- My name's Daniel Brown.
I'm a reporter and photographer for Business Insider.
I was recently down in McAllen, Texas,
down in the Rio Grande Valley,
to cover the immigration crisis that's been going on.
I reached out to the Border Patrol for that sector
and tried to get a ride-along.
Finally, they granted it.
- The Rio Grande Valley Sector
accounts for about 40% of the apprehensions
in the United States.
McAllen Station specifically
is about 20% of the entire nation,
and we catch about 300 individuals a day
just in this 50 mile span of border.
- They first took me on a boat,
just drove up and down the Rio Grande.
They're looking for crossers.
Most people cross on rafts or boats.
There are just some deflated rafts on the side
of the coast there.
That's from people crossing over.
We get off periodically, and just
take little trails, and walk around.
A lot of times they would look for tracks
and see some faint ones,
be like, okay, we know someone passed through here
a couple days ago, or a day ago, or something like that.
Their main job is, obviously, to keep the border safe
and to apprehend people who are crossing illegally.
But also, as they told me,
it's a humanitarian mission as well, you know.
Whether it's Mexicans or Americans,
or any other citizen of the world who's passing through,
they wanna try to keep those people safe.
- That's kinda one of the difficulties of the job
is you have to switch on and off from
humanitarian mission to,
is this guy trying to take your life?
- Border Patrol agents are killed,
are shot at, they find dead bodies a lot,
they experience, witness a lot of trauma.
One agent who operates mostly on the boats,
he said that sometimes they'll find a raft
or a little boat trying to get across,
and they'll be packed with 10 or more people,
or something like that.
Sometimes they'll just throw a kid off
into the water just 'cause they know that
the agents will go for the kid right away to save 'em.
We went up and down along the river there for a while.
We ran into a lot of sugar cane.
It's very dense, and they were talking about
the difficulties of tracking people through that,
how a lot of times people can just run into that
and they'll just never find 'em, even if they have dogs.
- You cordon off this field and try to surround it,
even when we have a canine assist come in
so that the dog can follow and smell the people,
he gets overloaded.
So, it's a big, big challenge, the sugar cane.
- [Daniel] After that, we drove around for a little bit,
a lot of stray dogs walking around.
And the agents even said they use the dogs sometimes
to kind of decipher if someone's in the area.
- These dogs at times will give you a heads up,
because with experience you start to see
that they weren't barking before,
but then they began to bark,
so they'll kinda give you a little heads up
that somebody's in the area or something's in the area.
- The people that live along the borders,
I spoke to some of them who have
people crossing through their property,
who've been there for years,
and it happens almost daily,
and they'll ruin their crops.
I met one family who's shot people
who cross into their property.
Those landowners, when I went and visited them,
they said to come back in a few hours, and I did,
and that's when they told me, "Oh, you missed it."
And then they drove me out on their little four wheeler
and showed me the tracks.
Those tracks were like an hour old when I took 'em.
A lot of these people that are crossing over illegally
or going to ports of entry,
they've had tough lives,
and they're trying to escape violence,
they're trying to get a better life.
And that's something that I think
that we should realize and understand as a country.
But at the same time, you know,
people, like the Border Patrol agents,
their lives are at risk sometimes.
People on all sides of the issue
are going through tough things sometimes,
and I think we need to see all aspects of that.