Border Patrol agents apprehended 186,855 illegal immigrants this year along a porous stretch of the Rio Grande between Texas and Mexico — where one agent doubts physical barriers would make any difference, the Washington Post reports.
"A fence and a wall are not going to stop them," Border Patrol agent Raquel Medina, a descendant of Mexican immigrants, told the Post.
Instead, a human wall of 17,500 Border Patrol agents are tasked with jobs that are "terrifying, heart-rending, defeating all at the same time," the Post reported after accompanying Medina on a 10-hour shift.
"A lot of people don’t know what goes on at the border," Medina told the newspaper. "They’re clueless. I was clueless.”
"I think a lot of people, they think we can catch everybody," she added.
According to the Post, Medina joined the border patrol in late 2013, just as hundreds of women and children a day flooded across the Texas border to the Rio Grande Valley, seeking asylum amid escalating violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
By the summer 2014, the Border Patrol had apprehended 50,000 unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, the Post reported, and the agency was anxious to hire people like Medina, Latinas who spoke Spanish and could put children and women at ease.
She told the newspaper she'd never drawn her gun nor fired it, but is constantly wary.
"I mean, every night you go out there you’re scared," she told the Post, adding: "Now I understand that not everyone comes across to work here."
"There are definitely some bad people."
She said some illegal immigrants are armed with knives and rucksacks stuffed with marijuana, and when she is involved in their apprehension, she feels she's made a difference, the Post reported.
In one stop on which a Post reporter accompanied Medina, four teens — three girls who were 13 and a 15-year-old boy — were apprehended at a spot where 43 people had been caught the morning before.
They said gangs were threatening them at school, the Post reported.
"I think their goal is just to land on U.S. soil," Medina told the Post.
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