Border agents take to skies to protect region

EL PASO – Todd Gayle of El Paso grinned as excitement filled his eyes when he was asked what he most enjoyed about his job. “It’s a lot of fun — I get to fly,” he said on a recent morning as he gestured to several helicopters parked at the El Paso headquarters for the newly renamed Air and Marine Operations, a division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Gayle, who joined the CBP in 1996 as a Border Patrol agent in San Diego, is a supervising air interdiction agent for the El Paso air branch, where he was worked since 2002. He is one of about 1,200 federal agents in the U.S. who use aircraft and marine vessels to secure and protect the nation’s borders.

“The Office of the Air and Marine, where I currently work, didn’t always exist,” Gayle said. It was created in 2005 at the behest of President George W. Bush, who sought to “consolidate efforts to have a unilateral approach to fighting terrorism,” Gayle said. It along with two other divisions — the Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations — comprise the CBP, which falls under the charge of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“There’s no other agency in the country and federal government that actually does what we do as far as utilizing aviation capability and maritime capability to go out and do the full spectrum of law enforcement operations,” Rodolfo Maldonado, the director of air operations for the El Paso air branch, said last week as he explained the renaming of the division.

Formerly called the Office of the Air and Marine, the division is now known as the Air and Marine Operations, or AMO for short. The name change took effect in October, Maldonado said, and it more accurately depicts the AMO as a “stand-alone agency.”

“In our minds,” he said, “ ‘Office of Air and Marine’ sounded more like a support entity.”

Mission of AMO

Still, even with its newly rebranded name, AMO’s mission has remained unchanged.

“We have a mission to serve and protect the American people,” Maldonado said. “We are not merely a provider of resources or capabilities. We own our mission and its outcomes.”

He added: “We protect the safety and livelihood of all throughout our area of responsibility of the El Paso air branch, which includes West Texas, all the way out to the Big Bend area, and the entire state of New Mexico.”

AMO’s mission has four broad categories: interdiction, investigation, domain awareness, and contingency operations and national tasking operations.

Interdiction encompasses AMO’s efforts to “intercept, apprehend and disrupt” threats in the air, sea or land along U.S. borders, officials said. AMO and its agents also conduct independent investigations “to defeat criminal networks.”

Last year, AMO agents stationed at 91 locations throughout the U.S. helped apprehend and arrest a total of 84,397 individuals, according to statistics provided by the agency. Agents also seized 997,440 pounds of marijuana valued at $2.55 billion; 115,144 pounds of cocaine valued at $11.6 billion; and 763 weapons valued at $147.8 million.

Officials described domain awareness as AMO’s most “critical contribution” to border protection. AMO is able to share real-time information through a vast network of sensors and sensor-equipped aircraft and marine vessels, Gayle said.

At the El Paso air branch, agents on a daily basis use an AS350 helicopter, which Gayle described as the agency’s “bread and butter.” The medium-lift, “multi-mission” aircraft has infrared cameras in the front, as well as laser designators and laser illuminators, among other features, like multiple global positioning systems.

“It has the ability to record everything we see in HD. It is able to broadcast everything we see to remote-carry viewers, which are little hand-held devices,” he said. “We can even broadcast into the Internet, so people in (Washington) D.C. can watch what we see live from the helicopter.”

The AS350 helicopters also are used to assist other law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

“If there’s a gunner running around a school, or if there’s someone holding a person hostage in a parking lot, we can capture that image (via GPS), and we can broadcast that live,” Gayle said. “The tactical team commanders on the ground who are about to take care of business will see that image, and they can make better commanding control decisions.”

Contingency and national tasking operations are the last components of AMO’s mission. When needed, agents are able to perform a range of disaster-relief and humanitarian operations will little to no notice, Gayle said.

“We are a national asset, so we go wherever we are needed,” he said, before adding, “FEMA will request our assistance to provide enforcement. We can take people off rooftops, deliver supplies and provide aerial assessments of damage that has been done by these acts of God, or natural disasters.”

Most recently, Gayle was deployed to areas along the Atlantic Coast in 2012 to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Several years earlier, the El Paso air branch sent its agents to Louisiana to aid relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina, he said.

In 2006, severe rainfall inundated parts of El Paso and southern New Mexico. Gayle said AMO agents were sent to Hatch, where flooding was particularly devastating. “That whole area flooded and there was some looting, unfortunately, in that little town,” he recalled. “We went up there to help law enforcement and made an assessment to figure where the need was greatest and facilitated that.”

Operations in southern NM

“Right now, southern New Mexico is the highest in the way of illegal alien traffic and OTMs (other than Mexicans),” Gayle said using a term commonly used by border agents.

As a result, agents in Santa Teresa and Lordsburg are grappling with an influx of undocumented immigrants.

“Of the entire sector, which encompasses from Fort Hancock (Texas) to the Arizona state line, Santa Teresa and Lordsburg lead the way in apprehensions — almost twice as much as we (in El Paso) received last year,” Gayle said. “I would suspect that those two stations alone are well over 100 percent of apprehensions from this time last year.”

About two weeks ago, Gayle piloted a helicopter to Columbus, New Mexico, in search off three drug smugglers.

“We were out on a routine patrol, which means we were looking for traffic and looking for foot signs that people have crossed the border,” he said. “While we were on that routine patrol, we were called out for assistance and provided air-to-ground support for the agents who were working the search.”

After about two hours, Gayle said, the agents arrested one person. The two other suspects were never found.

Over the past year, AMO agents also have supported authorities in Las Cruces with criminal operations, according to Maldonado.

“In Las Cruces, specifically, we have assisted in a couple of SWAT standoffs and situations, where we have gone out and provided situational awareness from the air on those major events,” Maldonado said. “I’m actually glad and refreshed that the police department from Las Cruces and its senior leadership are confident in us to provide that kind of support.”

Rewarding job

Because its expansive patrol area is surrounded by mostly desert, the El Paso air branch does not have any marine “assets,” Gayle said. But that doesn’t bother him much, since he prefers to fly.

“There’s a sense of freedom because you’re flying. This mission that we do very rewarding,” he said. “l really enjoy my job — otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I will retire doing this job.”

For more information about the Air and Marine Operations, visit www.cbp.gov/border-security/air-sea/operations/locations/am-ops-center.

Carlos Andres López can be reached at 575-541-5453 or carlopez@lcsun-news.com. Follow @calopez_los on Twitter.