When Vincent Vargas was training to be a Border Patrol agent in 2009, he was shown a video of two Mexicans desperately trying to enter America by swimming across the wild Rio Grande River.
A drowning man tries to save his friend, who panics so much that he accidentally pulls the man trying to save him down.
The video is horrible.
Both men drowned just five feet from land and from a group of screaming friends who couldn’t swim.
“I was disappointed beyond words watching this video,” Vargas wrote in “Borderline: Defending The Home Front” (St. Martin’s Press). “I told myself that I would never see someone drown if I could help them.”
With his new book, he aims to dispel what he calls “deeply offensive and intellectually dishonest” misconceptions about border guards.
“Most Americans have a view of the US Border Patrol from what they may see on TV or online, but this is a false narrative,” he wrote. “The Border Patrol has been misunderstood, slandered, criticized, and politicized by both supporters and critics. It has been compared to organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and even the Waffen-SS.
“Most Americans have a view of the US Border Patrol from what they might see on TV or online, but this is a false narrative,” writes Vincent Vargas. Courtesy of Borderline
While many assume that the border guards are “a bunch of racist individuals who don’t want to let anyone into this country, that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
One night, Vargas dives into the Rio Grande to save a migrant but is helpless as the current carries the man under.
“I have saved a handful of people, I don’t remember their faces,” he wrote. “But I still remember this young man’s face.”
The border between the United States and Mexico stretches nearly 2,000 miles, across mountains and canyons, deserts and rivers.
Vargas appears to provide a different take on the Border Patrol in “Borderline: Defending The Home Front.”
In some places, it can be one of the most inhospitable places on earth but, as Vincent Vargas explains, it is also one of the deadliest.
According to US Customs and Border Protection, more than 8,000 people have died trying to cross the border since 1998 and, as Vargas notes, 35 Border Patrol agents have lost their lives in the line of duty in that time.
“Guarding our borders can be a dangerous endeavor that, unfortunately, can result in the death of these agents,” Vargas wrote.
From the agency’s birth in 1924 to its wide and varied range of missions today, the Border Patrol is, writes Vargas, “part of that thin green line, that border, where the battle takes place every day between the opposite extremes of life and death, justice and evil, peace and chaos.”
Vargas served four years on active duty in the US Army’s 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, enduring mass killing tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before joining the Border Patrol and training to become a BORSTAR (Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue) agent, assigned to Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC).
Although Vargas coped admirably with the physical demands of the intense training program, some exercises left him confused and amused.
Occasionally, Vargas would be thrown into mock drug gangs where angry Spanish-speaking actors would appear out of nowhere and throw cash and bags of fake drugs at the interns, leaving the agents to try to defuse the situation. “You don’t just sit in a classroom month after month,” he wrote.
But the training left Vargas skeptical about the dangers of the job he would be doing.
In July 2009, just days before Vargas left the Academy, Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas was fatally shot with his own service pistol while he was investigating a drug smuggling operation near Campo, Calif.
“The killing of Agent Rosas was horrific,” he wrote. “It’s a rude awareness of the potential dangers of the job – and I haven’t even started as an agent.”
Death has been a recurring theme in Vargas’ life and career.
“Guarding our borders can be a dangerous endeavor,” Vargas wrote. Jeff Swensen
Growing up in Los Angeles, he had lost some friends to gang violence and more followed when he joined the army.
In 2004, while he was in the military, his close friend Devin Peguero was killed in live fire training.
Later, while deployed in Iraq, he had to deal with the deaths of colleagues Sergeant Ricardo Barazza and Sergeant Dale Brehm, who were shot dead by the enemy while they were clearing a building in Ramadi.
“Like most military men and women, I have survivor’s guilt,” he wrote. “If the bullet had hit me, Staff Sergeant Barraza might still be alive.”
“It’s never easy to deny families access to the land of opportunity,” writes Vargas.Courtesy of Borderline
The Border Patrol is no less dangerous — both for agents and those trying to enter the United States.
In 2010, Agent Brian Terry was part of ‘Operation Huckleberry’, a mission designed to disrupt so-called ‘rip crews’, or groups that steal drugs and contraband destined to cross the border into the United States.
As Terry’s team engages a crew member, he is shot by a suspect armed with an AK-47. He died in hospital a short time later.
“The news hit me like a two-four to the head,” Vargas wrote.
Such a gang has nothing to lose. “If a Border Patrol agent tries to stop them, they must deal with and potentially eliminate the agent,” he wrote.
Catching drug runners is just part of the job, according to Vargas. Courtesy of Borderline
Vargas is also tasked with catching ‘coyotes’, smugglers who make a fortune from taking the life savings of would-be immigrants to arrange illegal crossings to America.
“Once they have this money in their hands they manipulate, threaten, and often abuse their cargo while in transit,” he explained. “It’s common for families to force their daughters to take birth control pills so they don’t get pregnant if they’re raped by traffickers, something that happens all too often.”
Once across the border, they are then left alone with many who do not survive as heat exposure, dehydration, and hypothermia take their inevitable toll.
Vargas does his job with empathy, not condemnation.
“It is not my job as a BORSTAR agent to judge anyone for their efforts,” he wrote. “It is is it’s my job to conduct search and rescue and provide aid and, if necessary, life-saving intervention before any human life is lost in the unforgiving Texas borderlands.”
“Our borders are not broken. It’s misunderstood and ignored,” wrote Vargas.Mitch Meyer
There was good reason for his mercy.
When her maternal grandmother was 18, she left her home in Chihuahua, Mexico, and crossed the border into Texas.
Her sister, Francisca, had been born in the United States and was therefore an American citizen but when she died young of illness, Vargas’ grandmother, whom she only knew as Francisca, simply stole her sister’s identity and made a life for herself. in Canutillo, just north of El Paso.
His life experiences, and those of his family, shaped Vargas’ approach to his work on the border.
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“There I am, a third-generation Mexican American whose grandmother crossed into the United States illegally, to catch several individuals doing the same thing for the same reason – to have a chance at a better life.
“It is never easy to deny families access to the land of opportunity. I always see a little bit of my grandmother in everyone.”
He is not the only agent in the same position.
Today, there are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents and while 65 percent are white, there are about 20% who, like Vargas, are Hispanic or Latino, with another 8% black.
“The Border Patrol has worked hard to ‘look like America’ and has largely succeeded,” Vargas wrote.
He retired from the Border Patrol in 2015. The 42-year-old now lives in Salt Lake City Utah, with his wife and seven children.
He is a motivational speaker and actor, appearing on the FX show “Mayans MC”
He is also a drill sergeant in the US Army Reserve.
Nearly a decade after leaving Border Control, however, he’s still not convinced that people, whether politicians or the general public, really understand the kind of service the Border Patrol provides.
“Outside actors will not understand what we actually do. Knowing the good we’ve done — and will continue to do — is enough,” Vargas wrote. Courtesy of Borderline
It remains underfunded, understaffed, and undervalued and, he says, increasingly politicized by lawmakers without the knowledge to implement real change.
“Outside actors will not understand what we actually do. Knowing the good we have done – and will continue to do – is enough,” he wrote.
“Our borders are not broken. It is misunderstood and ignored.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
