Some illegal immigrants are gutsy — or foolish — enough to try sneaking through one of the legal ports of entry here.
Every week, authorities encounter between 80 and 100 immigration violations at these gateways, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Some people use phony documents. Others are impostors carrying stolen U.S. identification.
Thousands of pedestrians and vehicles pass through the gateways every day. On one recent morning, the Paso del Norte Port of Entry buzzed with chatter. Radios squawked. Scanning machines beeped. Long lines of men, women and children streamed across a bridge from the Mexican city of Juarez.
As officials gave an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and photographer a tour of the entryway, a federal officer in a blue uniform quietly directed a drug-sniffing dog through the crowd. Other officers scanned identification documents with machines that show whether people are wanted for crimes. Lastly, they instructed visitors to send their bags through a metal detector.
The officers often rely on something else to ferret out trouble: their gut. They search for things that look out of place. The bilingual officers ask in English or Spanish: Where are you going? What are you bringing with you?
“A lot of the times they will make a major seizure or an arrest and it was just on the little feeling they had,” Ruben Jauregui, a chief Customs and Border Protection officer, said as dozens of morning visitors queued up behind him.
Jauregui said the work is personal for him and his colleagues. He lives in El Paso with his wife and children.
“When you are the officer on that primary lane, you can’t allow anything bad to come across because if anything comes of that, how can you live with it?” he said. “It is professional, but it is also personal. This has got to be the front line. We have got to stop them here.”
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