Border security

Could Texas' Big Bend be the border's weakest link? Smuggling of drugs and immigrants is on the rise

In the late 1990s, border traffic moved from Southern California to remote desert stretches of Arizona; by 2013, it moved east again to Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of migration and enforcement ever since. Now, one of the things driving the Trump administration’s push for millions of dollars in new border security measures is a troubling new reality: New smuggling routes are opening up, and some of them are even further west, in Texas’ Big Bend region.

The river here, about 60 miles east of El Paso, is just a few yards wide, one of the reasons Border Patrol agents in Big Bend have seen worrying increases in smuggling, attacks on agents and immigrant deaths.

“There’s hundreds of these crossings just in our area of operation,” Smith said. “The drug cartels, they own this part of the land. We have conceded large swaths of the border. There are areas where there are not agents for days.”