I Got Picked Up By Mexican Border Police By Accident
It happens, right? One minute you’re driving down a long endless road in San Padre Island in a rented golf buggy with your family, next you’re on the Mexican border, unwittingly getting caught up in a big old Mexican border police mix up. I guess I should elaborate.
It was last summer and my family and I were spending the summer driving around Texas.
It was one of those long, hot summers where not even the tumbleweed seemed to be able to find any wind to carry it along. So it was safe to say that my mum, brother, two sisters and I were feeling quite sluggish and not expecting much excitement on the road except for the promise of a cool dip in the sea when our RV met with the coast every now and then and the time we accidentally let my ten year old sister drive the golf buggy down the freeway.
But that wasn’t all that was in store for us
After a day of fun and raking up some fines in San Padre, we decided to hand back over the golf buggy and carry on with our journey; our plan was to drive in the direction of El Paso but stop somewhere around Odessa. The problem was we started our journey quite late in the day and, as foreigners in another country and unwilling to pay for data, we got lost long before the sun slipped away behind the trees.
So when we found ourselves miles away from the nearest town with a KOA and in the middle of nowhere
we decided to park our RV on the side of the road for the night. It was a quiet road with no lights and tall pine trees towered high on either side above us, enclosing us in a cool and dark secret pocket of Texas for the night, under a blanket of stars. As city dwellers, the five of us have always found ourselves very much in awe of a sky full of stars. I know I couldn’t say, but even though we feel like it’s something that could never get old for us, I think it’s probably the same for everyone. Anyway because of this we ended up outside, backs pressed against the RV and our heads glued upwards.
And then, out of nowhere, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded
by men with torches and guns pointed at me, my mum, my brother and two sisters. All hell broke loose. My sister were crying, my mum started yelling and the men with guns were shouting, telling us not to move. The utter confusion of being drawn out of such a peaceful moment to what can only be described as abrupt pandemonium and panic was something I’ll never forget. We’d not seen even another car pass us for hours, so where the hell did all these men suddenly come from?
The answer soon became clear
The men with the guns were Mexican border police and they’d been hiding in wait for hours, waiting for something to happen. But not just anything, something very quite specific. Once the Mexican border police had established that we weren’t joking, that we really were just a “normal family” on a “normal road trip” and had parked our car exactly where we had for “completely normal reasons” (the spokesman for the group could not refrain from using air quotation marks with his unarmed hand), things calmed down a little, but the urgency was still very much present.
We had parked ourselves in the exact spot where the Mexican border police had been tipped off a human and drug trafficking exchange was going to happen that night.
Human trafficking. They watched the information sink into our stunned skulls. Then they asked again how we really ended up where we were, in the heartless no man’s land on the Mexican border. We didn’t know. We didn’t even know we hadn’t been heading north anymore. I’m sure one of them snorted. Then they asked me and my siblings if we knew our mother.
It didn’t take long for them to figure out how entirely hopeless we were
but I knew they couldn’t shake the overall suspicion. We were parked in the exact same place to the very last coordinate, and they couldn’t seem to let that go. So the Mexican border police checked our passports, searched the RV and actually escorted us to a secure location to park the RV for the night. But it was overall a strange night, and it’s hard not to think about all the other possible outcomes of that night that could have been. Did we foil a drug drop off and human trafficking exchange? Or did we narrowly miss a brush with something far more sinister?
