The Gate- Keepers

Travel Bans. Threats to Dismantle Daca. The Wall. Since Taking Office in January, President Donald Trump Has Kept Immigration a Hot-button Issue. As the U.s. Border Patrol Reels From Reports of Sexual Misconduct by Male Agents and a Tepid Campaign to Recruit More Women, Sasha Von Oldershausen Goes Behind the Scenes of Life on the Border

- Sasha Von​ Oldershausen

At a windswept rest stop along Highway 10, located between Van Horn and El Paso, Texas—some 18 miles from the U.S.–Mexico border—we are looking for “sign.” That’s Border Patrol–speak for physical evidence of human disturbance in the crumbling West Texas dirt. In this instance, the sign is three sets of footprints. “Two prints made by boots, and the third looks like cheese graters,” radio the agents who first spotted the prints south of our location.

Diana Martinez, a 24-year-old U.S. Border Patrol agent who works in the Big Bend Sector, radios back that we’ve caught sight of the “cheese grater” soles, but not the other two. This is protocol: Multiple agents assemble at different points along a line of footprints and leapfrog one another until they intercept the path of the prints’ owner. Sometimes, the markings are nothing more than those of local residents. Other times, they lead to no one. But once in a while, the agents find what they’re looking for: undocumented people crossing the border illegally or drug-toting smugglers.

Two other agents follow the prints behind a line of barbed-wire fence several yards from the rest-stop bathrooms. Moments later, a voice crackles over Martinez’s radio: “We got them.”

The agents emerge from the squat mesquite brush with three 30-something men: two wearing boots and one in canvas sneakers. The trio had traveled nearly 300 miles over nine days through the Chihuahuan Desert from the town of Delicias, Mexico. They had arranged to be picked up at the rest area, but when their ride never came, they camped out in the brush, just yards from the highway.