Confined Space Entry teams in El Paso are guarding the city's underground drain system, which leads directly to the Rio Grande on the Southern border.
How are the drain systems used?
The city's drain systems have 32 entry points along the Rio Grande and the tunnels follow into the city, where smugglers can exit through hundreds of different manholes.
What are people saying?
- Department of Homeland Security: "Don’t even think about entering our nation illegally — we WILL find you."
With hundreds of different exit points throughout the city, border agents spend hours in the tunnels of El Paso searching for smugglers and illegal migrants.
Agents use technology that can detect movement in the tunnels, helping identify where people are going and where they may exit in the city's underground storm drain system, which stretches for miles underneath El Paso.
"You are already exhausted and now you have to potentially fight with someone underground," Jason Hartman, Team Leader of El Paso Sector's Confined Space Entry team, told Fox News.
There are teams above ground monitoring entry points and teams underground, ready to combat groups that have traveled through the tunnel systems.
"@CBP’s elite Confined Space Entry teams in El Paso and along the southern border are combatting cartel smugglers and ensuring they cannot get into our nation," DHS wrote on X.
Now that the Southern border has closed, according to Border Patrol, groups traveling through the tunnels have decreased immensely and smugglers are charging migrants $20,000 to $30,000.
Border agents are working endlessly down in El Paso and other Southern entry points to catch migrants coming into the U.S., following the closure of the border during the Trump administration.
