"I talk to a lot of Mexican families and they tell me there’s going to be a revolution in Mexico soon."

Ian Dryden

San Ysidro is a small, predominantly Chicano section of San Diego that sees more illegal aliens than any other community in the country. The “Chula Vista Sector” is what it is called by the ^border patrol, the agency charged by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with enforcing the border.

Last year, the Chula Vista Sector captured 198,000 illegal “wets,” as they call them. They unpridefully say that they catch only one in every four who try to cross.

And so every night, rain or shine, whatever the conditions, they come through San Ysidro, looking for a better life.

“It’s gotten really bad in the last three years,” says Bob Moore, one of 45 border patrol agents patrolling the Chula Vista Sector. “I don’t know why, but it has.” Moore is young by patrol standards; at 25 he is the youngest agent working the Chula Vista Sector. He likes the work because it keeps him outdoors. He is blonde, fair-skinned, and like the other agents, carries a .357 Magnum on his hip.

“We have people who do nothing but work on the fence. The wets cut it open faster than we can fix it.”

Ian Dryden

“Well, this is just hearsay, you understand, but I talk to a lot of Mexican families and they tell me there’s going to be a revolution in Mexico soon and they want to get out before it happens. A lot of them feel that the United States is going to crack down on illegals soon, and they better get in now while they still can.”

While talking, Moore drives along Dairy Mart Road, named for the farm it services. It runs parallel to the International Border, the part of it called the “west side.” On one side of the border are Tijuana’s slums, pressing against the 12-foot-high fence that separates it from the neatly manicured farms that a few Green Carders (those who are allowed to cross and re-cross the border. Between the fence and the farms is what is called “the line.”

“There’s a lot of funny stories about that area to your left,” Moore says as he points to a canyon entrance that leads up to the line.

“Not too long ago a couple of customs agents were up there and decided to get a pair of binoculars out of their car’s trunk. They decided to take a leak and while they were standing there, two guys jumped out of the bushes and threw two duffel bags full of marijuana into the trunk, thinking it was a load car.”

They call the area “Smuggler’s Gulch.” For years it’s been a traditional smuggler’s trail—whether people or contraband. Only now the Gulch, like other well-known trails, contains body sensors—first developed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. But instead of calling in bomb strikes, they call in border agents like Bob Moore.

Moore continues driving. “Yeah, the sensors really work. We did have a problem with them at first, couldn’t read them. An animal or a plane will set them off. But we’ve got it down now.”

He wheels the car down a dirt road. After a short, bouncy ride we are parallel to the fence. “We have people who do nothing but work on the fence,” he says, inspecting the partially camouflaged openings. “The wets cut it open faster than we can fix it.”

At dusk, we are sitting on a mesa overlooking Colonia Libertad, a poor section of Tijuana. Libertad sits opposite the mesa on the southern slope of Spring Canyon. Directly below Libertad, on the U.S. side, the people have built a playground and a soccer field. No fence separates the border there. All along the line groups of aliens are massing, waiting to begin the trip north. Below them lies a maze of trails and canyons that criss-cross in a thousand places, then lead out of sight over the hills.

“It’s really impossible for us to enforce this border.” Moore says reflectively, looking down on the scene. “At one point we decided to concentrate on one small pass, over there.”

He pointed to a dirt road, once just large enough for a car to drive through, now bull-dozed over by the patrol. “We put every man and every machine we had on it— caught 500 of them in four hours.”

The people of San Ysidro try to live with this influx of aliens passing through, so to speak. Most of the residents are of Mexican descent and many of dubious nationality. If they hold anything against the illegals it’s that they bring La Migra—the name for INS and its many enforcement arms— into their barrios. Many people, especially the young, remember when the kids walked out of Southwestern Junior High in demand of more relevant courses last year.

“La Migra and the local police began going around to the ring leaders’ houses and asking the parents for their papers,” Lio Nunez, a local activist said. “Could you produce papers proving you were a citizen? A lot of people can’t, especially many of the old people. They hold that over a lot of Chicanos here.”

Lio has lived in San Ysidro all his life, all 26 years. His father maintains a tiny garage adjacent to their house, a small three-room place where Lio’s parents and his five brothers and sisters live. Across the street from their home is an abandoned shack, a favorite stopping place for illegals who are on their way into San Diego. They will wait there until the city bus comes and makes its stop, then scurry out of the shack and onto the bus. InsideThe shack someone has written with spray paint along the walls, “Welcome Amigo.”

Lio laughs at what he calls the “hypocrisy of the border.” “U.S. corporations are allowed to go to Mexico where the cheap labor is, what you call your runaway shops, but the Mexicans aren’t allowed to come here to work. But illegals work all over in this country, in the worst jobs. As long as they remain ‘illegal,’ or, in other words, underground, they will remain unorganized. This is what La Migra does—it keeps people underground.”

Jose Nunez, Lio's younger brother, sees the illegals in another light. “The coyotes (those who transport illegals across the border), they are heavy dudes,” he says with both respect and disgust in' his voice. “Talk about organized crime, they make a lot of money off those mojados (wetbacks).”

Jose won’t mention names, but he talks about how a few coyotes have the traffic tied up. “It’s real organized. They got people who find the aliens in Tijuana and take them to the runners. Then they got people who don’t do anything but drive the illegals out of town.

“There’s about ten, maybe twelve, big coyotes that control the whole thing, drugs too ... . ”

After showing me some of the foot trails, and telling a few people around San Ysidro he was helping a reporter, Jose was jumped and beaten in a canyon by three men who told him that he had better keep his big mouth shut.

But it is La Migra that many people of San Ysidro find the most offensive, perhaps partly because they don’t deal with the big heads of the smuggling rings. Only the smaller tentacles like their neighbor who might run illegals for a living or the guy down the street who does it to make a car payment.

Others remember La Migra for different reasons. The local Farmworker Union members remember the strike four years ago against Ghio Farms during the peak of the tomato harvest. They still talk about how INS started issuing Green Cards in large numbers. flooding the area with a legal influx of farm labor that broke the strike.

Not all of San Ysidro’s Chicano population finds fault with the border patrol or its attempts to regulate the flow of aliens. San Ysidro’s Mexican-American middle class complains that not enough patrolling is done in their neighborhoods, that the aliens ruin crops by trampling their fields, and that it isn’t safe around San Ysidro anymore—not even in their own homes. One man recently exchanged gun fire with what he assumed was a band of aliens, who thought the house was unoccupied and were planning to rob it.

A.B. Chapman, head of the Chula Vista Sector for the border patrol, leaned back in his chair. “Actually it probably was what we call the banditos, or outlaws.” Chapman is retired Navy, 20 years’ worth, and his face shows the ruddy complexion of years at sea.

“These gangs, from both Mexico and the United States, operate in the hills and canyons, robbing, and in some cases killing illegals. They’re young kids really, the oldest one we’ve caught has been eighteen; the youngest has been thirteen. They’ve killed three or four aliens in the past vear. They carry revolvers and knives. A lot more aliens are starting to carry weapons to protect themselves from the banditos.”

The area the banditos like to operate in is the east side, below Libertad. In the maze of trails and deep canyons they will lay in ambush for the alien packs. Local people say many of the gangs have arrangements with the coyotes not to hit certain packs (theirs). Instead, the banditos will hit “freelancers.” or another coyote’s packs.

When asked if the border patrol is getting into more firefights, Chapman answers, “Well, it’s not getting any safer. But we haven’t lost any men since 1967. That was in San Clemente (California). A couple of agents were checking out a lead and came upon four illegals in a motel room. The aliens over-powered them and handcuffed them to the stove, then shot them in the head with their own guns.”

Frank Medina, a border patrol agent, is from San Clemente. He remembers the incident very well. A short, black-haired Chicano with a long, serious face that pulls into a perplexing grin when he is trying to make a point, Medina is planning on getting out of the patrol as soon as the country’s “temporary recession” is over.

“The money we make is good,” he says, “nineteen grand a year. But you have to think about safety. A lot of guys are getting out because of the lack of it. Between the aliens, the drug smugglers and the banditos, we’re in big trouble out there.”

Medina, although both he and Lio Nunez grew up as poor Chicanos and are the same age, sees the alien situation a bit differently from Lio.

“It would be nice if the United States could take care of the world like it is trying to, but we can’t. The problems are in their country, not ours. It’s not our fault those people have the government they do, it’s not our fault they tolerate their government.” We are sitting in the San Ysidro Safeway parking lot while he is telling me this. People are swarming the market, those close to us look into the car with hard stares. Medina gets the shy-little-boy look on his face when he is about to make a point. “You can see how well we’re liked around here,” he says.

“I could walk down this street right now and pull out a couple of aliens but it would be like sending one policeman into a riot—I’m not going to do it.” Medina pulls out of the Safeway and down San Ysidro Boulevard. He points out the fence dividing the freeway to our left.

“See all those.places where it’s cut? Aliens. See that Jack-in-the-Box? That’s where smugglers park their cars to wait for nightfall. See that hill behind those shops? At night it is teeming with illegals.” He talks disgustedly, like a man on a treadmill, going around in circles.

“They’re better organized than we are,” he says regarding the coyotes. “They can have a lookout in one of those houses,” he points to the Tijuana side of the border, “who can see every move we make. They can see our substation and how many cars there are. They watch us go out and come in. They watch us at the-gas pumps. They see three cars go out. ‘There’s one on the freeway, that leaves two.’ One heads east and the other goes towards Imperial Beach, which is north. ‘It’s past, let’s go.’ It’s that simple.”

At night, it all begins. The banditos have already moved down into the canyons. The aliens are poised along the line, waiting for their coyote to move them out. The border patrol is prowling the roads and hills, waiting for a sensor to direct them to the first packs, or a spotting to send them into action.

Looking through an infra-red scope, patrol agent Bob Moore spots a group of five illegals. “I’m going to lay them down,” he says. He starts racing down a dirt* road parallel to the field the aliens are in. He quickly turns on his car lights and the aliens fall to the ground, hoping not to be seen. Moore gets on his radio and calls in a support unit. He stops the car and gets out, looks through the scope, and says, “There they are, directly in front of us, they look like black spots.”

The support unit pulls in. “I’m going to try and stop them from running south.” Moore says. He starts running, crouched over like his prey, talking to the support unit via walkie-talkie while he moves. He pulls up, then starts to walk north slowly. He moves behind the pack and in Spanish tells them to stay where they are and put their hands behind their heads. No movement. He tells them again, this time more forcefully. They obey. Moore pats them down and starts them towards the car.

As the aliens are marched into the headlights of the cars I can see their faces for the first time. The youngest is around sixteen, the oldest in his late forties. All move quietly and seem resigned to being captured. They are dressed in thin slacks, worn shirts and sweaters. A couple have coats on. the others are obviously cold in the chilly night air.

They are ordered to sit on the ground while the agents begin the paperwork. One by one they are processed. Name, place of birth, age. One agent leans over and says, “It’s just lies we’re writing down, they wouldn’t tell us their real names.” They know they’ll be taken over to the holding tank and kept there until the morning, then released back into Mexico.

One of the aliens, an older man, is asked where he was going. He answers he was going to Escondido, a town in the northeastern corner of San Diego County.

“More and more of them are heading for the smaller, out of the way places where there aren’t as many law enforcement authorities to catch them,” the agent says.

The paperwork is almost over and a transport vehicle comes into sight. One of the agents who has been looking over the field with th,e scope says that he has spotted a large pack moving north to our right. He jumps in the car and the other agents begin moving south as soon as the first group is safely in the transport bus. “It’s 20, 25 of them.” Suddenly a spotlight goes off and floods the field with light. Like cockroaches, the illegals start rushing for the darkness. They fan out in several directions, knowing that the border patrol can only follow some of them.

About a half-hour later the agents meet back at the cars. Their haul: eight aliens. This group is predominantly young. Some have long hair and a couple are wearing cheap, but stylish, platform shoes. They are told to place their belongings in front of them. Not one has over 15 dollars. “If they are caught and they have 55 bucks on them, we fly them deep into the interior. If they have $18 we give them a bus ride to Mazatlan, about 1200 miles towards the tip of Baja. But not many are stupid enough to carry that kind of money,” an agent explains.

Meanwhile, another agent is questioning the oldest of the group. “When is the last time you were in this country?”

“I was a bracero.” he answers, referring to the farm labor program that ended in 1965. “I haven’t been in the U.S. since then.”

He is wearing a straw hat, the kind that many farm laborers wear. His face and hands look worn from years of stooping over in fields drenched in hot sun. As he tells the agent of the last time he was here there seems to be a slight twinkle in his dark, deep eyes.

Along the line, from the Pacific Ocean to where the last sensor stretches eastward, thousands of people like these illegally enter the United States: mostly men, but more and more of them are women; mostly Mexican, but more and more Central and South Americans; mostly working age, but more and more of all ages.

San Ysidro is their first look at the United States. They use the Golden Arches of McDonald’s and the huge “76" gas station sign as beacons to guide them in.

It’s late now. The ground fog has settled in over the town and the border. The runners who were at the Jack-in-the-Box earlier have left for their runs to Los Angeles, Fresno, Yuma and Las Vegas, or half a dozen other cities across the Southwest. The streets of the town are quiet except for an occasional alien moving on foot towards San Diego, or the rumble of a souped-up lowrider cruising. The border patrol is responding to only sensor calls now. The only illegals trying to get across are traveling blind, without a coyote, and they stick to the main trails.

Moore starts to drive back to the Chula Vista Sub-Station. “It’s all a big game. After a while it begins to get .ridiculous. We catch them, then release them the next ' day so they can try it again. The locals have so little respect for the border they’ll jump the line just to go have a beer. The other day 1 stopped a guy in a suit carrying a bouquet of flowers. ‘Where you going?’ I asked him. He told me he had to get to a friend’s wedding in San Diego.”

Moore pulls into the sub-station parking lot. A group of women illegals are getting into a transport vehicle to be taken to Sybil Detention Center for Women in Los Angeles to be held for formal deportation hearings.

“Yeah, I think there’s going to be a revolution down there soon," Moore s voice breaks the silence. “Then San Ysidro's going to need a concrete wall around it to keep it from getting run over.”