Lots of Equipment

One of the things I have noticed on my drive is there is a lot of equipment on the road and in the area placed by border patrol. Driving along on the highway and I am passed by SUVs or trucks with a special cab on the back for imprisoning persons for transportation. In one place I passed a border patrol truck on the side of the road with two little all-terrain vehicles in the back. I have to admit it looked like it might be fun to race over the desert on a little ATV!

On the morning of Friday, May 8, when I got on the road in Douglas, Arizona, I drove downtown to see what there was to see of downtown and that did not take long. The main drag runs North/South, so I took a left turn at the end of the main street and I was then paralleling the border. There was an orange-pink set of traffic barriers on my right, then a ditch or arroyo, then a path, then the border fence which is, as you can see, a nicely constructed one with posts and ten foot tall parallel steel slats. Straight ahead one can see the monitoring tower, and to the left is a camera like the traffic cameras at home.

When I first turned left there was a one ton flat bed truck with special equipment mounted on the back, and it was pulled up at one of these light pole units that are placed along the left curb of the street as the orange-pink barriers are placed along the curb at the right. I think that the white box on a trailer at the based of the light pole is a generator. And this one ton truck was devoted to the maintenance and refueling of these generators on a regular basis. I was sorry that I had not thought to drive this route the night before, because I am sure that the presence of these several portable light units with their accompanying generators made for a dramatic lighting effect accompanied by the sounds of portable generators. I know a little of what that noise is like from the occasional power outages in the Rock Island. As a regular thing I suspect that it gets pretty tiresome. As I looked through the steel slats of the fence I noticed fairly new residences on the Agua Prieta side in Mexico.

Here I am pulling out of a parking lot and the vehicle right ahead of me was BORDER PATROL. Probably over time that I would become desensitized to all the presence all around of these law enforcement officials. Maybe I would get to know some of the officers at church or at the local eatery. But as a visitor, a foreigner to these parts, it was fairly overwhelming.

This last photo is of the parking lot at the new Border Patrol facility at Sonoita. According to my little AAA guide Sonoita has a population of 826, one motel, the Sonoita Inn which they have not evaluated, and one eatery, the Cafe Sonoita. The facility looks like one of the steel out-buildings which are placed on farms in my area, only bigger. That is a lot of vehicles in the parking lot. When we were given a tour at a Border Patrol station several years ago we were told that each officer is able to buy the sort of vehicle he likes and then it is "his." This means he can leave his stuff in the car next time he comes on shift. So I think these cars in the parking lot represent all the officers who are not on shift at this time. That would also mean that there are several other officers and vehicles that are in the field.

On the one hand I imagine that all this infrastructure, vehicles and personnel means investment in this area that seems pretty beat down and poor. The family income in Hidalgo County in Southwest New Mexico is a little over $20,000 per year. The national average is a little over $40,000 per year. At the same time I imagine all these guys relocated here from other parts of the nation have some impact on the community that is not so desirable, also.