Sunday, April 24, 2011
Los Angeles Times
SAN LUIS, Ariz.
The border fence ran right in front of Jeff Byerly’s post, a straight line of steel that stretched beyond town and deep into the desert. As a U.S. Border Patrol agent on America’s front line, Byerly’s job was to stop anyone from scaling the barrier. Hours into his midnight shift, his stare was still fixed, but all was quiet.
He pounded energy drinks. He walked around his government vehicle. On the other side of the fence, the bars in the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado closed, and only the sound of a passing car broke the silence. Byerly, 31, switched on his DVD player. Minutes later, a supervisor knocked on the window: The slapstick comedy “Johnny English” was on; Byerly was fast asleep.
Wild foot chases and dust-swirling car pursuits may be the adrenaline-pumping stuff of recruitment efforts, but agents on the U.S.- Mexico border these days have to deal with a more- mundane occupational reality: the boredom of guarding a frontier where illegal crossings have dipped to record-low levels.
Porous corridors along the 2,000-mile border do remain, mostly in the Tucson area, requiring constant vigilance. But beefed-up enforcement and the job-killing effects of the great recession have combined to reduce the flood of immigrants in many former hot spots to a trickle.
Apprehensions along the Southwest border overall dropped from 2000 to 2010, from 1.6 million to 448,000, and almost every region has lonely posts where agents sit for hours staring at the barrier, watching the “fence rust” as some put it.
“When the traffic stops ... of course it’s going to be difficult for the agents to stay interested,” said Supervisory Agent Ken Quillin, from the agency’s Yuma, Ariz., sector. “I understand guys have a tough time staying awake. ... They didn’t join the border patrol to sit on an X,” Quillin added, using the slang term for line-watch duty.
To stay alert, agents are encouraged to walk around or take coffee breaks. Some agents play video games on their mobile phones or read books. There are agents known as “felony sleepers” who intend to slumber — bringing pillows or parking in remote areas — but most dozers are victims of monotony who nod off despite their best efforts to stay awake.
In the agency’s San Diego sector, where apprehensions are at their lowest since the early 1970s, a supervisor last year was caught dozing in his parked vehicle by a television news crew. In the agency’s busiest region near Tucson, agents have been left glassy-eyed amid a steep drop in activity. “When you go from 700,000 arrests in a sector to 100,000 ... of course boredom is going to settle in,” said Brandon Judd, president of the local border patrol agents’ union, using approximate apprehension figures.
Perhaps no area has more action-starved agents than the Yuma sector, a vast expanse of desert and agricultural fields straddling California and Arizona that shares a 126-mile border with Mexico. In 2005, it was the border’s most trampled region, a place where immigrant rushes, called banzai runs, sent hundreds of people into backyards and lettuce fields, and teams of drug smugglers shot across the Colorado River atop sandbag bridges.
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