Yet Another Roadside Attraction

SAN CLEMENTE —  The U.S. Border Patrol’s checkpoint here, a familiar nuisance to anyone who’s driven the freeway between San Diego and Los Angeles, always has struck me as a true piece of California weirdness.

For starters, there is the assumption a handful of agents, standing on a busy freeway, peeking through windshields, playing their hunches, somehow can hold back the human tide that each year carries in fruit pickers, busboys, gardeners, nannies and factory workers by the tens of thousands.

“No matter how many you catch in San Clemente,” said one of the older agents, “there are always going to be apple pickers in Washington state come harvest time. You can’t let that get to you. Some of the younger guys, it eats them up.”

The setting, too, is surreal. Just north loom the San Onofre nuclear reactors, jarring against the backdrop of coastal bluffs and blue Pacific. Marines own the surrounding property and always are on view, lurching about in tanks, ambushing one another, hitting the beach.

But the road signs cap it. Close to the checkpoint, yellow-and-black signs depict in silhouette a man, woman and child, holding hands, running. A more direct message follows: “Watch for People Crossing Highway.” The people are illegal immigrants. Sometimes they dash across traffic to escape detection at the checkpoint. Sometimes they don’t make it.

“I’ve seen some of them running,” said Carl Green, 44, a veteran Border Patrol agent, “holding out their hands like this”--here he stiffened his arm, like a halfback--”as though it is going to somehow stop the traffic.”

The checkpoint has its own idiom. Agents who stand in traffic are said to be on “the point.” Immigration papers are “docs.” Docs that have been crudely forged are called “50-footers.” They can be spotted that far away. Motorists are “the traveling public.”

On the point is where agents will observe members of the traveling public, angered by the delay, brandish middle fingers or lay on the horn. One agent told me about a man who honked continually throughout a long wait.

“I asked him, ‘Why are you doing that?’

“He told me, ‘To alleviate my stress.’ ”

There are plans to eventually build a 16-lane station that will speed the process for motorists and make life less dicey for agents, who now are protected against drunk drivers and other hazards only by little portable stop signs and their own quick feet.

For now, the checkpoint must shut down whenever traffic backs up too far. This happens frequently on weekends. Savvy smugglers wait for Sunday, sending through scout cars to report back by cellular telephone when all is clear. While about 70,000 illegal immigrants were snagged last year at the checkpoint, no one knows how many others were missed.

“I try not to wonder,” Green said.

Agents are forever amazed by smuggling methods. They have found “loads,” as the immigrants are called, buried in caskets at the bottom of loaded gravel trucks, nailed into false panels inside vans, strapped on the back of Ninja motorcycles, stuffed up inside dashboards and sealed in plastic garbage bags.

“It’s very odd,” said Candice Brady, the night supervisor, “to touch a trash bag and have it gasp.”

I had picked a slow night to visit the checkpoint. After three hours, only one illegal immigrant had been caught. The agents kept apologizing, but the pace didn’t bother me.

I wasn’t eager to witness wholesale capture of the same people who clip our lawns, park our cars, prepare our meals, who care for our children, even. The arguments for orderly immigration processes and secure borders are all sound and reasonable, but instinctively it is difficult to root against people who endure so much to come for jobs that no one else seems to want.

The inactivity also gave the agents more time to sit in the cinder block control room and tell their stories. I heard about the time agent Green ordered a limo driver to roll down the back window--limos were then popular with smugglers--and there was Frank Sinatra staring back. I heard about a busload of cheerleaders who mooned the checkpoint, and about two young women in Corvettes who for a while sped through every Friday night topless.

There were many such stories, but the agents seemed most excited discussing the evils of smugglers, how they rape and steal and direct people on doomed sprints across a freeway. The agents are cops and cops need villains. The smugglers, I suppose, make them feel like something more than nanny snatchers.