The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.–Mexico Border

Chapter 2. Manny’s Disguise Isn’t One

Chapter 2 Manny’s Disguise Isn’t One T he last thing Manuel “Manny” A. Rodriguez needs on the jet to Memphis is a hard case across the aisle giving him the prison yard stare. According to Manny, these days everything is turned around. Now the lawbreakers have more rights than the law enforcers . Agents are not only targets patrolling the line, but also targets for members of the general public who disagree with national immigration policy. What incenses Manny is the scumbag drug smuggler whose testimony sent two border agents in El Paso to a federal penitentiary.1 “I don’t make laws,” he tells me. “My job is to enforce the laws. The public don’t seem to get that.” “Lou Dobbs for President,” he says as an afterthought . “You seen Lou’s show on TV? He doesn’t pull any punches. Or how about Rush?” Even with Manny’s new green uniforms carefully folded away in his rolling suitcase, there is no doubt he is pure Border Patrol from the top of his gimme cap to the worn leather of his hand- Manny’s Disguise Isn’t One 25 tooled boots. Manny is old-school Border Patrol, legacy, eons of spit and polish distant from the “wimps” graduating like clockwork from the academy in Artesia, New Mexico.2 Manny is incapable of disguising who he really is on his recruiting trips to Memphis, Dallas, and Chicago. In his civilian garb at the airport, Manny wears a white, tightly pressed western shirt, “made in Malaysia, wherever the hell that is,” neatly tucked into a pair of faded Levi’s jeans, also handpressed in his kitchen that very morning. His favorite boots, custom made in Laredo, fit him like a glove when the bootmaker sized Manny in 1996. But years of patrolling the line have long since flattened his feet, and now Manny ’s favorite boots give him blisters if he wears them during his shift. One thing Manny knows for damned sure: he will never buy boots across the river in Nuevo Laredo, not even if they are half the price of what he pays in Laredo. It is American-made for Manny, whether it is his truck or his cowboy boots—that is, not counting the countries he never heard of, such as Malaysia. In 2009 Manny still refers to french fries as “freedom fries.”3 It isn’t just his shirt with cuff snaps, his high-and-tight military haircut , or even the pressed jeans that scream Border Patrol agent. The disguise buster is his belt buckle with the Border Patrol logo. On shiny, gold metal plate with an embossment of Border Patrol green, the buckle is easily the size of a mature grapefruit. His gut has grown larger since he was promoted to supervisor, so his belt buckle is as impossible to overlook as a shiny front bumper on a forty-year-old pickup. The same Border Patrol emblem is replicated on his leather cell phone case, shined, like his old boots, to a mirror finish. Manny wears the cell phone case on his hip in place of his holstered service weapon. After more than a decade and a half of patrolling the line, Manny feels naked without his gun on his right hip, so the empty cell phone case with the Border Patrol logo is a hocus-pocus placebo. That way Manny can fiddle with the cell phone case the same way he does with his holstered service weapon, unconsciously readjusting it multiple times when standing in line at the ticket counter at the Laredo airport, then messing with it again before squeezing into the narrow coach seat next to me. Manny certainly doesn’t look like a DEA agent, many of whom along the Mexican border still dress like Don Johnson in television’s Miami Vice, or an air marshal before the marshals finally convinced their director that terrorists could spot them easily in their mandatory crew cuts, sports jackets, and running shoes.4 No, it isn’t just the clothes, the logos, or the remnants of military bearing that identify Manny as a career Border Patrol agent. It is his constant checking and rechecking of every passenger he can see from the vantage point of his A Virtual American Dream 26 narrow seat. Who are they? Are they acting in an inconsistent fashion since he last eyeballed them? Does he...