Working the Line

The hidden life of the U.S. Border Patrol

Luis Alberto Urrea, Orion magazine<http://www.orionmagazine.org>

The Border Patrol agent was driving us to supper in a desert border city. Since the publication of my book The Devil’s Highway, I have found myself in this situation with regularity. When I started writing that book, there was no indication that the migra agents would come to consider me their confidant. Even, for some agents, a friend. If you had told me this in my more radical days, or in my Tijuana boyhood, I would have laughed.

It wasn’t late, but the night was already heavy on the land, dropping hard like it does in desert winter. We rode in a late-model pickup—club cab. And the agent was looking up at a railroad bridge as we passed under. “Saw this guy once,” he said, almost to himself. “Three guys, actually. Two on either side, holding up the third. They were staggering down the tracks, you know. So I lit ’em up with my spotlight and got out of the truck.” In my memory, this moment lasts forever. Saguaros splash in our headlights, looking like landscape in black-and-white noir films. He said: “The guy in the middle . . . the train had cut off his feet. But the weight of the train . . . it had pinched his ankles closed. He didn’t seem to know it. He was trying to walk on his stumps.”

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The Devil's Highway ~ Luis Alberto Urrea, Reviewed in LiP Magazine
The Devil's Highway is a strip of deadly desert along the US-Mexico border in a region where, on average, at least one migrant has died every day of the past few years. For the thousands of immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, and even sometimes Asia and Africa who cross the border here, it really is like hell on earth: an endless swath of jagged mountains and blazing stretches of sand, teeming with Border Patrol agents, corrupt police officers, brutal smugglers, scorpions and rattlesnakes, all under a relentlessly cruel sun.