Border Patrol casts wide net for recruits

JACKSON, Tenn. - In a highway-side hotel crowded with enthusiasts attending the Miss Tennessee beauty pageant, the US Border Patrol is hunting for new agents to keep America safe.

The first round of applicants did not look too promising. It included a former carnival worker, a pizza maker who said he was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, and an unemployed hotel clerk whose eyes lit up when she asked about carrying weapons.

They sat in the cramped Old Hickory conference room glued to a television showing glamorous images of federal agents barking into two-way radios and swooping low across the desert Southwest in gleaming helicopters.

"Would you have to do all of that?" one attendee asked.

Welcome to the Border Patrol's unique recruitment drive, essentially a road trip across America and beyond, part of a presidential mandate to boost the force from 12,000 two years ago to 18,000 by December, the highest in the 84-year-old agency's history.

Agents say they are pulling out all the stops to find adventurous recruits willing to live along the 1,900-mile border with Mexico, where all new agents start. Teams of recruiters are hitting not only colleges, churches and career centers, but also NASCAR races - the patrol paid $2.6 million this year to sponsor a racecar - professional bull-riding events, US military bases overseas, and even declining former railroad cities like Jackson - nearly 1,000 miles from the Mexican border.

For the first time, the Border Patrol has also formed a "Minority Recruitment Strike Team" to attract more African-Americans, who now make up only 1 percent of the patrol. The 16,500-member patrol is 52 percent Latino and 45 percent white.

In Jackson - a city of 60,000 that also happens to be hosting the beauty pageant this week - a visit by members of the minority recruitment team showed how challenging it can be to find recruits of any background who are willing to move to the border.

Agents tout the opportunity to work outdoors and serve America without joining the military or risking their lives overseas. The Border Patrol's chief mission is to stop terrorists along the nation's northern and southern borders, but they also apprehend illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Recruits can earn $70,000 a year after only three years on the job, a big draw in Tennessee, where the per capita income barely tops $22,000.

But there is a downside: Agents can be assigned to remote and dusty desert towns along the border, far from the gleaming green fields of Tennessee. Recruits must pass a physical fitness test that includes running 1.5 miles in 13 minutes or less, learn Spanish, and work odd hours, since the border is patrolled around the clock.

On Wednesday morning, the Border Patrol launched its efforts at the Tennessee Career Center, a government-run employment agency, where men and women cast quizzical glances at the two uniformed agents who stood smiling in the lobby.

The city's unemployment rate is 6.5 percent, higher than the state average, and the number of jobs placed through the center sank 42 percent this summer, from 2,955 last year to 1,708. But few job-seekers approached the agents.

"I thought they were sheriffs," John Bond, a 20-year-old high school graduate, said in the parking lot. "What do they do?"

Belinda Fitzgerald, a 30-year-old mother of three, is desperate for work after being laid off from her job at a temp agency. And she would address a particular shortage on the force, which currently employs only eight black women.

"Yeah, I'd get out of here," she said wearily, but she did not approach them either.

At the end of the seven-hour stint, only two names were on the sign-up sheet.

Victor Howard, the lead recruiter, was unfazed.

"Most of the time people from these areas have never seen the Border Patrol in action, so they don't have a clue," said Howard. "We'll sit there and talk to them as long as it takes."

Howard had more luck in a meeting later that day at Lane College, a historically black school on the way into town.

Two administrators at the college said they were appalled by the low numbers of black people in the Border Patrol, and promised to recruit.

"You'd think the persons in authority would have sought out African-American people before now," said Richard Hulon Donnell, vice president of the college.

Their efforts are not without controversy. Immigrants said they fear the Border Patrol's recruiting in nonborder states such as Tennessee will inflame tensions there among black, white, and Latino people.

Tennessee had the fourth largest increase in the number of Latinos in the 2000 Census, mostly immigrants, leading to tensions and debate over whether immigrants are costing people jobs. In Nashville, the Rev. T.J. Graham has urged people to join the Border Patrol on his radio show.

"They're coming to recruit people, and then they're going to turn them against us," said Blanca, 26, who would not give her last name because she is here illegally from Mexico looking for work. She arrived here a month ago, fleeing a statewide crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona.

But for some who are struggling in Jackson, the Border Patrol offered a glimpse of a different future, far from a tradition-bound town that has a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the courthouse on Main Street and is so quiet at rush hour that you can hear the birds chirping in the trees.

On Wednesday evening, eight men and women gathered around a table in the Old Hickory boardroom at the Doubletree Hotel to watch a video of the Border Patrol.

On the television, highly trained agents traversed rough terrain in ATVs and tracked illegal immigrants across the desert.

To apply, they must be US citizens, under age 40, and pass a criminal background check, among other requirements. All recruits spend four to five months in a training academy in New Mexico.

The pizza maker, David Sinclair, 34, applied despite his disabilities, because he wanted to keep terrorists and illegal immigrants out of the United States.

"It's a chance to see if I could maybe help America secure the borders," he said. "I don't want what's down there to come over here."

Some of the more promising recruits wavered after watching the video. Steven Officer, a college-educated former corrections officer who is also black, said he was worried about the stress.

Recruiters Kurtis Woods and Jerry Payne, both military veterans who impressed the group with their discipline and ability to answer any question, assured him that the job was an exciting way to help the nation.

"It's worth it because of what we do," Woods said. "You'll be out in the desert, encountering guys with 300 pounds of marijuana. I love that stuff."

Officer said he would think about it, then left.

But Brad Boling, a 27-year-old college graduate who is white, said he was leaning toward it. He and his wife were born and raised in Tennessee, but he cannot seem to find a good job in Jackson.

"It feels like there's really not much hope for me in this town," he said as he went home to talk it over with his wife. "I feel like I've got to move someplace else to do what I want to do."