US Border Agent says job is misunderstood, villainized

When Vincent Vargas was training to be a Border Patrol agent in 2009, he was shown a video of two Mexicans desperately trying to enter America by swimming across the wild Rio Grande River.

One person drowned trying to save his friend, who panicked so badly that he accidentally pulled the man trying to save him under.

The video was gruesome.

Both men drowned only five feet from land and from a group of screaming friends who couldn’t swim. 

“I was frustrated beyond words watching this video,” Vargas writes in “Borderline: Defending The Home Front” (St. Martin’s Press). “I told myself that I would never be able to watch someone drown if I could help it.”

With his new book, he aims to dispel some of what calls “grossly offensive and intellectually dishonest” misconceptions about border guards.

“Most Americans have a view of the US Border Patrol from what they might see on TV or online, but this is a false narrative,” he writes. “The Border Patrol has been misunderstood, vilified, criticized, and politicized by both supporters and detractors. It has been compared to organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and even the Waffen-SS.

While many assume that border guards are “a bunch of racist individuals not wanting to allow anyone in the country, that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

One night, Vargas dove into the Rio Grande to save a migrant but was helpless as the current pulled the man under.

“I have rescued a few handfuls of people, I don’t remember their faces,” he writes. “But I do remember this young man’s face.”

The border between the United States and Mexico extends to almost 2,000 miles, across mountains and canyons, deserts and rivers.

In places, it can be one of the most inhospitable places on earth but, as Vincent Vargas explains, it is also one of the deadliest. 

According to US Customs and Border Protection, more than 8,000 people have died trying to cross the border since 1998 and, as Vargas notes, 35 Border Patrol agents have lost their lives in the line of duty in that time. 

“Guarding our borders can be a hazardous undertaking that, sadly, can result in the death of these agents,” Vargas writes.

From the birth of the agency in 1924 to the wide and varied array of its present-day missions, the Border Patrol is, writes Vargas, “part of that thin green line, that borderline, where battles are fought daily between the opposing extremes of life and death, justice and villainy, peace and chaos.”

Vargas served four years of active duty in the US Army 2^nd Battalion, 75^th Ranger Regiment, enduring the carnage of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before joining Border Patrol and training to become a BORSTAR agent (Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue) agent, assigned to the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC).

While Vargas coped admirably with the physical demands of the intense training program, some exercises left him perplexed and amused. 

Occasionally, Vargas would be thrown into mock drug busts where irate Spanish-speaking actors would emerge from nowhere and hurl wads of cash and bags of fake drugs at the trainees, leaving the agents to try and defuse the situation. “You don’t just sit in a classroom month after month,” he writes.

But the training left Vargas in doubt about the danger of the work he was about to undertake.

In July 2009, just days before Vargas left the Academy, Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas was shot dead with his own service pistol as he investigated a drug smuggling operation near Campo, Calif.

“Agent Rosas’s murder was chilling,” he writes. “It was a rude awakening to the potential hazards of the job – and I hadn’t even started as an agent.”

Death has been a recurring theme of Vargas’ life and career.

Growing up in Los Angeles, he had lost several friends to gang violence and more followed when he joined the army.

In 2004, when he was in the military, his close friend Devin Peguero was killed in a live-fire exercise.

Then, on deployment in Iraq, he had to cope with the deaths of colleagues Staff Sergeant Ricardo Barazza and Sergeant Dale Brehm, gunned down by enemy fire as they were clearing a building in Ramadi.

“Like most military men and women, I had survivor’s guilt,” he writes. “If those bullets had hit me instead, maybe Staff Sergeant Barraza would still be alive.”

Border Patrol was no less dangerous — both for the agents and those trying to make it into the United States. 

In 2010, Agent Brian Terry was part of ‘Operation Huckleberry’, a mission designed to disrupt so-called ‘rip crews’, or those gangs that steal drugs and contraband destined to cross the border into the United States.

As Terry’s team engaged one crew, he was shot by a suspect armed with an AK-47. He died in the hospital soon after.

“The news hit me like a two-by-four to the head,” writes Vargas.

Such gangs have nothing to lose. “If a Border Patrol agent tries to stop them, they must deal with and potentially eliminate that agent,” he writes. 

Vargas was also tasked with apprehending ‘coyotes’, the traffickers who made fortunes from taking the life savings of would-be migrants to arrange illegal crossings into America.

“Once they have this money in hand they manipulate, threaten, and often abuse their cargo while in transit,” he explains. “It is not uncommon for families to force their young daughters to take birth control pills so they don’t get pregnant if they are raped by the smugglers, something that happens all too often.”

Once over the border, they are then left to fend for themselves with many not surviving as heat exposure, dehydration, and hypothermia take their inevitable toll.

Vargas approached his duties with empathy, not condemnation.

“It wasn’t my job as a BORSTAR agent to judge anyone on their efforts,” he writes. “It was my job to conduct search and rescue and provide aid and, where needed, lifesaving intervention before any human life was lost in the unforgiving terrain of the Texas border.”

There’s a good reason for his compassion.

When his maternal grandmother was 18, she left her home in Chihuahua, Mexico, and crossed the border into Texas.

Her sister, Francisca, had been born in the United States and was, therefore, an American citizen but when she died young from illness, Vargas’ grandmother, who he only knew as Francisca, simply stole her sister’s identity and made a life for herself in Canutillo, just north of El Paso.

His lived experience, and that of his family, shaped Vargas’ approach to his work on the border.

“There I was, a third-generation Mexican American whose grandmother crossed into the United States illegally, about to apprehend some individuals doing essentially the same thing for the same reason – to have a chance at a better life.

“It was never easy to deny a family access to the land of opportunity. I have always seen a little bit of my grandmother in everyone.”

He was not the only agent in the same position.

Today, there are around 20,000 Border Patrol agents and while 65 percent are white, there are around 20% who, like Vargas, are Hispanic or Latino, with another 8% who are black.

“The Border patrol has worked hard to ‘look like America’ and has largely succeeded,” Vargas writes.

He quit the Border Patrol in 2015. The 42-year-old now lives in Salt Lake City Utah, with his wife and seven children.

He is a motivational speaker and actor, appearing in the FX show “Mayans M.C.”

He’s also a drill sergeant in the US Army Reserves. 

Nearly a decade on from leaving Border Control, though, he’s still not convinced that people, be they politicians or the public, really understand the kind of service that the Border Patrol provides. 

It remains underfunded, understaffed, and undervalued and, he says, increasingly politicized by lawmakers without the knowledge to implement real change.

“Outside actors will never understand what we truly do. Knowing the good we have done — and will continue to do — is enough,” he writes. 

“Our border is not broken. It is misunderstood and neglected.”