The Border Patrol has come under attack so often from a variety of human rights and environmental groups that agency officials seem to take most controversies in stride. "We have detractors," Garza says. "A lot of the stuff is smoke."
But when the fire comes from agents' smoldering frustration, Garza finds it harder to take. Learning of criticisms by his personnel, the normally genial chief growls, "I'm very disappointed that anyone who works for me would be making statements like that."
John Suval
Luis Serrato stops in Reynosa en route to the "famous American dream."
John Suval
Agents in Falfurrias find themselves "getting killed" by a shift in migrant traffic.
John Suval
The troops gather before another dead night on the line in Brownsville.
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At 2 a.m. Chris Ramnes pours himself a second cup of coffee, but it's hard to imagine him needing to be more alert. On the day his daughter was born, Ramnes witnessed a car flip over and land in a canal. He jumped in, saved three of the four passengers and still made it to the hospital in time to witness the birth.
Even on this quiet night on the line in Brownsville, Ramnes, who has the square jaw of a leading man, has managed to get his uniform muddy. He seems eager for the dynamic life he imagined when he left the Frankfort, Kentucky, police to join the Border Patrol.
Like other agents, he finds good things to say about the agency, especially the $56,000 he earned last year. He knows plenty of people who would love to earn that kind of money without working too hard. Ramnes thinks often of the illegal farmworkers he toiled beside in the tobacco fields of his youth, men who won his respect by always being the first to show up in the morning.
"This is the American dream here, but it isn't for me," he says. "I want more for myself…I want the job the recruiting film showed me." He hopes to start a job with the Department of Energy in August.
The Border Patrol cannot afford to lose people like Ramnes. The agency has fallen well short of meeting Congress's goal of 1,000 new agents a year. Garza says that nationally the Border Patrol will hire a mere 430 new agents this year. He alone wants more than that to bring his domain under control.
Union representatives say that Brownsville, which has less than a quarter of the sector's agents, accounts for 70 percent of its attrition. Since Operation Rio Grande began, 147 agents have left the station, according to Avery. Brownsville has been able to reverse those losses with an influx of new personnel. A result, however, is greater inexperience.
Border Patrol officials maintain that neither Brownsville nor the McAllen sector has an attrition problem, although they were unable to furnish specific data. Supervisor Herb Monette admits that agents sometimes get bored but insists that morale in Brownsville is fine.
"I don't think we have a major morale problem here," he says. "If we do, I'd like to have a chance to respond to it before we get blindsided by a newspaper article."
What supervisors call manning an area of responsibility, agents call "sitting on an X." Both refer to what has become the signature duty of Operation Rio Grande: sticking to a specific area to deter or detain migrants. For management, agents are the vital nuclei of these cells; agents feel more like prisoners.
The grueling 20-week academy they all struggled to complete barely made mention of this sort of passive duty. "False advertising," in the words of Charlene Posey, a 24-year-old agent from Alabama.
"I'm getting paid good money to sit here and not do my job," grouses a seasoned patrolman. "I think it's important for [taxpayers] to know how their money is being spent."
Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies says that strains between management and labor are only exacerbated by the country's "schizophrenic" immigration policies, which couple tougher border vigilance with minimal interior enforcement.
"The people sniping at each other are missing the point…They've been handed this absurd situation that they are supposed to somehow deal with," he says. "The problem comes back to Congress…which makes immigration policy."
Sylvester Reyes has tackled immigration issues from both sides -- as a former Border Patrol chief in El Paso and McAllen, and today as a U.S. congressman. He says that lawmakers are considering a sweeping new guestworker program at the urging of the agriculture, construction and service industries. Reyes believes that the renewed effort to legalize more foreign laborers shows that Operation Rio Grande and similar campaigns are successfully blocking the supply of illegal labor.
That would certainly be true if the whole Southwestern border shared the same deep quiet as Brownsville on this humid night. But cat-and-mouse skirmishes between officers and migrants are playing out across the vast frontier, even as agent Jeff Wagner sits parked on the levee road here, reading Popular Science magazine.
The South Carolina native pauses to reflect that the United States could militarize from Port Isabel to San Diego and desperate people would still find a way in. For now, most just skirt the blockade in Brownsville in their quest for opportunities. Wagner may follow in their footsteps. He had intended to make a career with the Border Patrol, but after just three years he's looking to get out.
"The challenge I was looking for just isn't there," he says.
