boots didn’t make sense,” he says, “it was like he couldn’t bend his toes. So I asked him to take the boots off, and there was two and a half pounds of dope inside them.”

  Leaning back in his swivel chair, he props his own boots on the table. “When you catch a load, you feel awesome, but you also know that guy is just done. I said to that kid, ‘Do you understand how serious this is? Do you know what you’ve done? I hope for your family’s sake they live nearby.’”

  “Do you ever worry about the cartels coming after you?”

  “I’ve never received a death threat, but … you basically steal people’s drugs for a living. It’s not like they’re saying, �
�Oh, it’s okay for you to take my $6 million worth of coke.’ Drug dealers have reconnaissance. They know where a lot of us live.”

  He doesn’t seem terribly concerned about it, though, and I understand why when he mentions that a book was written about his platoon in Iraq called The Long Road Home, by Martha Raddatz. Turns out, he was once caught in a ten-hour attack in Sadr City that killed eight U.S. soldiers—including the son of antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan—and wounded seventy more in 2004.

  But while “danger” is a relative term for Kooiman, he has seen unspeakable violence out here, too. Barely a month into the job, he fielded a call at one in the morning that a woman had been found on the highway, naked and bleeding. She had been crossing the brush with fifteen others when their coyotes—or human smugglers—attacked her, raping her, beating her, and leaving her to die in the middle of a ranch. She somehow made it to the highway, where she was spotted. When Kooiman arrived, she said her five-year-old daughter was still out there. He led a nine-hour search party, but they never found her. Days later, the coyotes called her family demanding $5,000 “or else.”

  “What could they do?” Kooiman says. “They didn’t have that kind of money; they were poor. So they lost her. God knows what that coyote did with that child. Those coyotes are worse than drug smugglers.”

  Other missions have been more successful, like the little Salvadoran girl they once tracked in the brush, “the cutest little thing but completely dehydrated.” For three weeks, they took turns keeping watch on her at a hospital in Corpus while doctors revived her kidneys. She survived and got reunited with her family. Stories like these are why many agents consider themselves lifeguards, out protecting their fellow citizens from criminals and saving the “aliens” from horrible deaths.

  “This is an awesome place and it’s a terrible place,” Kooiman concedes. “I have seen kids throw their life away for a quick buck. Like that guy with two and a half pounds of coke in his boots. He was eighteen years old, going to jail for twenty years, and would serve every day of it.”

  He becomes silent a moment, then perks up. His lunch break is over. There’s dope to find. We shake hands, and Cabrera asks if I’m ready to go. As we walk past the cell at the front of the station, I am startled to see that six people now occupy it: five men and a woman, all dark, slight of height, and thin. An agent questions them through the speaker holes cut in the wall. Cabrera explains that they are Salvadorans who were found in the brush. On the basis of their nationality, he guesses they paid their coyote about $10,000 apiece for their travels here—every centavo lost the moment they were found.

  I ask if I can speak to them. He checks with someone, but no: they could have tuberculosis or hepatitis, and the CBP can’t assume that risk. There is indeed something about seeing humans caged in a cell that makes you wonder such things yourself—until you remember, wait a minute, this is exactly how immigrants have been dehumanized in the public eye for centuries. Notions of being “diseased” caused Jews to be lynched in fourteenth-century Europe and Irish immigrants to be denied so much humanity in nineteenth-century New York that many crossed into Canada nearly naked. Similarly, when an influx of unaccompanied minors starts arriving in Texas from Central America in 2013, Fox News commentators like Dr. Marc Siegel will deem it a “public health crisis,” citing scabies, leprosy, and drug-resistant tuberculosis as points of concern. Fortunately, media like the Texas Observer will quickly point out that—thanks to high immunization rates in their home countries and, in the case of Guatemala, universal health care—these children are probably more likely to have been vaccinated against infectious diseases than Texas kids (16 percent of whom are uninsured).

  On our way past the cell, I try making eye contact with the woman inside. Roughly my age, she has curly hair and is wearing a tattered shirt and pants. She had been pacing the length of the bench, but now she stops to sit on it. Dropping her head into her hands, she rocks back and forth. A man hovers close, but he doesn’t seem of comfort. The others blink with exhaustion as an agent snaps their photos and records their thumbprints.

  Out in the searing sun, an Americanos bus has been pulled over for inspection. Cabrera climbs aboard and I follow. The passengers appear to be Mexican nationals, their belongings stuffed in oversize plastic bags and cardboard boxes tied with string. Anxiety seems to be emanating from their seats, and glancing out the window, I see why. A passenger has been pulled off the bus for questioning. She is middle-aged with dyed red hair, wearing a hopeful blazer. Two agents are interrogating her near a pile of squashed tomatoes. She’s shrinking into the juice.

  One by one, the passengers stare up at me as if I too wielded authority—a sensation my body rejects. After flashing the most compassionate smile I can muster, I hurry down the bus steps, away from this invasion of privacy, away from this obstruction of journey, away from this snooping on fate.

  ACCORDING TO A 2011 FRONTLINE DOCUMENTARY, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set a target of 400,000 deportations per year in the early Obama administration—and achieved it. With ambitions like that, it’s hard not to view these agencies as pseudo-gestapos prone to pounding on doors in the middle of the night and dragging noncitizens from their beds and their children. But because so many agents I meet are Tejanos (like me) whose families have lived in this region for centuries (like mine), I try to empathize with their plight. Besides oil refineries, “homeland security” is one of the few lucrative (yet legal) employment options in South Texas, especially for folks without advanced degrees. If suicide rates are any indication—at least fifteen Border Patrol agents between 2008 and 2010, or nearly twice the national average—the profession extracts an emotional toll. Judging agents solely on the basis of their profession might be as problematic as berating undocumented workers because of theirs.

  These, at least, are the conclusions I draw upon meeting the visual artist Celeste De Luna. A second-generation Tejana who mostly spoke English growing up in Illinois but then got plunked in a Spanish-speaking class because of her skin color upon her family’s return to South Texas, she understands the border’s complexities as well as anyone. She greets me at the front door of her ranch-style home on the outskirts of Harlingen wearing a cardigan over a gray cheetah-patterned tank top and black stretch pants. Maybe forty years old, she has painted her toenails a glittery purple that matches her sequined flip-flops.

  As I follow her into the kitchen, where she prepares two mugs of green tea, I notice her painting Border Saints Fail. In it, La Virgen de Guadalupe hovers behind a local patron saint whose dress has been collaged with a signed-and-stamped WARNING TO ALIEN ORDERED REMOVED OR DEPORTED issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Down the hallway hangs a woodcut print titled Breach Baby that features a fetus inside a belly wedged between a wall and a coil of barbed wire. In a sunlit studio decorated with images of Frida Kahlo and quotes by Sandra Cisneros, Celeste shows me her best-known series: four 2- by 6-foot paintings called Compass. In the one titled South, a Tejana poses by the international bridge arcing above the tree-lined Rio Grande. A Border Patrol agent guards a highway dotted with crosses in North, while East features an ICE agent in the foreground of a sprawling detention center. With a skeletal finger, Santa Muerte beckons viewers toward a parting in the border wall marked West. I immediately fantasize about hanging one in my office.

  As we settle down with our tea, Celeste further complicates her images by sharing how, in early 2000, she encouraged her husband to work for the Border Patrol—despite the fact he entered this country illegally himself, as a young boy fleeing war-torn El Salvador with his family.

  “It didn’t seem that serious back then,” she explains, curling a strand of silky black hair beneath her bandanna. “The Border Patrol would catch people, but they always came back, pre-9/11. It was like a game. But after 9/11, people got psychotic. They became racist in a way I hadn’t experienced before, especially now with Donald Trump.”

  The changing political climate soon seeped
onto her canvases, especially when Congress announced plans to build a wall just a few miles from their home. The palm trees and hummingbirds of her early paintings morphed into today’s agents and saints. In fact, the ICE agent depicted in East is her husband. After deciding he couldn’t “catch people and then throw them back” for a living as a Border Patrol agent, he took a job with Immigration and Naturalization Service instead. But in 2003, INS reconfigured into ICE, and he spent four harrowing years working at “Tent City,” a privately run federal prison in Raymondville that used to house 2,800 undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation.4 Celeste shows me the yellow star she painted behind his ICE badge to symbolize his “survivor guilt.”

  When I ask about the irony of their relationship, Celeste folds her arms across her chest. “I didn’t marry an ICE agent. I married my husband. This happened to us, too. What, so he became an ICE agent, and then I was supposed to divorce him? I used to be caught up in the embarrassment of it, but this isn’t my fault, and it isn’t my husband’s fault either. He sees it as a job, and he wants to do it right and be fair. And it is good to have good people do that work.”

  She pauses a moment, allowing this to sink in, before reminding me that migrants aren’t the only ones trapped in nepantla, the state of in-between-ness that transpires from straddling worlds. Such is the fate of every member of the borderland, no matter what documents we carry.

  “Everybody is caught up in the system together,” she says in a low voice. “You may not be doing law enforcement, but you are still a part of it, too.”

  NOTES

  1. Smuggling doesn’t traverse a one-way street. Approximately 250,000 U.S. guns are covertly shuttled across the border into Mexico each year, meaning we are essentially arming the drug cartels ourselves.