Increasingly complex narco-tunnels challenge U.S. Border Patrol

A string of recently discovered, highly-developed drug-smuggling tunnels, equipped with electricity, engineered structural support and air-moving systems, has U.S. Border Patrol agents stepping up detection efforts and concerns among U.S. citizens in California and Arizona border towns.

Border agents from federal task forces comprised of local law enforcement, U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and drug enforcement agencies found and closed four impressive drug smuggling tunnels last month, one of them among the top 10 found in the area in the last decade.

The agencies charged with finding the tunnels say the builders of these passageways are investing big money in the structures because of increased pressure from U.S. border agencies above ground. Although they said the smugglers’ move underground is a measure of law enforcement’s recent success above ground, they also caution that the tunnels can present obvious and not-so-obvious new problems.

“The concentrated efforts of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, as well as field operations of state and local partners, have pushed smugglers underground and out into the water,” Joe Garcia, deputy special agent in charge for ICE Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, told Government Security News.

Smugglers have apparently gone underground in a very big way in the last year or so, given the string of discoveries of highly-advanced tunnels in the last few months, which came in quick succession this past fall. Border agents in Nogales, AZ, uncovered a 319-foot-long tunnel in late November. The structure was three-feet-wide and two-feet-tall, running for 100 feet into Mexico, 20 feet below the surface. It was chiseled out of solid bedrock and came complete with water pumps (to get rid of seeping groundwater) and wooden supports.

It was the twenty-first tunnel discovered in Nogales in the past two years and one of the largest, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A couple of weeks earlier, near San Diego, federal and local authorities found another tunnel that ran 400 yards from a warehouse district in Otay Mesa to Tijuana, Mexico. Agents seized 17 tons of marijuana from that facility.

On Nov. 29, agencies in the San Diego Tunnel Task Force found yet another complex tunnel in the Otay Mesa area, which stretched 612 yards – the length of more than six football fields -- across the border and into Tijuana. The passageway and staging areas in and near it yielded 32 tons of seized marijuana. It was also remarkable for its audacity, equipped as it was with electric rail cars, lighting, reinforced walls and wooden floors. On the Mexican side, the tunnel's entrance was accessed through a hydraulically-controlled steel door and an elevator hidden beneath the warehouse floor.

Although smugglers burrowing underneath the border is not a new activity, the scope has shifted from simple “rabbit hole” work that only ducks under the border fence, to big, broad, stable tunnels capable of transporting large amounts of drugs. Smugglers have also turned in force to other alternatives, such as ultra-light aircraft and small ocean-going wooden boats, to get around border security in California, said ICE’s Garcia. However, he added, the aircraft and boats aren’t capable of moving the largest volume of narcotics, which makes tunneling more attractive to big smugglers.

“These people invest a lot of money in building a tunnel,” said Garcia, and they have been ramping up the passageways’ engineering during the last few years. A tunnel discovered back in 2006 was, perhaps, one of the first professionally-engineered, according to Garcia. That passageway was a half-mile-long and travelled 90 feet below the surface. “You had to use a compass to plot the path,” Garcia noted. “It had to have been built by someone with an engineering background.”

The name of the engineer that built it was unknown, Garcia said, but U.S. and Mexican federal authorities believe drug smugglers were beginning to tap into a crop of engineers working at the silver mines in Durango, Mexico. “We’re confident they’re using mining expertise,” he said.

The soils along the southwestern border vary greatly, said Garcia, making some areas more amenable to digging than others. The Otay Mesa area is good because it’s not too sandy, not too rocky, and is composed of clay-based soils that hold together more readily, Garcia explained. The tunnels in Nogales, he noted, tap a big system of municipal drainage culverts and passageways that pull storm water away from the town.

U.S. border agencies and law enforcement have also gotten better at sniffing out tunnels in recent years. A better understanding of where tunnels are most likely to be built, technologies that can detect voids underground, along with old-fashioned detective work has led to the most recent string of finds, said Garcia. Federal and local agencies, for instance, gave Otay Mesa’s warehouse owners and workers a “Drug Smugglers 101” short information course about things that indicated a tunnel may be in operation in the area, he said. Agents explained to business owners and workers in the area that noise and vibrations of jackhammers or heavy construction equipment that was never seen; strange comings-and- goings of people and vehicles and piles of dirt; doors that were never opened; and water discharges are all signs of something nefarious going on.

Understanding those signs, said Garcia, could forestall tragedy. Although the ownership of the tunnels has never been directly traced, law enforcement assumes they’re owned by the same violent Mexican drug cartels that have killed thousands of law-abiding Mexicans south of the border.