Wyoming Highway Patrol agents who helped Texas police track down people illegally crossing the Southern border last summer used it as a learning experience and as a way to help fellow enforcement agencies seeking assistance, the agency’s leader told state lawmakers on Monday.
The state of Texas asked Wyoming to send its state troopers to help with border operations, during a high number of illegal crossings last summer, Wyoming Highway Patrol (WHP) Col. Tim Cameron told the House Judiciary Committee during a Monday meeting.
Cameron said he saw the opportunity as a way to help another law enforcement agency during its time of need.
“I certainly feel if we ever needed assistance here in Wyoming, Texas would absolutely step up to provide that,” said Cameron.
The operation also threw Wyoming agents’ training into real-life situations of drug-smuggling, human trafficking and other crimes, which Cameron said was its other main benefit.
The trip was “entirely covered” by the Wyoming Homeland Security Office, said Cameron, “I believe through grant funds.”
The WHP did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about the source of the grant funds.
WHP Trooper Ethan Smith worked night shifts in Del Rio during his 10-day stint in Texas. Every day he rode along with a local Texas agent on a 60-minute drive from Eagle Pass to a duty station in a tiny town where three highways crossed, Smith told the committee. He witnessed four law-enforcement pursuits in those 10 days. Nearly every traffic stop was with illegal immigrants, he said.
“The problems Texas is facing are massive,” said Smith. “The amount of police work that’s there is infinite. The number of drugs and illegals and problems coming across the border that they run into every day – it was eye-opening.”
Smith later said Wyoming has problems of its own, and that what starts at the Southern border drifts north.
“Working in Laramie, I can say the number of illegal immigrants I come into contact with coming north on (Highway) 287 is astronomical,” he said. “It’s increased over the last three to four years, significantly.”
He said it’s a problem for Wyoming.
Military-Aged Males
Trooper Logan Kelley arrived at the Southern border last year to find Conex boxes and razor wire, and marveled at the hard work Texas did to secure the region, he told the committee.
He witnessed a large-scale warrant service in Uvalde involving hundreds of agents from various agencies.
In one operation, agents served warrants at 2 a.m. because they knew they’d be close to a school and didn’t want their work to extend into school hours, he recalled.
A lot of the work agents undertook meant going from “ranch to ranch to ranch” to monitor for crimes.
American citizens are part of the human smuggling, he said. Their involvement could start with something as simple as Facebook message and a job offer to transport people a certain distance, for a sum of money.
“Sometimes it’s significant. Sometimes they’re paid by the person,” said Kelley.
Agents know to watch for vehicles with multiple rows, with the seats laid down, with the interiors covered in dust from all the people tromping in and out of it, he said. Most of the people he encountered during immigration busts were males between the ages of 20 and 40, Kelley confirmed after a question by Committee Chair Art Washut, R-Casper.
So You Don’t Put Your Eye Out
When a pursuit begins out in the brush, the drivers will take a hard right or left-hand turn, go as far as they can until the terrain interferes, then bail into “that very thick brush.”
Troopers were required to wear glasses to the brush didn’t put their eyes out. They could get lost in it; they could find themselves being chased by their own quarries.
That’s where Texas’ considerable tech comes in, said Kelley.
“They’ll call in aerial assets, dogs…. Drones, planes, helicopters,” he recalled. And despite all the operations and all the tech, they will “never” run out of police and patrol work down there, Kelley added.
Handheld X-Rays
Sgt. Brad White worked at Eagle Pass during his Texas project, doing “various interdiction efforts.” The local sheriff’s deputies had the help of handheld X-ray machines for that, but White’s job was to run traffic stops on known suspects, he said.
Out by the Conex boxes lining the border, troopers can walk “knee-deep in clothing” and passports, which illegal immigrants shed when they cross so they can’t be identified, he said.
While Kelley spoke to navigating “ranch after ranch after ranch,” White said working with ranch-owners was key.
Limited in their ability to prosecute people under state crimes (immigration laws are federal), agents would get most of the local landowners and ranchers to sign affidavits saying they’d be willing to press charges for trespassing, on illegal immigrants.
“They were very thankful for the help we gave,” said White. “A couple of them had basically abandoned their homes because of the amount of vandalism and trespass that occurred on their ranches.”
Some ranchers would leave food and water outside so people wouldn’t break into their homes or barns – but that didn’t always thwart the break-ins, he said.
He lamented oft-unscrupulous practices of “coyotes,” or human smugglers who would take, sometimes, a fee of $5,000 from hopeful immigrants only to betray or abandon them at the first sign of trouble.
White and his crew found a 13-year-old Guatemalan girl cut and lacerated, tangled in the razor wire and abandoned by her crossing party. They took her to a camp where she’d “ultimately be processed and released into the country.”
The fees of “coyotes” increase criminal activity, Lt. Clint Christensen told the committee.
If the fee is $5,000 and someone only has $2,000 to get across, the smuggler will say, “Hey, you’re gonna be a mule for me,” the lieutenant said.
Crime and human smuggling are intertwined, and drugs are involved about 75% of the time, he added.
Rep. Ken Chestek, D-Laramie, asked if Texas authorities were prosecuting American citizens who smuggle people.
Yes, Christensen answered. He didn’t know if all the smugglers were arrested, but they were investigated at a minimum, he said.
Not Just Central American
Rep. Laurie Bratten, R-Sheridan, asked if the Wyoming agents saw border-crossers from nations outside the Central American region.
White said yes, the troopers he worked with attested to having seen “many other nationalities.” That comprised a small percentage of the total, but “with the number of people coming across the border, it’s a large number.”
Wyoming agents’ good sense for “unusual” trucker behavior helped in Texas, said Christensen, referencing the work of a Trooper Keely who was unable to attend the meeting.
Keely was working with his Texas counterpart one night and they saw unusual behavior from a commercial vehicle at a truck stop – “something we have a lot of experience and knowledge with.”
The trailer had roughly 20 people inside it, mostly males, and had just crossed the border, said Christensen.
Bullet-Proof Cars
In Texas Smith learned that Wyoming troopers are “very well trained,” well-supervised and encouraged; but don’t have as much useful equipment as Texas agents, he said
Wyoming patrol cars aren’t bulletproof but Texas Department of Public Safety cars are. Each fitting costs about $8,500, Texas news outlet KBTX.com reported. The state made that change after two DPS troopers were shot through the windows of their patrol cars within weeks of each other.
Smith called the bullet-proofing a game-changer.
While the Wyoming trooper’s traffic-stop strategy is to get out of the cab and into a strategic but flexible position as quickly as possible, Smith said, the Texas strategy is to pull someone over and wait a couple minutes – to see if they start shooting.
Christensen marveled at the Texas equipment as well – especially its drone programs.
It’s nice to send a drone ahead of a helping agency so one group of law enforcement agents can see how an operation is arranged before joining it, he said.
Drones also help when executing warrants on a huge plot of land with five or six trailer houses on it – and the potential for suspects to be in any of those, said Christensen.
Well Not Yet
White said he’s spoken with the agents he met in Texas since President Donald Trump took office, and so far they haven’t registered huge functional changes within the U.S. Border and Customs Protection, “but morale is high.
All told, the project was an “incredible opportunity and I’m thankful we got to have it,” said White. “I’m really hoping we get the opportunity to go back.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
