Drug smugglers get creative in bids to elude U.S. border guards

Hidden inside a load of green peppers, sealed in bales of coiled cable wire, stuffed inside the cups of women’s bras — drug runners are finding increasingly innovative places to stash their illicit cargo as they try to sneak it by U.S. border guards.

But U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who staff the ports of entry, and the Border Patrol, which mans the line between the official crossing points, said they are up to the task, sniffing out each of those attempts and hundreds more every year in a high-stakes cops-and-robbers that nets millions of pounds of contraband each year.

Sometimes the busts are big — spools of wound cable concealing 1,365 pounds of marijuana, worth nearly $1.1 million, sealed so tightly that it took more than 12 hours for CBP officers in El Paso, Texas, to cut into the compartments.

During Memorial Day weekend CBP officers netted 212 packages of marijuana, totaling nearly 2,000 pounds, after a drug-sniffing dog alerted them to a tractor-trailer coming through the port of Nogales, Arizona. The drugs were hidden in the roof of the vehicle.

Other hauls are smaller but no less ingenious. Officers at a border checkpoint in Calexico, California, stopped a man carrying two wooden rocking horses into the U.S., only to discover that 29 pounds of cocaine were stashed inside them. He said he was paid $2 to carry the rocking horses across the border, as one of the latest tests by smugglers intent on reaching the lucrative U.S. drug market.

“All they do is try to think of ways to get across the border aliens, narcotics — something that doesn’t belong here,” said Beverly Good, port director in El Paso, whose officers spotted the wound cable smuggling attempt, which she called “deep concealment.” The spools were made specifically with compartments for the drugs.

Although illegal immigration usually dominates the border security debate, agents and officers are on the lookout for more than human smuggling into the U.S.

The amount of drugs confiscated at the southwestern border is volatile. Marijuana seizures dropped 20 percent from 2013 to 2014, below 2 million pounds for the first time since 2011.

Harder drugs have shown mixed results. Cocaine seizures, which regularly topped 20,000 pounds a year a decade ago, amounted to 4,443 pounds last year, but heroin has jumped from 228 pounds in 2005 to 9,205 pounds last year.

Analysts said it is not clear how much of the flow is being seized, so it’s difficult to determine whether higher totals are good news or bad news.

CBP officials insist that the trend lines have been positive.

“The significant and positive results seen in recent years is due in very large measure to our border security efforts focusing our resources where our intelligence and our surveillance tell us the threats exist,” the agency said in a statement.

Diversifying threats

Those threats are increasingly diverse.

In just one week in the middle of April, CBP reported netting a $50,000 cocaine stash inside a vehicle battery at Nogales, $1.1 million worth of marijuana stuffed inside six reels of wound cable spools being carried on the back of a flatbed truck through the El Paso port of entry, $59,000 in methamphetamine stuffed inside a car’s stereo speaker box at the Port of San Luis, Arizona, and $1,700 in marijuana that two 17-year-olds, a boy and a girl, had stuffed inside the tires of the bicycles they were riding into the U.S.

Border Patrol agents manning a checkpoint on Interstate 8 also rescued several illegal immigrants stashed in car trunks.

At the northern border, where drug-running is at a far lower rate, CBP officers seized about 1 pound of marijuana stuffed inside maple syrup cans at the Grand Portage port of entry in Minnesota.

Border Patrol Agent Payam Tanaomi, who works in the San Diego sector, said the sneakiness is nothing to admire and is a sign of CBP’s success.

“There’s nothing genius about them. They’re becoming more desperate, you could say,” he said. “Just desperate measures, making them put their drugs in gas tanks, oil tanks. I would say it’s a lot more dangerous types of situations.”

Joe Agostini, deputy director of the Nogales port, which is the most active border crossing in Arizona, said smugglers have ranged from an 84-year-old woman to 12-year-old children. They work from no real profile because the drug traffickers don’t want to create a pattern, knowing it would allow CBP officers to zero in on them.

One of the more difficult smuggling techniques to spot is what border officials call the “body carrier” — stuffing the lining of a bra is just one of the options. In that case, officers found nearly 2 pounds of heroin stuffed in the lining of the cups of the undergarment.

Mr. Agostini said lots of people — usually women — shape packages to conform to their thighs, buttocks or bellies, then cover up with multiple layers of clothing. Sometimes, drugs are sealed inside shoe soles.

Among the more unusual finds were parents who put drugs inside their baby’s diaper and women who put their hair up and hide drugs inside the hairdo.

Mr. Agostini said those are usually hard-narcotics carriers. The bigger loads of marijuana are packed inside of vehicles or smuggled inside truckloads of produce or merchandise.

Nogales has snagged 4 pounds of methamphetamine hidden inside an Xbox video game machine, nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana wrapped and hidden inside a load of watermelons and 2,800 pounds of pot inside a shipment of green bell peppers.

Finding the drugs is an art form, given that officers and agents usually have a matter of seconds to evaluate each car or pedestrian who arrives at the border. Authorities rely heavily on drug-sniffing dogs, use sensors to scan tires or vehicle panels for anomalies, and have radiation detection equipment and license plate readers to track vehicle movements.

It all begins with well-trained and experienced officers with a nose for something suspicious.

“Nothing is going to replace our officer. No matter what technology we have in place, no matter what tools we have — nothing is going to replace that intuition, that feeling that something is wrong,” Mr. Agostini said.

CBP relies on a layered approach to try to catch as much illegal traffic as it can, with port officers manning the official entries and Border Patrol agents watching the miles in between the ports and manning checkpoints often deep inside the U.S.

Sometimes, those carrying the drugs are not even aware they are smuggling. Truck drivers with permits to cross the border will pick up loads in Mexico and transport them without knowing anything about them.

Cartels pay “mules” $500 to $1,500, depending on the amount and type of drugs.

Body language, reactions to questions and other behavior can tip off an agent or officer.

“Agents who have worked at a checkpoint for 10 years have a good hunch for any cues,” Mr. Tanaomi said.