IMPERIAL SAND DUNES, Calif. - The man at the wheel of a roaring dune buggy rips a swirling trail over the desolate landscape on a morning ride. He veers to the south and then whips back.
That prompts U.S. Border Patrol agent Danielle Suarez to pull him over and give him a warning. The dune rider doesn’t know it, but he just crossed into Mexico and back.
Here, along a five-mile stretch of constantly shifting sands, the border is invisible. It’s an opportunity for drug smugglers to slip over the line and mix with the off-roading crowd — and a challenge for the agents trying to spot them.
At one point, the international line sits just a half-mile south of Interstate 8, the main link between San Diego and Phoenix.
The Imperial Sand Dunes is a giant playground for all-terrain vehicle enthusiasts. On busy weekends between fall and spring, when the temperatures are tolerable, all-terrain vehicle (ATV) riders, dune buggy fans and campers in motor homes swarm over the sands. A holiday weekend can draw close to 200,000 people.
“It’s so easy for [smugglers] to blend in, looking for a way to get onto I-8,” Miss Suarez says. “There’s really nothing separating the two countries.”
The southern edge of the dunes, the Buttercup Dunes, is remote enough to have served as a film location for parts of “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.” The only marking for the international border: a couple of concrete obelisks about 15 feet high.
Marijuana smugglers appear to have used Buttercup since about 1999, said Ricardo Sandoval, special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau in El Centro, about 35 miles west of the dunes. He declined to elaborate.
In one typical raid last month, a Border Patrol agent spotted seven ATVs streaking across the border at sunset — five of them with large duffel bags strapped to the seats. At the main campground, two men loaded the bags onto a trailer.
Agents stopped the trailer on I-8 and found 558 pounds of marijuana hidden, according to charges filed in federal court. The driver admitted delivering four bags to a truck stop in El Centro a few days earlier.
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