Years ago, I remember an Agent telling the following joke. Two postmen meet in the middle of their routes and start talking. They’re having a good long chat when one of them spins around and looks down at the sidewalk. There’s a slug on the sidewalk and the postman curses, then crushes the slug under his foot. The other postman asks, “Why did you do that?” To which the first postman says, “That bastard has been following me around all day.”
I thought that was funny, but not entirely accurate. I usually get my mail with no problem (although, I get way too much junk mail).
In the Border Patrol, as with a lot of law enforcement, it was a different matter. To a certain degree a cop on patrol or a frontline Border Patrol Agent is his own boss. He can go out into the field, find a hiding place, and sleep through his shift. Trust me, it’s been done before. I can remember when I first started out in the patrol and I was riding with a senior Agent. We left the station late and, instead of rushing south to the border. We went north to a field where they fly remote control aircraft, one of his hobbies. It was night, the graveyard shift (midnights) and he promptly went to sleep. There I was wide awake for hours while this guy happily slept through the entire shift.
We called Agents who never made arrests “slugs” or “sandbaggers”. In Mexican slang, what we call a slug, they call an oppossum or, in Spanish, zarigüeya. Don’t ask me to pronounce it. I tried once and I dislocated my tongue. We had one Agent at McAllen whose nickname was zarigüeya. We had another Agent nicknamed “Steak and Eggs” because he would always go to breakfast on duty. They were trying to catch an illegal alien runner once and the alien was trying to make it back to Mexico. His last obstacle was Steak & Eggs, and the alien ran around S&E like he was a parked car. (No, Steak & Eggs was not thin).
I remember one night being parked on the levee near the Hidalgo Bridge. I was to the east of the bridge and faced in its general direction. Suddenly, in my side mirror, I saw a silhouette trying to crawl over the drag road behind me. The illegal alien was in between myself and where another Agent was parked. The other Agent was closer, so, I radioed him to start towards me and we would sandwhich the illegal alien between us. That Agent didn’t move at all. He claimed he couldn’t see anything. Which I knew wasn’t true. I could see the alien from my side mirror and the other Agent only had to look out his side window to see the alien. Due to the narrow road, I had to execute a 12 point turn to get pointed back in the right direction and by the time I got to where the alien had been, he was gone. Because I was supposed to be parked on an X pulling guard duty, I radioed some other Agents to try to find where the alien went, but no one showed up.
I remember one of our better Agents telling me about this one guy who everyone knew as slug and an ass kiss. The Agent was telling me, “The Border Patrol for him is all sex and violence.” I was shocked, “Are we talking about the same guy? He hasn’t made an arrest in years, and he’s not exactly handsome either.” He responded, “Sure it is. It’s f***ing the government, and killing time.”
Another time, one of my friends on the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department told me they called certain police officers “Road cops”. Me, “Road cops like they’re always out on the road making traffic stops?” Him, “No, as in Retired On Active Duty, R.O.A.D. cops.”
On the northern border, we had one Agent who had not made an arrest in over a decade. He was ordered to do a train check at one point. This is where you ask passengers for their citizenship. He was part of a team doing the check and he walked straight down the aisle of the train cars without looking at the passengers or questioning anyone. You have to wonder why some people get into law enforcement at all and especially immigration law enforcement if they did not believe in the job.
When I was in grad school in the 90s, I remember learning that a small percentage of police officers were responsible for the majority of arrests. In one study from 1974, 8% of police officers accounted for over half of all arrests. “A federally funded study of police operations in the District of Columbia shows that fewer than 10 percent of the police officers there made more than half of the arrests that resulted in convictions.” In my experience, the same thing was true in the Border Patrol. It was a few certain Agents that wound up being the stars of the station and making the majority of arrests. Sometimes these Agents were known as “shit magnets” because they were always getting into some kind of fiasco. The supervisors knew they were likely to get into something resulting in long hours of paperwork.
The slugs loved to say, “Big cases=big problems. Small cases=small problems. No cases=no problems.” They would use that as an excuse to do nothing.
Of course, not all Border Patrol Agents are slugs. If that were the case, we would have even more illegal aliens running around all over the place. We do have our Gregory Bovino types who get out there and do make arrests.
I bring this up because one of my friends recently made supervisor. Unfortunately, he didn’t do the hiring for the crew he has under him and that crew is apparently full of slugs. For a while, at least on paper they were making arrests because they have a good rapport with the local police officers and the locals were giving them a lot of illegal aliens from what we call “Other Agency” (abbreviated O.A.) calls. However, now, I.C.E.’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (E.R.O.) agency has doubled in size. These are the guys who used to be called Deportation Officers. (E.R.O. can also be referred to as D.O.s). The D.O.s are doing all the O.A. calls (gotta love acronyms).
As a result, the Border Patrol Agents aren’t doing much. They are content to be passive and wait for a call to come in from an O.A., but they aren’t going out there on the hunt. My friend got the supervisor position precisely because he was the type to be proactive and go out onto the streets to try to identify illegal aliens. This usually involves running license plates or hanging out at convenience stores in an unmarked vehicle.
So, the question becomes how to motivate Agents to get out and make arrests. Yes, they do get overtime already, but many of them are not motivated by that. Apparently, they feel fine with the amount of money they already make. It’s also difficult when you have a whole crew of unmotivated Agents. It’s different if you have one slug and a bunch of hard chargers. Oh, and they do have civil service protection and a union. So, getting rid of deadwood is not easy.
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As I write this, I took a short break and noticed that ICE Agent Christian Castro is languishing in Cameron County jail while Minnesota Attorney General Ellison is trying to extradite him back to Minnesota to face charges for shooting an illegal alien in the leg during an arrest. It sounds like Castro was patriotically carrying out his duties and not being a slug when he wound up in trouble. I’ll have to make a separate article on that.
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders" & "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century". Books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as Thrift Books.
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
