Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 31

Sometimes I feel I've got a sort of double life going on. When I come to work, I'm in a completely different world. But I think that's actually a good thing. I love coming here. Because I'm seeing a world that I wouldn't be privy to otherwise.

Of course, I'm an outsider here. Most definitely an outsider. And I've thought a lot about that. Being a social worker for five years now, in the beginning I wrestled with that a lot and I've done a lot of work personally on it-I've done a lot of work on being white and being a social worker and coming into an environment which is mostly people of color and from a different socioeconomic cla.s.s. Sometimes it's painful because I just want to be a human being, but obviously there's differences. It's something I'm constantly conscious of, and I find I often have to do a lot of trust-building with my clients. Sometimes I'll get the sense that they're thinking, yeah, who's this f.u.c.king white lady? And I'll say, "Listen, obviously I'm white. Do you have a problem with that? Do you want to talk about it?" Generally, that works to get things started.

If it doesn't work, I don't really get upset about it anymore. It's just the way it is. Sometimes clients just say, "f.u.c.k you, I'm not working with you." Or, on the street, someone threw a tomato at me the other day, and they were just like, "You f.u.c.king white b.i.t.c.h." It makes me sad. But I deal with it. You have to develop a thick skin. You have to learn to be like, it's nothing compared to what other people have experienced historically da-de-da-de-da. Still, of course, there's times when it really hurts. It's those few times when they get you in between the cracks.

But what can you do about it? I'm not going to stop just because I don't always fit in. Ultimately, I don't see how it changes anything. I mean, I really am seeing things differently here, doing this. I'm seeing people that have to make a living selling drugs, I'm seeing people who are incredibly mentally ill being locked up, I'm seeing a lot of pain and anguish. And from the courts, all I'm seeing in the courts is dehumanization. Everything about the legal process here is geared towards dehumanizing the defendants. At the most basic level, they are called "the bodies" by everybody. They're never called by name. They're just "the body." Everyone uses that term and just accepts it. The judges say, "the body this," or, "the body that," "the body got into trouble," "the body is in restriction." It's horrible. And the cops, I'm scared of the cops now. I grew up with "the policeman is your friend." But now, the cops in the courtroom, I watch how they treat people differently-white people, black people. I notice it, and I'm offended by it. It makes me sad.

I read the paper differently now, too. Generally when they're presenting our cases in the paper it's from a very prosecutorial approach. There's a certain slant I never picked up before.

So I may be an outsider. I may always be an outsider, but I feel like I'm learning to translate for myself what my reality is. Just the different way the world is for different people. I know this sounds nutty, but I'm learning to look at things in what I think is a more real way, you know? It's not just a bunch of violent f.u.c.ked-up drug addicts up here. It's much more complicated. So I'm not always having these huge triumphs with my cases or anything, but I'm dealing with reality. Which, you know, as painful as that may be, once you start dealing with it, it's very hard to stop.

There are a lot more people out

there s.e.xually abusing children than I care

to think about.

FBI AGENT.

Allison Mourad.

I've been an FBI agent since 1991. My first seven years, I was investigating primarily bank robberies and white collar crime-fraud, embezzlement, that kind of thing. Then, starting in 1997, I began working on cases involving child p.o.r.nography and molestation on the Internet. I'm on a squad called "Innocent Images"-it's a term that characterizes the essence of what's going on. The children in the pictures, they're innocent kids. We go after the people producing, distributing, and trading this stuff. I'm also involved in a lot of cases where we pursue what are known as "travelers"-individuals who use the Internet to lure children into s.e.xual activity where either they or the kid has to travel across state lines for the purpose of having s.e.x with a minor. That's a federal offense.

Basically, what I do is I go online and pretend I'm a little boy or girl. [Laughs] I hang out in chat rooms. I'm not a techie sort of person. I don't know a whole lot about computers. But I've been a kid before, and I know how to do investigations, how to be creative. I'm good at studying these people and figuring out how they think, how they operate, and kind of what it is that they're looking for.

I just arrested someone who appears to have been pursuing little boys most of his adult life. He was a teacher at a theater camp. He'd actually been a Broadway musical director and was once fairly well known, apparently, but he hasn't worked on Broadway for quite a few years because he earned a reputation for having a thing for little boys. And so he would pretty much volunteer his services and work for near nothing at these summer stock theater camps all over the country, because that was a great way to still have access to kids. It's like, here he comes to this obscure camp with all these great credits and these kids are in awe, they're thinking, "Wow, this guy's gonna teach me the ropes." So from the get-go they trust him and that's usually how it is. It's often an authority figure-a teacher, a Boy Scout leader, all of these stereotypes of people who have access to kids- they're the people that are molesting them. And that's primarily why they have access to kids. I mean, this guy, he made sure that he continuously found himself in these positions. And, you know, it wasn't Broadway, but it was getting him what he needed.

The local police around some of these camps knew about him- the investigation started, actually, because a local police department brought him to my attention-but the problem was kids won't usually come forward and give evidence, especially boys, because of the social stigma. What teenage boy wants people to think that he's maybe interested in other boys? So I came in and I pretty much tossed out some bait and he took it. I started communicating with him on the Internet-which he was known to use-pretending I was a thirteen-year-old boy.

The very first conversation that I had with him I said, "Do you remember me?" And he didn't remember me, obviously, but he didn't care that he didn't remember me, what he cared about was that I'd said I was a thirteen-year-old boy and so now he's gotta know who I am. He was, like, immediately hooked just by that one fact. You know? I mean, after that, we just had some casual conversation and within minutes he was talking s.e.x. And that was it. I had an ongoing computer relations.h.i.+p with him for like a month, then we arrested him and he pled guilty.

I have very similar conversations with most of these guys. They all seem to want to know what your s.e.xual experience level is and they always kind of feel you out for your family situation. They're gauging how to manipulate you. So here I am, I'm a thirteen-year-old boy and I live at home with my mom. So now he knows I don't have a father figure in my life. Then comes a s.e.xual orientation-type question. So I'm like, "I'm not really sure if I like boys or girls, I'm kind of having mixed feelings." So now he has something else to go on. "Oh, well, I like boys too, it's okay to like boys." And so they kind of try to very obscurely extract information from you. They think you're not gonna realize that that's what they're doing and regular kids probably don't. 'Cause in a lot of these situations, there's a lonely kid on the computer and they're looking for someone to pay attention to them. They're just going to volunteer information. So these guys know that, and they try to figure out how to manipulate the kids and get them to sort of look up to them and trust them and turn to them for guidance about everything. And it kind of goes on from there.

When I first started doing this, it was just amazing to me how fast these conversations go into the gutter. I was like, I can't believe this guy just asked me this. I remember one of the first cases I had, I was being a little girl and this guy was asking, "Where do you live? What do you look like?" And then flat-out he was like, "Have you ever sucked d.i.c.k?" [Laughs] I was just shocked. I mean like totally stunned that this fifty-year-old guy would ask a kid something like that. Now I know that's the norm. I mean, sometimes they're a little more tender with you. But basically, they want to get to the s.e.x as fast as they can.

It's gross. With some of these guys, especially when I first started, I just want to reach through the computer and strangle them. But I can't, obviously, and fortunately, I've never even broken character. When something happens that offends me, I just do what I would have done at thirteen, which is respond like, "You're disgusting." Like I don't even know this guy and he's asking me stuff like this. And then, you know, they'll kind of back off and say, "I'm sorry," you know, whatever. [Laughs] Then usually they'll say like, "Well, what are you wearing?" [Laughs] Like, okay, now that we've got that out of the way let me see how she'll respond to this. [Laughs] It's appalling, really. These people are doing one of the worst things you can possibly do to a human being-and they're clueless.

I've wanted to work for the FBI forever, like since eighth grade. I remember my cla.s.s took a trip to the FBI building in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.-and I was just amazed. I went back to school and cornered my guidance counselor and I was like, "How do I do something like this?" And the guy had no idea. None at all. So I started going to the library and reading books. I was in eighth grade and I was hooked. And as soon as I reached the legal age to work part-time, I got a job at a funeral home. I figured [laughs] okay, dead people, you know, this is somehow related, you know? So that was my first job. Later, after I got my driver's license, I would drive the hea.r.s.e and pick up bodies at the hospital. [Laughs]

It's just been a lifelong thing for me. In college, my friends were working in restaurants, and I was out interning in state police labs and places like that. 'Cause, you know, that was stuff I could put on a resume for the FBI, and that's all I wanted to do. But, honestly, now that I'm doing it, it's hard. It's a difficult job. I mean, I'm still enthusiastic. I'm doing the type of work I want to do, which is a privilege, I know, that a lot of people don't have. And every day is different. It's never the same thing over and over again. It's really interesting and I think it's obviously really important that we're trying to catch these people. But it can be very frustrating sometimes, too, even a little bewildering. I mean, my squad is making an impact, but these people aren't going to stop. This is need-driven behavior. These guys, the pedophiles, they even know about us and they know we're looking for them. They talk about us in chat rooms. They share ideas about how to go about what they do undetected and how not to get caught. So a lot of them know they're taking risks, including the risk of going to prison, but their need to do what they do is greater than their fear of getting caught.

Some of these investigations get pretty involved, pretty weird. There was this one guy, we started out chatting on the Internet and after a while I was talking to him on the phone all the time. He really, really thought that I was a thirteen-year-old girl. I was "Jamie." And I felt that he was genuinely in love with Jamie and I would think to myself, this is me. You know? This is me, this is my personality, this is my voice, this is really weird. And he told me he loved me and I had to tell him I loved him-and it was very strange. Even though I was playing a role, it was still me talking, and it was still my experiences that caused me to say what I was saying. I mean, this guy is telling me, "Hi, I love you," and I'm telling him, "I love you, too." And that's coming from somewhere inside me. I know it's just a role I'm playing, but it got to the point where I just did not want to keep going anymore. I was like, "Yuck, I don't love this guy!" But you can't do that. You just have to pretend with vigor that you love them and, you know, you have to be convincing.

So I kept it up. I was convincing enough that he traveled here and I arrested him. And that was very strange, too. Because again, here was this guy that I'd spent a very long time with on the computer and on the phone. Like four or five months, telling him I loved him and whatnot and it was like, oh, so this is who he is. I mean, just seeing him, it was kind of-it's kind of hard to explain-you look at this guy and think, G.o.d, I was telling this guy I loved him?

In the end, he was like all these others. He showed up at the meeting spot and I'm watching him walk up and he's very excited to be there. He's looking around for Jamie and I'm waiting there to arrest him. As soon as he gets there we're going to arrest him. He's just another pedophile. But it felt so weird.

When I arrested him, he was kind of like dazed. He didn't really understand, probably didn't think there was anything wrong with what he'd been doing. A lot of the guys are like that. It wasn't until a couple of days later in court that he realized that FBI agent Allison Mourad was the one who was telling him she loved him on the phone.

He was forty-two, divorced, lived alone at home. Lonely guy. When he realized there wasn't any Jamie, he was just very quiet. He had this very stunned look on his face, very embarra.s.sed, I think, because he knew that I knew all the things we'd talked about. And because he had been taken.

He pled guilty. He also had child p.o.r.nography on his computer and he pled guilty to that, too.

I didn't feel any sympathy for him, but he wasn't the worst person we ever arrested. Not by a lot. In fact, he was one of those guys who was a little sensitive, he was trying to be very understanding of young Jamie's situation, and although it was pretty much said what they were going to do when they saw each other-which was they were going to make love, it wasn't like he was very vulgar. He was interested in her s.e.xually, but wasn't an in-your-face kind of vulgar guy. And you know he definitely was in love with Jamie. He was in love with an imaginary thirteen-year-old.

I don't think I contributed to that sentiment. I think it was something inside him, you know? Something we can't really understand. You wonder what makes a forty-two-year-old guy want to pursue a little girl? It just doesn't make sense.

This job has definitely affected my thinking about having kids. I mean, I like kids, I really do. But I don't know how you could do this and have kids unless you just stopped working and I'm not ready to do that. I mean, with what I know about people who hurt kids, I don't think I would ever trust somebody to just take care of mine ten hours a day. I just can't imagine doing that and feeling safe about it. If I'm going to have kids, I want to raise them myself. And I'm not sure how that'll ever happen.

Before I got in the FBI, I never thought people robbed banks, I thought Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks. Then I became an FBI agent and realized that every hard-up drug dealer goes out and robs banks. And now that I work this kind of stuff I realize that there are a lot more people out there s.e.xually abusing children than I care to think about. We've arrested people actually having s.e.x with little kids in addition to their escapades on the computer. Some of them are having s.e.x with their own kids. It happens quite often. And it's all men. I haven't encountered any women hanging out in these chat rooms.

It's shocking sometimes. I mean, the guys who try and meet little boys are often kind of stereotypical-single white males, unmarried loner types. A lot of them live with their mothers and/or have never been married. They lack social skills. They're basically what you'd expect. But mostly the guys who are going after little girls are married and have their own children. They are white men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, well educated, upper-middle to middle cla.s.s. They have good jobs. A lot of times, their wives have no idea they're interested in having s.e.x with little girls. They're shocked when they find out. I was shocked at first, too.

This is a very pervasive crime. Incredibly so. There is a whole underworld of these people. And catching them and bringing them to justice is very challenging work, it's a huge commitment, it's very time-consuming and it's not a job that you leave here at the office when you go home at night. You have very complex cases, you don't really take vacations. I've gone like ten months at a stretch without even taking a day off.

Thankfully, I'm married to another FBI agent, so we have a great deal in common. He doesn't do child violence, but, you know, we understand each other and the nature of this kind of career. That's very comforting and nice, really. But our life outside work is kind of spare. [Laughs] Just because we're working so much.

I should go home earlier at night so that I'd have more time when I get there, but I don't. There's just too much to do. It's hard for me to relax with so much in front of me. I mean, a lot of times I come home and it's like eight-thirty at night and I'm exhausted, I don't want to do anything else, I'm done. So I tape soap operas. I like General Hospital. I used to watch it with my mom growing up and now I tape it every day. Chances are I won't watch it, but sometimes my husband might work really late, you know, he might come home at like two in the morning and I'll stay there all night watching soaps and I'll unwind. It'll be my way of vegging out. It's kind of funny to watch. [Laughs] And I definitely need the relaxation.

I don't care what gender you are,

what color your skin is, what religion

you are, it makes no difference to me.

If you break the laws, I arrest you.

BORDER PATROL AGENT.

Rob Smith.

I'm a very patriotic individual and I love my country. I would do just about anything for it. I think it is the greatest country in the world, and I think that the only reason that it is that way is because we have people in the military who are willing to sacrifice some of their own personal gain-such as money or time or whatever-to protect the freedom that this country enjoys. I went into the army when I was twenty-two, right after I got out of college. That was ten years ago. Today I'm a United States Border Patrol agent located here in San Diego. I protect the borders of the United States against illegal immigration. I believe we have the right and we have the need to protect our borders. And as a GS-9 Border Patrol, I'm contributing significantly to that right and need. And I think that the nation overall is better because of it.

The border here is roughly sixty-six miles long. And historically speaking, San Diego-even though it's very small geographically-has accounted for almost forty-five percent of illegal immigration apprehensions throughout the nation. At least those were the numbers until we started Operation Gatekeeper about four years ago. And what Gatekeeper has done-it's actually a lot of things. A big part of it is a philosophy s.h.i.+ft that we've made. Prior to the operation, our philosophy was that when you come across the border illegally, we are going to apprehend you. Now we've s.h.i.+fted our focus to more of a visual deterrent mode. We built a steel border fence and put our guys up along this fence where they can be seen, as kind of like a show of force. And rather than letting migrants in and then apprehending them, now we try harder not to let them cross the border in the first place. Because if you don't let them in, then you don't have to make an apprehension.

Since we put the fence up, the apprehension numbers went from more than five hundred thousand annually, to now-last year, it was two hundred and fifty thousand. So I mean, we drastically decreased the amount of people who try to come through here. But it's not just the steel fence that did that, it's a myriad of things. I mean, in addition to the fence, Gatekeeper also increased the size of our force. We've got somewhere around twenty-three hundred agents here, where we used to have about nine hundred. And we've also buried over a thousand motion sensors in our sector. And that's a force multiplier-because rather than having to have somebody physically there all the time to watch a particular trail-because there are thousands of trails out here-we can use these sensors to alert us to somebody's presence, even if we're not there to see them visually.

And then we started using infrared night scopes that detect heat signatures. So some nights, I'll be a.s.signed the scope position, where I'll get up on a high point and see as much as I can see. Basically I'll sit there with a joystick and move the scope around to detect people on the south side of the border and alert my guys, "Hey look, we got a group that just crossed over here."

We also have an air operations unit. Helicopters are extremely effective because they can move very quickly and they have great visibility. We usually use them in conjunction with an agent tracking a group on foot. A lot of times the vegetation is pretty thick out there, so a copter may not be able to physically see a group. But when smugglers hear that thing in the air above them, what they'll often do is hide until it leaves-take cover, you know. So if I'm tracking a group and I started out an hour behind them, and now there's a helicopter in the air and those smugglers aren't moving because they don't want to be seen, then I'm catching up. And I can usually track them to where they're hiding before they get a chance to escape.

We get individuals from all over trying to cross the border illegally, but ninety-nine point eight percent of the people we apprehend are Mexican citizens. Because, well, I don't know what the figures are now, but let's say hypothetically speaking, I know it's close-five percent of the people in Mexico control ninety-five percent of the wealth. And most of those people are government officials. So the majority of Mexicans are impoverished. They can't make a living in their own country. They don't want to come here. They would rather live in their own country. But they can't get a job, they can't feed their families.

Most of them come in groups led by professional smugglers. These groups used to be huge in size. I can remember just a couple years ago busting units of fifty to a hundred. They would leave signs like a herd of elephants. But the smugglers have since broken it down into very small groups. The largest I've seen in a very long time is about fifteen. They're much more difficult to track. And now you don't see them taking the women and children, or old men. Generally speaking they limit themselves to younger men who can move quickly. Because obviously the faster they can move, the more likely that they will get through. And they're doing things now like taping sponges to the bottoms of their shoes, which means their tracks are much harder to follow. We're trained to look for these things, but still, we've got to work to keep our advantage.

It's incredible how skilled these smugglers are. I mean, they're true professionals. They've got smugglers here who have operated generation after generation. When these groups make their move, it's usually after dark. Because then, obviously, it's harder for us to see them. And it gets really dark some nights, but they always know where they're going. I don't know how they learn the area so well, but these smugglers don't even use flashlights. They move in a trail formation, moving as fast as you possibly can without lights. A lot of times, two or three smugglers will accompany a group, and when they see me coming-and they do see me, because I carry a flashlight-they'll split up. They may be up on a mountain and see me down at the bottom, and every time they look back I'm getting closer and closer. And they know that I'm going to catch up with them. It's inevitable. And so what they'll do is they'll divide the group from one into three. And there's only one of me, so I have to pick one group- track them down. And then once I get them, I make the arrest. Then transport comes-one of our vans-picks them up from me, and takes them to the station for processing. Now I've got to go back to where the others split off and start tracking those remaining groups.

Unfortunately, once I catch these guys, justice is not always properly served. For a smuggler to be seriously prosecuted, we need to have two material witnesses who are willing to testify in court that yes, that guy right there is the guy that I paid eight hundred dollars to bring me into the United States. But unless somebody in the group has died or suffered a severe injury, most are very unwilling to testify against a smuggler because they fear retribution. So it's really difficult.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I put one of these guys through our identification system, and it shows how many times they've been caught trying to cross before, and, well, you know that if a guy's been caught twenty-nine times in the last two years, he's probably a smuggler. But you can't prosecute unless you've got those two people testifying against him in court.

It's frustrating, and I don't think that they get nearly enough time in prison when we do finally convict. We just had one in January who was sentenced to ten years-but it was for alien smuggling and a.s.sault on a federal agent and, you know, a laundry list of things. Usually these guys get two years, if that.

The regular migrants, you know, the guys who pay the smugglers-they go through a different system. It takes a lot of repeat offenses for them to land in jail. And ironically, if they do end up incarcerated, many of them don't see it as too big of a punishment. They're getting three meals a day, medical care, dental care, a warm place to sleep. So some of them actually are happy to be caught! [Laughs] But that doesn't really bother me. Those people I'm not so worried about. It's the smugglers who I would like to see punished severely. And unfortunately, as I said, I don't think that happens.

I try my best, though, not to focus on the prosecution aspect. My job is to enforce the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and I do this to the best of my ability. What goes on throughout the remainder of the judicial system, I have no influence over. But I have to admit that it still burns me up when I arrest a guy who turns out to be a dirtbag, and I just know I'm going to see him again. I mean, these smugglers don't know anything else. That's how they make their living. And you know, they're getting paid eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars apiece for each person they bring across. That's awesome wages for a Mexican. More than I'm making.

I despise smugglers. In my opinion they are the lowest form of life on the face of the earth. They're below slugs, and all that kind of stuff. I just despise them. Because they prey on misery. That's how they make their living-on other people's misery. And that's just something that I can't fathom and that I can't stomach.

You have all these impoverished people making a desperate attempt to better their lives-trying to find a way to feed their families. And they give these smugglers their entire life savings to get them across the border. And a lot of times, after they've only gotten across a little ways, the smuggler abandons them. They'll say, "Okay, you wait here, I'm going to get the van. I'll be right back." Well, these people hold out hope for a couple days that this person's going to come back and get them. But he never does. By the time I find them, hiding in their layup spot, waiting there for a ride, the smuggler's long gone.

These people have just given what it took them a whole lifetime to earn to a smuggler who just left them-maybe in the snow or the rain. The smugglers don't care if they die. They don't care if they're injured. If they can't keep up, the smugglers leave them behind. And it's just something that-it's pathetic. And when you go out there and you arrest these migrants who have been burned like that, you know, you can't help but really feel sorry for them.

I mean, I have a job to do. And I'm going to do it indiscriminately. I don't care what gender you are, what color your skin is, what religion you are, it makes no difference to me. If you break the laws, I arrest you. That's the way it works. But I don't do it without compa.s.sion, and I also don't do it without thinking that, hey, if I were in their shoes, I would be doing the exact same thing. And most of the migrants know that we have a job to do, and that we're not against them personally. So there is a mutual respect amongst the Border Patrol and most of those people.

But when I speak of the mutual respect between myself and the migrants, I'm not trying to imply that we're all just great friends or that there's no danger involved in my apprehending them. Because there is. Generally speaking, I'm out there by myself, at night, in the mountains, tracking these groups of very desperate people. Now that's an inherently dangerous situation. Specifically, you know, I once had a couple of molotov c.o.c.ktails thrown at me. They landed well behind me, but it was one of those things that got my attention, you know? I've also had rocks thrown at me. And I've been in plenty of situations where I felt like I was in danger. You do have other people out there to back you up and you have a radio and you've got a pistol and an asp-which is a steel baton. Those are tools that you train with. But still, you feel the danger.

Some of them, it's not a question of judgment, it's a question of despair. When I catch them, I can see that the frustration on their part is immense. Their desperation to get into the United States and the need is so great-it's always in the back of your mind, that, hey, these guys might try something here. And I know a lot of that depends on my actions. I mean, one of the most important things I have to do when apprehending a group is immediately establish what's called a "command presence." These people have to know in no uncertain terms that I'm very serious-that if they try and take me down or whatever, there are going to be some very severe repercussions.

You have to lead. You walk up on them and you tell them, "U.S. Border Patrol! Don't move!" They've gotta be like, "Oh, geez, this guy, we might not want to try anything with this guy." You have to be a little bit stern with them, raise your voice, command the respect that you need to be able to arrest a group of fifteen guys by yourself.

You can tell which one is going to try to attack you, if any of them. You can just see the look on his face. You know, you tell them all to sit down on their rear end and a couple of guys don't. They kind of crouch down on their heels, so they can spring back up real quick. Well, those are the guys whom you forcefully set down on their rear ends. Other guys might be looking around or whispering to their buddies or whatever. Anybody does that, you tell them in no uncertain terms to shut up. And then you separate him from the guy he was just talking to and you handcuff him. Maybe take his shoes off. Just make things a little bit uncomfortable for him. So now the rest of the people in the group see that. Take the tough guy and you make an example of him.

If somebody starts moving, then you grab him and you set him down hard and you cuff his hands together. And a lot of times, because these guys might need an extra pair of pants for later, they'll wear two pairs at once. So I'll take the outside pair of pants and pull them down to somewhere between their knees and their ankles. That way if they decide to run, they're not going to get very far.

This is the way you have to act if you're going to keep control of these situations. And respect or no respect-you can't try to be their friend. You can't care about that. Because these guys are not going to end up thinking of you with admiration. I mean, in general, these people see me as-well, for instance, I came across some graffiti someone had put up along the fence a while back. They had drawn a picture of genitalia, a man's genitalia, and they had written in Spanish La Migra, which is Border Patrol. So that's basically what they think of us, and you just can't worry about that.

Unfortunately, I think, that's what a lot of other people are thinking too. I mean, this is not an easy job to have in certain ways. I don't normally tell people what I do for a living. If they're persistent and they ask, I tell them I work for the federal government. And then if they continue to ask, I tell them that I work in law enforcement. But I don't get specific. Because I find that if people know that you're a Border Patrol agent, they automatically form opinions of you before you even talk to them. Like, last Christmas I was dating this girl and she invited me to her Christmas party. Well, a woman, who'd heard I was a Border Patrol agent came up to me and basically said something to the effect of, "So, how does it make you feel knowing that everybody hates you?"

I said, "I'm not in this to win a popularity contest." And that's true. I'm not in this for any of that recognition. Really, it doesn't matter to me. People's opinions are their opinions and they're ent.i.tled to them. But I'm still going to do my job indiscriminately.

And I found out later on that she had an illegal maid, and she was very sympathetic to her cause. And you know, I'm not the big, bad Migra that is here just to throw everybody out of the country. I said, "I have a job to do just like you have a job." She's a teacher. She has a job to educate our children. I have a job to ensure the sovereignty of our borders. So I said, "I don't look down upon you for doing your job. But if people look down upon me, that's you know, that's on them. It's not my fault."

There just aren't a whole lot of people who are middle of the road on the immigration issue. Everybody seems to have a strong opinion one way or another. I mean, I get people on the other extreme who say, "Well, why can't you guys just shoot them?" Or, "Why can't you put a minefield out there?!" Well, I've gotten to the point where I'd just rather not indulge those kinds of questions. So as a result I'm very private about what I do. I don't bring my job into my personal life. Even when I'm driving to and from work, I usually wear a sweats.h.i.+rt or a jacket or something over my s.h.i.+rt so that people can't look through my windows and see that I work for the Border Patrol.

I'm not trying to imply that I'm ashamed of what I do. I'm actually quite proud. And, you know, there's even a certain amount of glamour inherent to this job. And there's freedom and there's authority. And there's the pleasure of being outdoors. But I'm not in it for any of those reasons. [Laughs] I'm certainly not in it for the money. None of us are. There are a lot of people within this organization who have college degrees and could go earn a lot more money within the corporate sector. But I don't know that the job satisfaction would be there.

The thing that's satisfying is-it's a lot of small victories. When I'm out in the field and I come across a set of tracks that have crossed the border road, I know what to do. I don't know how far ahead of me the people are who made those tracks. But I set out to track them down. And I may track them for hours on end, ten or twelve miles into the interior of the United States, before finally coming up with them. I've tracked groups all night many times. Ten hours straight, through mountains. It's physically demanding. But when I get them, it's very rewarding to know that all the hard work has paid off. It's really a tangible victory. It means something. I need to feel that I'm part of a greater goal and that I'm making a significant contribution to my country. And being out here, I truly get that feeling.

We make mistakes. We're human beings.

We do wrong things.

HOMICIDE DETECTIVE.

Monica Joyce Childs.

I'm a homicide investigator for the Detroit Police Department. I'm a.s.signed to the Elite Squad 7. We do all the whodunnits in highly publicized cases-the ones where you start with nothing and you have to work that up to something.

It's funny because, where I grew up, the police officers I always saw in my community were always male and white, over six feet tall. It was rare that a police officer talked to you like you were a human being, or talked to you as if you were an intelligent person. Everything was always confrontational. I thought they were a gang of hoodlums. But then I joined up. [Laughs]

I guess I became the police because I didn't like the police. I still don't like the police. [Laughs] But I thought, you know, you can't complain about a system, a group of people, and then not try to do somethin' about it. I never advocated burning down a system or blowing up a system. That was never me. So I looked at the police and I thought, "Well, okay, there's got to be some good ones somewhere."

And when I started out, I did find some real positive role models-a lot of strong women-a lieutenant, a investigator, the deputy chief. Other female officers from all types of ethnic backgrounds and ages were actually doing this job and could handle it. I said, okay, girls can do this. And they don't have a pink badge. You can still be feminine and still be police, and be just as effective as men. You can be better, even. I mean, female officers never get into fights. Because we can talk our way out of anything. We can get you cuffed. Get you in a car. Just by being reasonable and fair and by being persuasive. Male police can't do that. They just have that att.i.tude that brings about trouble.

I've been in homicide for ten years now. I first started working patrol. Morality crew. And then I went to the vice enforcement unit. I worked as a decoy, actin' like a ho. [Laughs] I got into it. I was one of the women that walk down the street with wigs on with the string hangin' in the front. And I had some run over high heels. Those shoes were so run over, baby, I looked like I was bowlegged. And then you know I had the bracelets on and the cheap perfume.

We weren't allowed to stop cars, you know, flag 'em down, 'cause that's entrapment. So you know what I did? In the summertime I'd get a red Popsicle. And there's just something about the way I ate that Popsicle. I had cars doin' U-turns, okay? I would be standin' out there posin', voguein', and eatin' that Popsicle. And it always worked. It was like [snaps fingers] you want a long day or a short day? Let's get our three cases and get outta here. [Laughs] Man, we had good times on vice.

But then I left and graduated to homicide. Because ever since I started out, that's what I wanted to do. Because murder-it's just the ultimate crime. To catch a killer, to identify and arrest a perpetrator- it's just like an emotional high. When you're able to give a family their day in court, they have closure. A person is still dead. Someone is still gone. But you've given closure to a family who's lost someone. And that feels good.

I got a ninety to ninety-five percent conviction rate. I can take a case and run with it. Read it, run with it, know which direction to go with it. You know, "Let's do this, let's do that." What I'm best at is interrogations and interviewin'. For some reason, I've been able to always get more confessions than anybody. So I work that. If they have someone-a suspect-in my squad or any of the other ones-and it's coming close to the time where we have to charge 'em or release 'em, they send me in to get the confession.