A costly game of cat and mouse unfolds nightly along the banks of the Rio Grande in South Texas. The number of immigrants crossing illegally there has doubled in the last four years, making it the busiest section along the Southwest border.
As night fell outside Mission, Texas in late August the Rio Grande looked deceivingly peaceful under the glimmer of a full moon.
Suddenly through a pair of night vision goggles, a Border Patrol agent spotted movement. He picked up his radio. “Ey, can you tell what’s on the raft,” he said.
On the river ahead of him a mother and her two infant boys floated across on a raft. She scampered onto U.S. soil, but her taste of success was brief. She was apprehended and ended up in the back seat of a Border Patrol suburban.
The woman had traveled from Guatemala. She told the Border Patrol she was on her way to reunite with her husband in the United States. Her fate will now be a detention center and likely deportation.
This year, Border Patrol has detained nearly 200,000 people from Del Rio to Brownsville. While apprehensions across the southern border are at record lows, South Texas is the one spot where the numbers are rising again. “We could apprehend anywhere between 100 and 200 a shift,” said Mark Foster, a Border Patrol supervisor. “On the weekend its very hard to get all the incursions dealt with, with the manpower that we have.”
In response to the increased traffic the Border Patrol is shifting more manpower and resources, like night vision technology and mobile towers, to South Texas. By the end of this year the Rio Grande Valley Sector expects to have 600 more agents.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbclatino.com ...
