- At the end of last year,
I spent some time
at the Coast Guard Training Center
in Cape May, New Jersey,
which is boot camp for the Coast Guard.
- [Woman] Get upright.
- Fly away from me.
- And I wanted to see what
these recruits do after they leave Cape May.
I wanted to see what they do after they graduate.
After seeing a lot of headlines, I saw
that the Coast Guard
in Miami was very active
in terms of drug interdiction
and also dealing with illegal immigration.
In 2019,
the Coast Guard in Miami has been involved
in a major seizure of cocaine.
Also you've had migrants intercepted in the region
of Miami.
- We have to build the wall,
it will get built.
We're going to complete it.
- Right now the eyes
of the world are focused
on the US-Mexico border.
- The drugs and the human trafficking and all of the things
that pour into our country,
it's so terrible. - While the US-Mexico border
definitely deserves attention and resources,
these other ports around the country,
there is a massive amount of activity
that's being monitored by military
and law enforcement resources.
I wanted to go see what the Coast Guard
in Miami does on a daily basis
to stop the flow of illegal immigration
and drug trafficking.
The Coast Guard in Miami combats drugs
and illegal immigration from the air
and from the sea.
On day one,
I was at the air station in Miami
where a fleet of airplanes and helicopters are always
standing by to perform search and rescue,
which is a major function of the Coast Guard in Miami.
- Our primary mission that we have here is search
and rescue or SAR.
We also perform our secondary mission
of law enforcement.
Typically this is gonna be
us going out there to be the eyes in the sky
for our surface assets.
- My day at the air station unfortunately was pretty boring
because the weather was terrible.
There were no search and rescue calls, thankfully,
which means that people were smart enough
to stay off the water on a day
when the weather was so bad.
The next day,
it was sunny.
I got the all clear to join the Coast Guard
on the cutter known as the Robert Yered
that patrols the port of Miami.
- We're heading outbound from Base Miami Beach.
So we're just gonna head offshore here
to begin our normal patrolling operations, looking
for vessels of interest and really anything
that's standing out of the ordinary.
- We set out into the port of Miami,
and we got out about 5 miles offshore,
and the seas were pretty rough.
It looked like
a nice day, but it was very bumpy.
On the stern of the cutter,
there is this fast-response boat
that they can deploy
when they need to quickly engage
a potentially suspicious vessel or
to conduct routine boardings of vessels for inspection.
Before I boarded
the small boat, they outfitted me head
to toe with rain gear, so I was essentially waterproof.
I was on the boat
with four other Coast Guardsmen.
Once we're all
in the boat, we simply slide
off the back,
and we are out in the open ocean.
I mean, it's a small boat,
and you're out there,
and you really feel it.
It was bumpy.
It was wet.
All I brought was this little GoPro camera.
Constantly getting splashed and sprayed
as we cruised around the port.
We came upon a fishing boat.
It looked like a pretty normal fishing trip,
five or six people on board.
Our boat pulled alongside theirs,
and the Coast Guard said
that they were going
to perform a routine inspection.
Two Coast Guardsmen boarded that boat
and then we essentially kind of pulled away.
We sort of just trolled around staying
within proximity of the boat.
I wasn't too concerned that anything was suspicious
or out of the ordinary while
this was happening.
It seemed pretty routine.
You know, I kind of felt bad
for the people on the boat because
this kind of interrupted their fishing trip.
And I asked them, "Why would you stop
a boat that looks like it's just
a bunch of guys having a fishing trip?"
And they said that oftentimes drug smugglers,
people trying to smuggle illegal migrants
into the country,
they will use boats that look like this
to make the Coast Guard,
to make law enforcement think that it's just
a regular fishing boat.
This is the boat that the Coast Guard caught trying
to smuggle in cocaine last month.
I mean, it looks like a regular fishing boat,
it looks like the boat that they boarded
while I was embedded with them.
They have to assume with these routine inspections
that there's always a chance
that you could find something illegal,
something that needs to be stopped
from entering into the United States.
Then we finally, about 20 minutes later, got the signal
that the inspection was done,
and so everything was fine.
There were no drugs,
no illegal migrants on board or anything like that.
Everything checked out.
At first, you know, I felt bad
that these fishermen were interrupted,
but the Coast Guard was just doing their job.
My biggest takeaway
from my time with the Coast Guard in the port of Miami
is that these men and women
that work at the air station
or on these cutters, every single day, they enter the port
of Miami not knowing what to expect.
I didn't know what we would find.
There was a chance that we could run
into a hostile situation.
Nothing about my day with the Coast Guard was dangerous,
but it just made you appreciate the fact
that every day these men and women put themselves
in unpredictable situations
all in the name of trying to keep us safe.