by Alex Gilly
Before she could expand on that, the judge interrupted her with his own train of thought. “And what I want to know is, if Ms. Vega felt so threatened by her spouse, why didn’t she just leave him? She didn’t need to sneak into the United States in the trunk of a car just to get away from him. She could’ve just moved to another town within Mexico.”
“Ms. Vega’s abuser has a reach much greater than most, Your Honor. He’s a high-ranking member of the Caballeros de Cristos cartel. He could get to her pretty much anywhere in Mexico. Internal relocation is not a reasonable option for Ms. Vega.”
“Then why didn’t she just go to the police?”
Mona almost laughed. “Your Honor, the present state of security in Mexico prevents Ms. Vega from having any confidence that the police could or would provide her with adequate protection. Her only reasonable recourse was to leave the country entirely.”
The judge gave an exasperated wave of the hand and leaned back in his chair. “I’m losing patience, Ms. Jimenez. Women are not a group, the defendant’s asylum request is not plausible, and I’m dismissing your motion. You’ve wasted enough of my time already. This is an arraignment, and your client must enter a plea. But before she does,” he said, tipping himself forward, that supercilious smile returning to his face, “I want to make sure she understands her rights. I would hate anyone to accuse me of denying Ms. Vega due process.”
“Your Honor—”
“No, that’s enough, Counsel. Sit down.” The judge told Carmen to stand. He asked her to confirm her name, nationality, and age. Then he said, “Carmen Vega, do you understand that you are facing two years’ incarceration in a federal institution? And that at the end of any sentence you may serve, you will be returned to the custody of ICE, who will remove you from the United States?”
There was a delay while the interpreter did her job.
“Sí,” said Carmen.
“And do you understand that after your removal, you will be banned from returning to the United States for a further ten years, or face felony charges carrying penalties of up to ten years in jail?”
Carmen said she did.
“Then I hope, for your sake, that your lawyer bore all that in mind when she advised you on what to say today,” said the judge. “Carmen Vega, to the charge of illegal reentry after removal, how do you plead?”
Carmen glanced anxiously at Mona. Mona gave her a reassuring nod. Carmen took a breath, straightened her back, and said, “Inocente.”
Unnecessarily, the interpreter interpreted. There followed a long silence.
“The court has noted that the defendant has pleaded not guilty to the charge of illegal reentry after removal, 8 USC 1326,” said the judge in a flat tone. “The court will now set a tentative schedule for trial.” Another long silence while he looked at something on his desk, Mona figured a calendar. Finally, he set a date sixty days hence, saying that was the earliest slot available. Mona knew that sixty days was the maximum delay allowed between arraignment and trial. Judge Ross didn’t need to wait sixty days, she thought. He was doing it to punish her. She stood up.
“Your Honor, given the extraordinarily long delay until trial, we move that the court review Ms. Vega’s bail status,” she said.
“Motion denied. I don’t grant bail to illegal entries, Ms. Jimenez. They just disappear into the population. The defendant can stay at Paradise Detention Center with the rest of them. Be grateful, Counsel; at least there, she’ll be safe.”
“Then I move that the court set an earlier date.”
The judge gave a theatrical sigh. “I wish I could accommodate you, Ms. Jimenez. However, as you can see, mine is a busy court. Sixty days is the earliest I can do.”
Judge Ross brought down his gavel, stood, and disappeared through the door to his chambers. Mona turned to Carmen. The bailiff was already putting the shackles back on her ankles.
FIVE
THE following Monday, Finn got up early, drove over to Torrance, picked up Gomez, then drove sixty miles east on the Riverside Freeway to March Air Reserve Base.
“You call the union?” said Gomez.
“No. You?”
Gomez shook his head.
“I was going to, but then I figured, I’m still getting paid. Why not take it easy for a while out at Riverside? Learn something new. Let things run their course.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Also, I did Taser him. There’s no denying that.”
“You did. Any regrets?” said Finn.
“Hell no.”
They talked shit about Figueroa for a while, then fell into an easy silence.
At March Air Reserve Base, they went through one security checkpoint at the perimeter, then a second one at the AMOC campus located within the base. An agent met them at the security gate. Young and friendly, she introduced herself as Leela. Finn only learned her last name—Santos—from her name tag. From the badge on her arm, he learned that she was a detection enforcement officer. She wore thick-rimmed spectacles and two diamond studs in each ear. He and Gomez followed her into a plain, warehouse-type structure that, Leela informed them, was known as Building 605C.
“605C. Pretty bland name for a place that watches half the world,” said Gomez.
“This isn’t a place that wants to draw attention to itself,” said Leela.
“How long have you been at AMOC?” said Finn.
“A year.”
“What were you doing before?”
“Before I joined CBP, you mean? I worked in retail while I was at college.”
“You went straight to AMOC out of college?”
“Yup.”
“What did you study at college?”
“Computer science.”
Finn nodded. Before he’d joined the CBP, he’d served in the navy’s Maritime Expeditionary Security Force in Iraq during the insurgency, guarding oil terminals from sabotage. Klein was right. Times were changing.
They came to a set of doors that required Leela to use her swipe card. Finn heard the door’s locking mechanism click, and he followed her and Gomez into a vast, dimly lit room.
“Welcome to the AMOC nerve center,” said Leela.
At the far end was a screen maybe eight feet high and thirty feet wide, onto which were projected four separate radar displays. The one in the center covered the entire continental United States. Finn recognized the outline of Florida on the right side of the screen, covered with thousands of moving green crosses. Below the wall screen were several rows of cubicles, along which were arranged dozens of monitors. There were about seventy or eighty people in the room, their faces softly lit by the monitors’ glow. It occurred to Finn that he hadn’t been in a command and control center like this since Iraq.
“So I was thinking I’d start by showing you what I do, then show you the different operations,” said Leela. She led them to her station, which comprised a triptych of monitors in a cubicle. Finn sat down on one side of her, Gomez on the other. Leela typed in a password, and all three screens lit up. She dragged the cursor over a projection of the coast of Southern California.
“So we get data from a bunch of different sources,” she said. “Air traffic control radars, satellites, radar balloons, aircraft like P-3 Orions, and UAVs. My job is to monitor it all and flag anything suspicious. This here, for example, is a satellite feed.”
Finn looked to the screen she was pointing at. He saw dozens of little green crosses moving across a digital map of the sea off Long Beach.
“It’s usually busier than that,” said Gomez.
“That’s only what the satellite’s showing us. If I add all the shipping data, it looks like this.” Leela clicked a checkbox on the menu on the right of the screen, and dozens more crosses appeared—vessel identifiers broadcast from transponders aboard cargo ships. Finn saw that most of the new crosses were crowded into the fairway leading into the Long Beach container terminal.
“And then I can overlay air traffic over all that,” said Leela, checking another box.
Instantly, hundreds of red crosses appeared, clustered into the corridors leading into the various airports around LA. Now there was so much happening on the screen that it was almost impossible to read. He pointed at the jumble of dots and crosses.
“You can pick something suspicious out of all that?” he said.
“Sometimes. I look for signature behaviors. Like, for instance, if a plane veers outside its flight path, or a ship stops far out from the coast. But most of our useful maritime data comes from visuals. I usually check them before I flag anything for interception. Especially if the vessel is too small to pick up on radar or satellite.”
“Visuals from planes, you mean?”
“Sometimes. Although we’re using UAVs more and more. Like this.”
Leela typed, and an aerial view of the sea appeared on one of the monitors. Finn could see sailboats from above.
“This is live,” said Leela. She pointed at the sailboats. “We can’t see anything that small from satellites. That’s why the UAVs are so useful. Unlike regular aircraft, they can stay in the air for twenty-four hours.”
Finn pondered. Every intercept they’d made over the past three months had been that small. He looked around the room. “What’s its altitude?”
“Overland, the FAA says it has to stay above nineteen thousand feet. Overwater? Whatever we want. We usually cruise at five thousand feet.”
“Who’s flying it?” he said.
“The UAV operators. They work in crews like in real aircraft. One to fly the UAV, one to operate the cameras and sensors.”
“Where are they?”
“They’ve got their own room, just down the corridor. We call it the drone den.”
“Can we see it?” said Finn.
He detected a moment’s hesitation before Leela said, “Sure.”
* * *
Leela led them to a door with a sign on it that read UAV GROUND CONTROL. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. NO FOOD OR DRINK. Her swipe card didn’t work here. She had to knock.
The door swung open, and a tall young man stuck his head out, saw Leela, and smirked.
“Leela,” said the young man, drawing out the vowels—Lee-laa—and touching his tongue to his lip on the middle L in a way that struck Finn as discourteous, at best. Leela gave the dude an icy look. She turned to Finn and Gomez.
“This is Agent Nader. He operates the UAV’s sensors,” she said.
Nader glanced from Leela to Finn and Gomez. He scanned the badges on their uniforms. “You the guys from the Long Beach station?”
Finn nodded.
Nader held open the door. “Welcome to the den, gentlemen,” he said. “Please, step inside. You, too, Lee-laa.”
Finn, Gomez, and Leela entered the room. Nader shut the door behind them. It was a small, musty-smelling space crowded with equipment: screens and dials, keyboards and joysticks. In front of the controls were two large, padded, tilting chairs, not unlike La-Z-Boys. The space struck Finn as part flight simulator and part computer-game lounge. One of the two chairs contained a young man wearing a headset, holding a joystick, and drinking a can of Rip It energy drink, which he presently perched precariously on the control panel in front of him in order to give a wave to the visitors. Nader introduced him as Harrison Sperling.
“Harrison flies the aircraft. I’m the eyes,” said Nader, sitting down in the empty chair. Finn, Gomez, and Leela stood at the back.
The two largest screens in front of the operators showed the same bird’s-eye view of yachts crisscrossing a square of sea that Leela had shown them in the command center. The yachts’ sails cast long, triangular shadows on the water. Finn saw the numbers on the screen giving the UAV’s navigation data: airspeed, ground speed, altitude, heading. The drone was at five thousand feet, as Leela had told him. The resolution was extraordinary. As the drone traveled, a peninsula appeared at the top of the screen. Finn instantly recognized the round structure of Catalina Casino.
“Pretty cool, huh? You ever seen anything like this before?” said Nader.
“We had drones in Iraq.”
Finn figured neither operator was old enough to have served in Iraq.
“Not like this one,” said Nader, who seemed annoyed by Finn’s response. “The MQ-9 Predator drone. Costs $16 million. The cameras alone cost two and a half million bucks. They’re amazing. Watch this.”
He hit some dials, and the screen started zooming in on one of the yachts in Avalon Bay. Finn kept expecting the resolution to diminish, but it stayed sharp. Soon he could count the number of people in the cockpit. He could see that the man at the wheel was wearing a blue hat. Nader kept zooming. A woman wearing a bikini was sitting with her legs up in the yacht’s cockpit. Nader zoomed in on her breasts.
“It’s a blue-sky day.” Nader smirked. “Great visibility. Even from five thousand feet.”
“You’re not authorized to monitor U.S. citizens,” said Leela.
“You think she’s a citizen? I can’t tell from this angle,” said Nader.
Finn thought about what Klein had said, about scraping the bottom of the recruitment barrel. If this was the best that the CBP could attract to fly aircraft worth millions, the agency was in trouble.
“Explain to me why you’re flying over Catalina,” said Finn. “I’ve patrolled that sector for ten years. Traffickers don’t go to the islands. They head for the mainland.”
“I like the view,” said Nader.
The pilot, Sperling, was more circumspect.
“Mostly, we preset the trajectory,” he said. “Then we let the plane fly itself. That lets us focus on looking for any signature behaviors—overcrowded vessels, evasive actions, traveling dark, that kind of thing—that we can signal to you guys out on the water.”
“How do you determine the trajectory?” said Finn.
“It depends on a number of factors,” said Sperling. “We know traffickers like to be over the horizon when they cross the sea border, out of sight of land. We know they like to time it so that they start coming into shore under the cover of darkness—that’s another consideration. Add into that all the FAA’s regulations and airspace controls—we can’t put the drones in the way of airport approaches, for instance, and we need to stay above and below certain altitudes—as well as weather forecasts, and you start to get the idea. We can’t cover everything, so we try to cover a different sector each sortie. Anything to increase our chances of finding people doing things they shouldn’t be. We come up with a flight plan, then we discuss it with the operations director during the briefing. He has final say.”
SIX
MONA was so busy with other work, she didn’t manage to get out to Paradise again until almost three weeks after Carmen’s arraignment. Mona didn’t need to go, but she felt close to Carmen. She wanted to show her a friendly face.
She set off early, with a mug of coffee and a pack of doughnut holes. She had the radio playing. A few miles outside Paradise, the hourly news bulletin came on. The big story that day was that the president had nominated Michael Marvin, the CEO of the Border Security Corporation of America, to head the Department of Homeland Security. The news bulletin carried a sound bite of the president: “Michael’s a businessman, like me. He’s someone who knows how to get things done. We need someone in charge of Homeland Security who knows how to deal with these people.”
Mona switched off the radio. These people. It was getting hot, so she turned on the AC. The vent started rattling. She reminded herself to get it checked out. The car was long overdue for a service.
Finally, she pulled into the detention center lot. Although she hadn’t seen a snake, she still checked the ground before opening the car door. Once she was sure it was all clear, she grabbed her briefcase and a Nordstrom bag from the passenger seat and made her way to the entrance.
Thanks to Operation No Return, the private-prison business was booming. Yet more people had arrived at PDC since Mona’s last visit, and to accommodate them, the center had erected a hangar-sized tent in the yard. Whe
n Mona asked the guard if the tent was heated—in the desert, the temperature dropped to thirty degrees at night—he shrugged. “We give them blankets,” he said.
She sat down and waited at the table where she’d first interviewed Carmen.
When Carmen appeared, Mona barely recognized her. She’d put on more weight than Mona thought possible in three weeks. Her skin was blotchy, her hair dirty and unkempt, her eyes devoid of the river-stone gleam that had struck Mona the first time they’d met. After just a month in detention, her features had coarsened; her nose and ears seemed larger, and her eyes farther apart, as though she’d aged a decade. She reminded Mona of a drug addict nearing bottom—the dead look in the eyes, the bad skin. Incarceration ought to come with a health warning, she thought. Not only was prison food disgusting, it was unhealthy; Mona had pulled up next to a man unloading catering supplies from a truck. She’d seen him forklift off a fifty-five-gallon drum of cooking oil and had pictured the giant fry cookers inside the detention center kitchens, all the lumps of cheap, preprepared foods sputtering through them. No wonder Carmen looked the way she did. I should’ve brought her some fruit, Mona thought.
“I haven’t been feeling well,” said Carmen, as though reading Mona’s thoughts. “The toilets overflowed again. Everybody’s getting sick.”
“Did you ask to see the doctor?” said Mona.
Carmen hesitated. “Yes. He gave me some medicine.” Then, changing the subject, she pointed at the tent and said, “Did you see that? Fifty more people arrived. They told me 150 more are coming. But they didn’t build any new toilets. Two hundred more people using toilets that are already overflowing? No es posible.”
It was depressing to hear the emptiness in Carmen’s voice. Mona tried to sound cheery.
“I brought you a present,” she said. She placed the Nordstrom bag on the picnic table, hoping its contents wouldn’t be too small. “It’s to wear in court. The first impression you make on the jury is vital. I thought this might be appropriate.”
Carmen opened the package and unfolded the dress it contained. It was a conservative long-sleeve number that fell below the knee. Mona had told the sales assistant she wanted something she could wear in church.