MEXICALI, Mexico — Border agent Jose Luis Maldonado raises his binoculars and scans the desert horizon, looking for would-be migrants making the perilous crossing into the United States.
When he finds them, he doesn't arrest them. Rather, he makes sure that they know what dangers they face and lets them go their way. If they're in trouble, he helps.
Maldonado is one of the veteran agents from Grupo Beta, the decade-old border unit established by the Mexican government to protect migrants as they make their way north to the U.S.
In Mexican eyes, these are not illegal migrants. Rather, they are citizens who might face grave risks while still traveling freely within their own country. Beta officers have the delicate task of protecting migrants without encouraging them.
The officers patrol in beat-up open-air Jeeps and other hand-me-downs, while their U.S. Border Patrol counterparts cruise in air-conditioned Ford Expeditions. There are just 75 Beta agents along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border, hopelessly few for such vast terrain. The United States, by comparison, has nearly 9,000 agents on the border.
In some of the most dangerous stretches of desert along the Arizona border--where 14 Mexican migrants were found dead in a single group of crossers in May--Beta doesn't have any patrols at all.
Yet Beta has won respect from human rights groups and works well with the U.S. Border Patrol.
President Vicente Fox's government plans to add an additional 50 Beta agents in coming months, said Felipe de Jesus Preciado, director of the government's National Migration Institute.
The increase will let Beta agents start covering remote stretches where migrants are increasingly crossing because of tougher U.S. patrols around border cities. To step up protection near the Arizona border during the hot summer, Mexican officials last week announced a temporary deployment there.
Although the agents don't bother migrants, they do arrest people-smugglers--1,500 in the last 18 months, Preciado said.
But their principal task is search and rescue.
One recent day, with the temperature nearing 110 degrees, Maldonado steered his Jeep through a brutal gray-sand landscape about 30 miles east of Mexicali.
The La Salada arroyo doesn't have water running through it, but it has become a human channel. Maldonado said at least one group of six to 20 or more migrants passes through each day. Blue-and-white signs erected by Grupo Beta warn in Spanish: "Caution: Don't Expose Yourself to the Elements. It's Not Worth It."
