Guardians of the line [US Border Patrol]

The U.S. Border Patrol could add up to 10,000 agents in the next five years. The training this sometimes-controversial agency requires can seem brutal, and the job can be deadly. So who would sign up for work like this?

ARTESIA, N.M. - On Independence Day 2004, Pedro Infante was driving through Mosul, Iraq, manning a 50-caliber gun atop a cargo truck, when an explosion hurled shrapnel into his helmet.

A year later, Infante is here in another desert, training for another dangerous and highly politicized job: working as a Border Patrol agent in Southern Arizona, the nation's hot spot for illegal immigration.

Infante, 28, has joined an agency whose mission was elevated on Sept. 11, 2001, and whose staffing around Tucson swelled sixfold in the past decade. He has also entered an organization bedeviled by high-profile corruption cases and beset by low morale, according to employee surveys.

No other U.S. law-enforcement agency makes as many arrests, and the repeated capture of the same migrants crossing a porous border might dissuade some from joining up.

Not Infante. "The way I look at it, it's job security," he says with a smile one day in his Spartan barracks.

But it's no laughing matter for Infante during 19 weeks of running, boxing, shooting, driving, handcuffing and book-learning in Artesia. In many ways, Infante finds the academy tougher than Army boot camp.

"In the military, when you're going through a class, they pretty much give you the answers for the test," he says. "Out here they don't teach you the test."

One afternoon of training leaves him in agony. Infante does jumping jacks to open his pores and get his heart pumping before an instructor fires pepper spray into his eyes. He then must subdue a heavily padded pseudo-attacker by whacking him with a rubber baton.

Infante is part of one of the largest staffing increases in the Border Patrol's 81-year history.

He is one of two trainees the Arizona Daily Star was allowed to follow through the academy in Artesia. Agency officials were present for all interviews.

By the end of 2006, the Border Patrol expects to field 12,600 agents - a 51 percent increase since 1999. All new agents will be deployed to the Southern border; most will head to the Tucson, Yuma and El Paso sectors.

The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act calls for adding 2,000 agents in each of the next five years, subject to funding. Even if staffing remains the same, the agency must replace the 5 percent of agents it loses every year to retirement and other jobs.

Around Tucson, billboards have sprung up to advertise the openings. In the next year or two, the Border Patrol plans to start running paid advertisements on television and radio to help entice tens of thousands of people to apply for the new jobs .

Agency critics question whether the need for more bodies on the border has led to a lowering of standards - a charge also made during the force's expansion following a 1996 immigration-reform act.

Background investigations were once done by the FBI, but more than a decade ago they were transferred to the Office of Personnel Management, which in turn contracts the job out to a private firm. That remains a sore spot for the union that represents Border Patrol agents.

"People are slipping through the cracks that possibly should have never been hired," said Mike Albon, spokesman for the union's local chapter.

Border Patrol officials deny that charge. If an applicant's history includes arrests, convictions, job dismissals, financial problems, alcoholism or drug use, they "most probably will be rated unsuitable for this position," the agency says.

As proof of their selectiveness, officials note that for each trainee entering the academy, 29 others have been excluded in the hiring process. Most drop out before the initial exam.

The Border Patrol's minimum age for trainees has been 18 for at least two decades , but applicants must have either a bachelor's degree or "substantial" work experience. "Kids" is how academy instructors often refer to their students, but many are in their 30s. Only 3 percent of current agents are younger than 25.

Infante's class is the 592nd to go through the Border Patrol's academy, but one of the first to receive basic training in Artesia. Incoming agents used to be educated in Glynco, Ga., or Charleston, S.C.

The first thing you notice approaching Artesia, population 10,553, is the smell of the gas refinery, the biggest employer in town. Artesia lies in southeastern New Mexico, between Roswell's extraterrestrial trappings and Carlsbad's caverns, but otherwise offers trainees little in extracurricular activities. That can be a plus, veteran agents say, since the seaside town of Charleston had plenty of bars where a trainee could spend too much time.

But in congressional testimony in May, the agents' union argued Artesia is "less than ideal" because its remoteness discourages instructors from relocating there. The Border Patrol says the move has been cost-effective and lets agents train in a desert environment similar to where they'll be deployed. Putting one agent through the academy costs taxpayers $23,000.

The academy is a former college campus, and it retains a hint of academia when agents role-play in Spanish class or highlight textbooks on immigration law. But Artesia is more like boot camp: trainees muster and march, polish boots and belt buckles, and say "yessir" to just about everything.

As soon as an incoming class gets off the bus, a sort of hazing ritual begins as instructors bark at the newbies to unload their luggage and line up.

"You're taking too long! You're moving too slow!" they scream like drill sergeants.

Each class begins with 50 students, but by the end of the 91 days of paid training about one-quarter are gone - either by choice or because of failing a test. Anyone who misses 24 hours of training is dismissed, even if it's due to illness.

"Two to five come in during the first couple of weeks and say, 'This isn't for me,' " says Clark Messer, a training operations supervisor.

Messer addresses a class on its first day: "Can you pull your firearm and take the life of someone else if absolutely necessary?" he says. "If your value system says you can't do that, you're in the wrong place."

"Can I work outside on the southern border, by myself, with my partner three or five miles away and do the job?"

There will be no tolerance for misbehavior in Artesia and beyond, Messer tells the trainees.

"Everything you do from this point on is looked at through a different set of glasses," he says. "You're going to be a federal agent 24 hours a day, whether you like it or not."

Within their first day or two at the academy, trainees take a three-hour course on "officer integrity" that stresses the ethics of the job and how corruption will tarnish the agency's image.

"From the time they get off the bus, they're under scrutiny and under the microscope," says Rodney Hall, a supervisor of Infante's class. "We can lay out all the rights and wrongs, but ultimately it's the individual choosing whether to do right or wrong."

A young Jack Nicholson faces that moral quandary in the 1982 movie "The Border," soon after he becomes an agent in El Paso.

"Seems kinda silly, don't it?" Nicholson's partner and neighbor says after they finish processing poor migrants. "We're busting our ass to send 'em back and respectable business people are paying to bring 'em in."

Nicholson, struggling to support his spendthrift wife on an agent's salary, rejects an offer to help smugglers, but his entire sector appears to be on the take.

In reality, the number of corrupt Border Patrol agents is "relatively small," said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas-El Paso who studies smuggling issues. "But we don't know how many people aren't caught," he said.

Uncovering corruption is tough, he said, because an agent may do little to help smugglers.

"Literally looking the other way for five minutes could be enough to get a load in," he said.

The hiring process is meant to filter out those with criminal histories or intentions. But most corruption involves agents who come in to the Border Patrol without ulterior motives, Campbell said. Problems arise when agents start living in border communities where drug trafficking is so prevalent.

"In general, the problem is in the circumstances," he said. "It's not necessarily that the Border Patrol is hiring a lot of bad people."

At least 20 employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection were arrested, indicted or convicted of crimes from April 2004 through March 2005, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General.

The Border Patrol, whose motto is "Honor First," can't monitor what its agents do 24/7. But on the job, agents are subject to repeated radio checks and "that constant monitoring dissuades people if they had any intentions," agency spokesman Salvador Zamora said.

No one detests a bad agent more than an upstanding one, officials say, and many cases of corruption have been exposed by others in the agency.

The curriculum in Artesia centers around Spanish, the law, driving, firearms and physical techniques, such as handcuffing and using pepper spray.

About half the trainees know some Spanish and many, like Infante, are fluent. But everyone must endure 222 hours of class time. This strikes some trainees as foolish. After a mock vehicle stop goes awry, one student bluntly suggests that less time be spent teaching Spanish to native speakers and more time be devoted to practicing the dangerous scenario. It's a rare moment when authority is openly challenged in Artesia.

Zamora said he also thought the practice was odd when he was in the academy in 1994. But midway through the program he realized that forcing everyone to go through the same training "is about building a team." The agency also wants all its agents to know the same terminology and dialect.

"We get trainees from Michigan, Minnesota and New York that have never been exposed to the language," instructor Raul Rodriguez says.

Language teachers also discuss cultural traits that can bail an agent out of trouble. Instructor Rich Plaatje says one agent can control dozens of border crossers by "getting the oldest male to buy into your agenda" because the culture of Latin America respects elders.

"The big misperception," he says, "is law enforcement is all this TV tough-guy stuff. There's a lot of soft skills involved."

Legal training focuses on determining a person's nationality and immigration status, plus search and seizure rules. For Infante, this is the toughest part of the academy.

"There's so many years, so many dates, so much stuff that people can do to get kicked out or let in," he says.

Driving has become the most dangerous part of an agent's job and accounts for half of on-the-job deaths since 1970. At the academy, trainees are taught how to negotiate curves while speeding to emergencies and how to recover their vehicle from a skid.

There's also an obstacle course for SUVs, Jeeps and Hummers that cost $500,000 to build - seemingly an exorbitant price when you see it but worth every penny, officials say, if it saves just one life.

"We get people from urban areas who are used to mass transit," driving instructor Robert Wickham says. "We have people here who have just gotten their license and who have very little driving experience."

"The majority have never touched a firearm before," instructor Donald Wilkinson says. By graduation, however, they'll be qualified to fire a shotgun, 40-caliber handgun and an assault rifle similar to an M-16.

"The last time I shot a rifle was at someone in Iraq. When I picked up the handgun, I couldn't hold it steady," he says.

Firearms instruction includes a sort of video game. Scenarios based on real-world incidents play on a big screen and trainees must decide whether to shoot a laser at the actors.

Some are easy calls. While backing up local police - a common occurrence - an agent enters an abandoned building and finds a drunk, 300-pound motorcycle gang member yelling, brandishing a shotgun and attacking with a knife. You shoot or you die. But in a subsequent scenario, an unarmed border crosser darts across the hall to cower in a room. Hold your fire.

In perhaps the most chilling scenario, an elderly woman in a bonnet pulls up to a checkpoint, calmly hands over her driver's license, then suddenly pulls a handgun from her pocketbook.

The academy also pays locals to serve as role-players in exercises that are the capstone of the training. Artesia native Israel Torres, playing a cocaine smuggler dressed as a bird hunter, says some trainees "seem like they've been doing it for years."

Other students don't come off as well. One forgets to turn off his lights and drains the battery of his SUV. In another scenario, trainees cuff a suspect but open themselves up to false-arrest charges because they don't ask for his name and nationality.

Still, the "arrested" role-player, Javier Salinas, says the trainees' treatment is better than he received from actual agents six months ago. Salinas says he was "searched like a criminal" near El Paso after a drug-sniffing dog became suspicious about his vehicle.

"I know what the real world is," Salinas says, "and these guys are doing it a lot better."

Infante graduates with the second-highest grades in his class, which has been whittled down from 49 to 37 students.

Ten days after leaving Artesia he's in Nogales, the nation's top station for drug arrests. One of Infante's supervisors, Steve Poligala, says the 34 miles of border around Nogales is so busy that two or three years there is worth double that time in other stations.

Infante's native Brownsville, Texas, is also a border town, but it has grass, trees and the Rio Grande separating the countries, not a big metal wall. His wife, Rosana, nearly cries because of the culture shock.

The couple, with three young children, struggle to find housing, but eventually decide on an apartment for $700 a month. Many of his colleagues will make the daily drive from Sahuarita or Green Valley.

Infante's field training will continue for months. He'll be on probation for two years and take make-or-break tests in law and Spanish at seven and 11 months. But he now has the tools and power to enforce the law.

"It's no longer a controlled environment," senior patrol agent Robert Sanchez tells him. "This is the real world: real bullets, real bad guys."

pass rate for oral interview, drug screening, fitness test and background investigation.

cost of agent's training, equipment, vehicle and first year salary and benefits.

It may take more than a year between someone applying to the Border Patrol and their first day of training. Some of the requirements:

-Passing written exam that tests logical reasoning, plus ability to speak Spanish or learn the language.

-Ability to do 20 push-ups in a minute, 25 sit-ups in a minute and five minutes of stepping on and off a foot-high platform.

-In 1919, Mounted Watchman Clarence Childress was shot to death near El Paso. In 2004, agent George DeBates died in a vehicle accident west of Tucson. In between, 95 other Border Patrol employees have been killed on the job.

Before 1930, 14 agents were shot to death by crossers, typically liquor smugglers defying Prohibition. Since 1970, seven agents have been strangled, shot or stabbed to death; half of the 44 fallen agents died in vehicle accidents.

The murders include the 1998 shooting of agent Alexander Kirpnick near Nogales, and a grisly 1967 case of two agents abducted by marijuana smugglers, shackled together in a mountain cabin in Southern California, then shot to death at close range as they lay on the floor.

Fewer Border Patrol agents may be murdered today than in decades past, but nonlethal violence appears to have increased in recent years, especially in Southern Arizona. From fiscal year 2004 to 2005, the number of assaults on Tucson Sector agents more than doubled from 118 to 246; nationwide, the assaults increased from 354 to 687.

It is difficult to determine if Border Patrol agents face greater risks than other law enforcement because the agency is typically lumped with other departments in studies - a problem compounded by the merging of agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.

When the Department of Justice studied assault rates on federal officers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service - former home of the Border Patrol - ranked second behind the National Park Service for the 1997-to-2001 period.

-Two recent surveys of Border Patrol agents and others in the Department of Homeland Security revealed low morale and doubts about their effectiveness.

In 2004, the National Border Patrol Council surveyed 500 of its union members and found:

-Only one-third were "very satisfied" or "fairly satisfied" with the tools, training and support needed to do their job.

-Half said the practice of stationing agents in fixed positions was "not at all effective."

Border Patrol officials, however, dismissed the study as biased, noting that a small fraction of employees - all union members - were interviewed.

Earlier this year, a far larger, government-run survey ranked the Department of Homeland Security last in worker satisfaction among 30 Cabinet departments and federal agencies.

...The U.S. Border Patrol could add up to 10,000 agents in the next five years....

Never happen while Jorge is El Presidente.

5 posted on 11/27/2005 9:09:11 AM PST by Lurker ("Son, there's only two things you need in this world; love and a .45.")

In 5 years, Jorge will have all the illegals he wants
anyway. We don't have 5 years. Hell, we don't have 5 months!!

Protect our borders and coastlines from all foreign invaders!

Support our Minutemen Patriots!

Be Ever Vigilant ~ Bump!

Border Patrol uniforms made in Mexico

Lawmakers also worry that unscrupulous gang members might help sneak terrorists into the country if the price is right.

"Who's going to miss a few dozen uniforms?" said Bonner, the union president. "That could be very dangerous to the agents. You see a uniform, and you assume that's one of the good guys."

10 posted on 11/27/2005 4:01:49 PM PST by B4Ranch (No expiration date is on the Oath to protect America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.)

This is terrible reporting. The article is about the Border Patrol which has approximately 11,000 agents. Customs and Border Protection has over 44,000 employees, so there is no way to tell how many BP agents were involved in corruption during this time frame. I would be surprised if it were more than 3 to 5.

12 posted on 11/28/2005 9:09:00 AM PST by usurper (Spelling or grammatical errors in this post can be attributed to the LA City School System)

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