By SEAN ROBINSON
Tacoma News Tribune
October 06,
2002
- Somewhere in one of Washington's lonely places, a barbed-wire gate leans open, surrounded by sagebrush.
Three gray sticks hold it together. One is loose. On it, two words appear in faded black ink. The farmer who wrote them knew where he stood:
CANADA/USA.
U.S. Border Patrol agent Richard Graham pulls at the stray post and talks to himself.
"I thought for sure I wired this son of a gun up," he says. Swiftly, he wraps a strand of metal around the post to hold it in place.
Someone crossed through here recently, someone who walked from one nation to another as easily as stepping off a curb. Graham has no idea who.
He has no fancy cameras on towers to help him, no rows of houses with watchful neighbors who keep half an eye on suspicious foot traffic.
Here in this empty land, he works alone, aided only by instinct, experience and a trained eye that picks footprints out of the dust.
Graham is the agent in charge of the Border Patrol station in Oroville, a town of 1,653 in Okanogan County, Wash., about 3 1/2 hours west of Spokane. Along with a small contingent of agents, he guards 100 miles of border between Canada and the United States - 50 of them in wilderness where only horses and hikers can travel.
At a time when America's fear of terrorist infiltration has never been higher, he is responsible for more ground than his agents can cover.
He is an optimist - confident in his agents, proud of their efforts to corral border-jumpers who haunt this remote outpost. But he knows it's not enough.
"You can only do so much," he says.
As of spring 2002, the Border Patrol had 346 agents assigned to the 5,525-mile northern border: one agent for every 16 miles, including the vast stretch of rugged land that marks the entrance to Alaska. Conversely, the Border Patrol assigns 9,094 agents to the 1,989-mile U.S.-Mexico border: an agent every 1,000 feet.
"Obviously we're outmanned," Graham says.
He will not say precisely how many agents work in Oroville. Since Sept. 11, 2001, INS officials have refused to say how many Border Patrol agents work in each of its northern border stations.
However, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse, N.Y., a research organization that monitors staffing levels at the INS, FBI and other federal agencies, says the number of agents assigned to the northern border has grown by only 15 people since Sept. 11, 2001.
While drug smuggling always has been the Border Patrol's biggest headache in Eastern and Central Washington, the Sept. 11 attacks fueled darker fears of terrorists crossing into the United States from Canada, using that country's friendly immigration policies to concoct new identities.
The list of suspected terrorists who have used Canada as their base of operations includes Ahmed Ressam, arrested at the Blaine crossing in December 1999 with a trunk full of explosives and a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.
News reports from Canada show other suspected terrorists tied to Canada include Armine Mezbar, an Algerian accused of having ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and Nabil al-Marabh, who may have played a role in coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks.
From Canada, the United States is only a border crossing away. The Border Patrol and immigration agents at ports of entry are the only defense.
In 2001, 5.3 million vehicles crossed the Canadian border into Washington, carrying 16 million people, according to statistics from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Typically, the INS searches exclusively for immigration violations. The agency does not arrest people at the border unless agents learn of an active warrant and alert another law enforcement agency, said Bob Okin, deputy district director of Seattle's INS office.
U.S. and Canadian officials have announced plans to improve security along the border. The Bush administration and the Canadian prime minister recently released a 30-point "Smart Border" plan to address security issues, much of it revolving around greater sharing of critical information.
The plan includes new buildings and technology upgrades at key border crossings and shared customs and immigration officers at connection points between the two nations.
Canada will issue permanent resident cards for new immigrants, and the two countries will share information on individuals seeking asylum in either country. Both also plan to track the movement of air travelers deemed to be high risk.
In Oroville, agent Richard Graham can't say terrorists have crossed in his sector. He can't say they haven't.
Occasionally, immigration inspectors who work at the border entry will call to tell him that Arabic or Middle Eastern people have crossed - sometimes carrying cell phones and global positioning systems.
They can't be stopped when their papers are in order. They can't be profiled just because of their appearance. There's nothing illegal about visiting Oroville, though Graham sometimes wonders why anyone would. The town isn't that exciting.
Visitors come to town, go to the store, go to the gas station. They drive the lonely roads along the border - areas marked by farmer's fences or nothing at all.
Smugglers follow the same pattern: They stop at spots along the border, wait for a confederate to hop in and then drive away. Agents stop people then - if they see them.
"It's a mad monkey scramble," Graham says. "What are they up to? I don't know. They drive back and forth, back and forth - when do you stop them?"
Lacking the resources for 24-hour surveillance, his agents rely on frontier guile. They might place a loose post near a fence at a certain angle, like leaving a hair in a keyhole.
If it's disturbed the next time they visit, they know someone has crossed. Or something. One recent jumper turned out to be a wandering bear, who ripped a post from the ground to get at the anthill underneath.