 The damage illegal immigration and drug smuggling has on the land management agencies is significant. But the impacts do not stop there. Employees themselves also feel threatened and get emotionally worn down. First, employees find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, surprised by illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. If they come across people, usually they're either doing some field work and they're either doing some resource monitoring work or some type of work in the back country and they'll either come over a hill and there will be a group of people anywhere from one to a hundred people can be the encounter. You know, we've had so many instances where staff have run across drug smugglers. I've done that personally. I've been out in my vehicle driving down an old dusty road and there's six guys with big black backpacks on and as soon as they see my truck they hit the dirt trying to hide. You know, I had already seen them. I just drove by and called law enforcement. We were thinning out of the pasture and I saw a guy walking along the fence so I went to see what was going on and the guy actually pushed me and hit me on the shoulders. He thought I was going to detain him. He took up running. That time I got nervous though because if he wanted to hit me, I mean just imagine whatever he could be hiding drugs or a big group of illegals. We got water patrol and they caught the guy and he had a group of 20 illegals with him and he was hiding in the canyon. You know, on horseback or if you're out on foot doing project work like an example is we're out doing a project over in Puerto Spring just north of here. They were doing some welding on a spring exposure and they were, you know, doing their work and 120 people walked right through the project where they were welding at. But an interesting occasion was when I was first assigned the new vehicle that I drive here at work and it didn't have the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service logo on it yet. So I was driving along the Eravaka Road in the Riparian section which is an area they like to lay up, the lay-up sites when they're waiting for pre-arranged rides, waiting for the next leg of their journey. And I was writing some notes down. They caught some movement in the rearview mirror and I looked back and here's these two guys. They came up out of the ditch and they were running toward me. They thought I was their pickup. So I took off and they looked so bewildered. There was one time when we were just camping and recreating out at Anzabrego and basically, you know, there's a group of us and I remember in the middle of the night, you know, half asleep I could hear noises out there and when I woke up I saw that I was actually sleeping right next to a trail, you know, an illegal immigrant traveling. So it's a little unsettling when you're totally vulnerable and people are just traveling right next to you. You know, anything could have happened. Another impact on employees is always having the creepy feeling of being watched. You know that when you're in the woods these days that you're likely to be watched 24 hours a day, seven days a week by somebody and so you never feel like you're alone You always get that kind of feeling on the back of your neck, you know, that somebody's watching and it's just one of those things that you have to deal with. I think it answers a lot of stress to the employees knowing that, you know, you really can't go out and relax in the forest because you really probably are most of the time under some kind of surveillance. On the Cabeza Prieta, if you're being watched, you're being watched from a real high point. They're called spotters and we've detected them and caught them from time to time and they're capable of being in place for days. They'll be supplied with food, with water. They may have communication equipment to communicate with counterparts in Mexico and they're watching border patrol. They're watching movement. Are you being watched all the time? We don't know, you know, but sometimes we're surprised at what we do fine out there and they do come equipped with night vision goggles, with radio contact, camouflaged up on some of these high points and mountaintops. The knowledge that we are almost always being watched while in the back country is a strange thing and it's partly the scouts that are operating for the illegal migrants and the smugglers but also the law enforcement surveillance is out there too and it's a pretty safe assumption that if you're out in the back country anyway, you're being watched and it is a weird feeling to have. Knowing that you're being watched all the time, it does make life interesting for simple things. You know, what do you do if you're working out in the back country all day long and it's lunch break and you've got to take a potty break. It's a whole different world for people now because you can safely assume you're being watched. So that's kind of the funny angle to it but the other part of it is to look at that and think about how does that affect my safety here today and my security and I find that I'm less likely now to actually go and explore something that I might see from a distance and I'll use that knowledge that I'm being watched to really kind of affect what I'm doing at a much earlier point and start backing off. It kind of fuels your paranoia out here but having paranoia here is kind of a survival skill. As human traffic moves north into the United States, a lot of waste and debris are discarded along the way, posing a possible biological hazard to employees. And so anytime our staff is working in the field, they have to be very aware of where they're at and if they see that they're in a layup site or a site where there has been immigrants in the area with trash, they have to be aware that there's biohazards in those areas that they have to be very, very careful about. You really don't want to poke around this trash because it's not very safe from a health standpoint. There's human waste here, sometimes there's drug paraphernalia here, hypodermic syringes, broken glass, things of that nature. There is concern about human disease, you know. We don't know what kind of disease might be coming across the border. Again, you're not just cleaning up boulds and things. There's human waste in there. We don't have portapies out throughout the desert so when they got to go, well, you know. So you don't know what you're going to come across. There's a whole lot of different hazards. Finally, living and working along the border can wear employees down emotionally. There's a whole aspect of employee wellness, too, on the border. This activity is, even when you're off work, it's still there, still 24 hours. When you want to go hiking in the park, you know it's there. When you want to have some personal time, you know that the activity is going on. There's potential for your car to be broken into, your house to be broken into. So it's a vigilance, it's a state of vigilance that you have to be in all the time. We have employees transfer. It gets to a situation where they find that they need to move on because of the emotional stress. For the people who have worked here for quite a while, like myself, and knowing and remembering how it was, it's very discouraging. It's very sad to see what's happening here. You can't even stay on top of it and it is a daily issue for all of us to be seeing immigrants on the side of the road and mother and child waving you down on the road as you're driving to work. Or just the trash cleanup or the number of trails and the impact to the wildlife. It's very discouraging and sometimes wonder what our mission is after a while because the border issues have taken over. It's a bit of a dilemma on a human level at times because if you see someone in pain, you know, especially if I were to run into a child which there are children crossing the desert and I saw someone who was really sick and knew they needed help then and now. My instinct to want to take care of that person and help them would be so great. And that was hard the day that we had to leave the woman behind whose legs were hurt. It was one of the most awful feelings ever to feel like here's a woman who's crying and she's crying out in pain and I have to leave her and I can't. I mean, I speak Spanish but it's not a, I'm not fluent. I'm basic, functional, I can get by. And to not be able to explain to her we're not leaving you stranded. I was going to come get you was just the most painful feeling that I've ever had working out here to not be able to communicate that to her. And it makes it difficult, you know, on just a personal level. In this module, you heard about the drug smuggling and illegal immigration that takes place along the U.S.-Mexico border. You also heard of these activities impact land management agencies and their employees. The problems you heard about in this module may seem overwhelming. However, in module two, protecting yourself, you will hear how experienced employees deal with these issues, maintain their personal safety and still find meaning in their work despite all of these problems.