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A look inside Imperial Beach border patrol

By Larry Knowles

December 12, 2005

Imperial Beach--Imperial Beach Station occupies a niche of territory in the extreme southwest of the United States, a sort of border within the border. It sits a block south of suburbia, where the town of Imperial Beach is laid out in neat gridwork of working class neighborhoods and subdivisions.

It overlooks, from the North, a rugged nomans land, where horse farms and marshes cede to more rugged canyons and mesas along the border. And to the west, it pushes up against Imperial Beach Naval Air Station, the southern-most outpost of the Coronado Naval Air Station.

The processing center at Imperial Beach Station

All the action, ostensibly, takes place at the air station, which is a training ground for helicopter pilots. Throughout the day, helicopters take off and land. The base is concealed behind fencing and the lay of the land. Helicopters emerge from the horizon and dart upward, as though released from penitence. They hover briefly, then dip back below the line of sight. The thrum of rotors, however, is always present.

The nomans land appears more sedate, with its uninhabited swaths of scrubland and marshes along the Tijuana River floodplain. The view, however, is deceiving. It’s here where the action really is.

It’s along this five and a half mile tract of border that Imperial Beach Station apprehends roughly 15,000 aliens a year trying to enter the United States illegally. That averages out to 40 arrests per day, or 1.66 people per hour—every hour, every day of the year.

Apprehending illegal aliens who cross through Imperial Beach plays out like a massive football game. The illegal aliens are always on offense and the border patrol is always on defense. There’s the wall at the border, or line of scrimmage. There are Mexican “guides,” or quarterbacks, who lead their groups across scrubland, or playing field. There are “rabbits,” or wide receivers, who will create diversions by streaking down the periphery. Then there are the thugs who, like an offensive line, throw rocks at the agents and try to muscle them off their positions.

To the left, Mexico. To the right, the U.S.

And like a big-time football game, both sides study each other and come up with a game plan. “We have our posture out there,” says David Brown, Patrol Agent in Charge at Imperial Beach Station. “We wait. We work. We maintain our surveillance out there. The people on the South side, the smugglers, they’re doing the very same thing. They’re watching us. They’re waiting for an opportunity.”

Agent Brown, a solidly built man with silver hair and a neatly trimmed moustache, cuts the figure of a senior border patrol agent. Originally from upstate New York, he joined the border patrol in 1974 for financial reasons, and has been in charge of  Imperial Beach for three years.

The ebb and flow of crossings

The number of people trying to enter the United States through Imperial Beach depends on two factors: season and weather.

Spring is the busiest time of year. Traffic peaks in March, when migrant workers flock to the agricultural jobs north of the border. Winter sees the slowest time of year, with workers migrating south in November and December for the holiday season.

Since people can enter Mexico by walking over the footbridge at the San Ysidro checkpoint, there’re rarely—if ever—any cases of illegal aliens heading southward across the five and a half miles of border at Imperial Beach.

Weather plays a pivotal role in how much action Imperial Beach will see on any given day. The station, with 135 square miles of territory alongside the Pacific Ocean, gets bouts of fog—an advantage for the aliens.

In addition, when the mountainous area East of San Ysidro starts to get snow each winter, immigrants forgo the hard—and dangerous—slog in the mountains for a flatter, warmer foray through the Imperial Beach area.

Referring to activity in the Campo area East of Imperial Beach, Brown states, “You’ll get a couple feet of snow up there on the ground. In fact, I’m gonna say—Has it been three or four years ago, now?—that there were several aliens that they had to rescue out there. They got stranded in the snow.”

“That’s a heavy, wet snow, and it’s kind of slushy. It gets to your clothes and soaks you all the way to the skin. Hypothermia sets in. We did a lot of rescues out there in the East County area a few years back.”

The Tijuana River, which cuts through Imperial Beach, also plays a role in how much activity the station gets. If it’s been a rainy year, the river will flow hard, rising above its channel and flooding the scrubland. Traversing the river at this time can be extremely dangerous.

“We’ve had drownings,” states Brown. “What you see is that people won’t try to cross the river. They will try to cross the river if it doesn’t get too high. The guides will still bring ‘em across.”

“If it gets too high, they’ll start going to other areas to get across, probably the Chula Vista side. They have no river to cross over there.”

Aliens avoid entering the U.S. via the ocean for the same reasons they avoid the Tijuana River when it’s running hard: there’s the possibility of drowning. Also, once a swimmer gets out of the water, they’re, of course, soaked and don’t have a change of clothes.

Imperial Beach Operations

The number of agents working at Imperial Beach is sensitive information. According to Agent Kurstan Rosberg, a public information liaison present at Imperial Beach, the San Diego sector, comprising eight stations, employees about 1,500 people.

“The number fluctuates quite a bit, though,” he adds.

Operations at Imperial Beach are broken into three sections: field operations, transporation, and processing. Agents are trained in all three sections and will rotate through them in a given week. While transportation and processing play an integral part of border patrol operations, it’s field operations that provide the most serendipity.

Field operations entails deploying agents to strategic locations on the border, with the agents typically getting right up on the border and maintaining a highly visible posture. If anything happens, the agents either call for somebody else to apprehend individuals, or they apprehend the people themselves.

“You have various shifts and the people are deployed out in their positions,” says Brown. “And the next shift replaces them. They, in essence, take those positions over and the thing rotates. It goes from nights to days to evenings, and back to nights again. It’s a twenty-four seven operation.”

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