[♪ dramatic music playing] [in Spanish] Good morning. This is your vehicle? -It's your friends? -You have a vehicle by your own, right? -You're coming with a vehicle, it's your, for your friend, instead for your own vehicle? -Something's weird.

I'm gonna send the vehicle to the X-ray machine. -The anomalies appear pretty bright. Dense objects in the rear of the vehicle. We'll go in and take a look at the vehicle itself. [♪ dramatic music playing] -Do you see anything? -This one? This here? -This felt is not supposed to be there. -Somebody was tampering with the bumper.

I got this. -Alright. [metal thuds] -Bingo. [♪ theme music playing] -Yeah, there are six bundles. I bet you it's coke. Because the way that it's perfect packets. When it's crystal meth, well usually, they got a little bump. But we test it over there.

[♪ suspenseful music playing] Okay. Cocaine, yep. -Nope, not yet. Let me get all this stuff. Here we go. 6.7 kilograms. We got some snow in El Paso. It feels great. It's always a good thing to have, like, doing something for this country. So far, they're interviewing the female subjects and they're gonna decide the prosecution on both of them.

And we are happy, I'm happy doing my part to take those drugs out of the reach of the kids. [plane approaching] [♪ upbeat music playing] -Where are you coming from? -Anything from Frankfurt in that bag? -What you got there? -Chocolate and beer. Perfect. That's a good combination.

I oversee the Anti-Terrorism Contraband Enforcement Team, also known as "A-TCET." All right, boss, have a good day, okay? I appreciate it. Our team mainly focuses on currency and narcotics. [♪ dramatic music playing] -Where are you coming from today? -Spain. -Purpose of trip? -Vacation. -All right. Good deal, bud. Thanks.

-Thank you. [Chief Augustino] We may not have the personnel that, say, big airports, like Miami, JFK have. But we still have a very robust threat stream. So we, we wear many hats. One minute we may be checking a passenger coming off a flight in a roving situation, the next minute we may be out on the tarmac checking packages from Europe in the express consignment environment. We have some packages arriving from the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a known source area for narcotics. We're gonna hit up the X-ray van and, uh, check a bunch of packages.

-Coffee beans. -Coffee beans. Coffee is used to conceal narcotics. People think that it's gonna throw off the scent of the dogs. So, definitely something we're gonna wanna take a look at. We see a lot of ecstasy coming through in containers like this. But it turns out it is just coffee. That's a very unique container for coffee, but it's a nada. -All right. K-9, K-9, If we can do a roving op, I'd appreciate it. [Officer] So we're gonna line these packages up out here for our K-9 to run through.

[Officer Notnagle] Good girl. We'll check it. Good girl. Awesome job. Good job. [Officer] We're gonna run it through the X-ray, just to make sure there's nothing inside the linings of this. That'd be a good, uh, good concealment method. There's nothing inside the lining, so it's good to go. -Yeah, there's totally a smell on that. -Is there? -It's like a very hempy smell.

-Okay. -I can see why the dog would alert to it. -Okay. Good girl. -It's common to see narcotics and other nefarious material coming through the mail facility. Didn't find anything this time, but it's a beautiful day out here. The sun's shining. Where else would you want to be? [Agent Moreno] We're out here in San Diego. There's a lot of smuggling activity that takes place. So it's important that our border patrol agents interdict contraband, people, or narcotics that could be smuggled into the country.

-Our organization, Customs and Border Protection, the way that it's structured is kind of a layered approach. Field operations works at the ports of entry. We, as Border Patrol, we work in between the ports of entry. And the Air and Marine Operations, they patrol the air. [Agent Stephenson] The migrants come over Otay Mountain. Guided by smugglers called, "foot guides." They're part of a larger criminal organization.

Human smuggling is a profitable venture for them. And the smuggling often turns into trafficking, which is even more profitable. So the cartels lie to the migrants and tell them, "Oh, everything's gonna be fine. Life's gonna be great. The crossing's gonna be easy." The reality is it often takes three or more days. Very treacherous terrain. Very arduous. But the people are very desperate, are fleeing some pretty extreme situations. So they'll often believe the lies that they're told by smugglers, uh, just because they're so desperate to, to find that better life.

Our five-point scopes spotted three people running up towards the road up here. [helicopter rotors] -The coordinates had them right down here, running uphill. -They were running, like, uphill, he said. So right here, you can see, somebody came through here. 'Cause there's rocks that were moved. It looks pretty fresh. You can see the dirt is disturbed. And you can see this rock, somebody stepped here and turned this rock over.

[agent] No? [Agent Stephenson] So right now, we have three migrants. What will happen is, they'll go back to the station. They'll get fingerprinted, uh, and if they've been arrested before we'll have their histories. And then they'll get debriefed by other agents. We'll try to determine who's the foot guide. Nobody tried to run away. So the foot guide could have already left these guys before, or he could be in the group. And we don't really know until they get back to the station.

[Agent Moreno] He's a local guy, it's his first apprehension. And these guys are all from other parts of, uh, of Mexico. So potentially indicative of maybe, uh, being a foot guide. Too soon to tell. [Agent Stephenson] Any time we can interdict and catch the foot guides before they get to the pickup spot, essentially, we're disrupting the criminal organization. We're disrupting their criminal activity, which is what we want to do.

[plane departing] [♪ dramatic music playing] [speaker chatter] [announcer].have your boarding pass at the counter. [Chief Augustino] We're headed to an outbound gate to check a subject of interest, who's a possible courier.

A courier's an individual that's paid by third-party individuals to import or export items out of the U.S. Our A-TCET is geared up to stop that person, do a verification, and make sure K-9 gets a chance to hit him as well. Courier has to declare everything on what's called a "manifest." But we've had a lot of trouble with people exporting items that are unmanifested or, or not declared properly. How are you doing today? -Very good, sir. -What's your final destination, ma'am? -Paris, and then I'm going to Korea. -Have a great flight, okay? -Thank you.

[Chief Augustino] We're also seeing a lot of outbound couriers exporting a large amount of electronic devices that are not manifested properly. Which is a way of exporting money from narcotics or other illegal proceeds without actually taking out physical cash. But they take out items they can sell. Don't see him yet. -Right here. You got him? -Yup.

[Officer Griffin] Okay, so you may have electronics, then? [Officer Griffin] Okay. [Chief Augustino] As he was boarding the jetway, the officer intercepted him. I could see he was visibly getting nervous. [Chief Augustino] It says, "laptops," in the paperwork. And then he says, "No, I don't have laptops." But, like, you have a form that's declaring laptops.

The individual did file a manifest export of multiple, uh, electronic items. Do you believe him? -Yeah. Could be all clothes and garbage, but that's what we're doing. [Chief Augustino] It appears he has a lot of checked luggage, which is kind of a red flag. So we're gonna go check out those bags and see if there's any contraband, inconsistencies, or items that are not declared properly. [♪ dramatic music playing]

-Where are you headed today, man? -Work? Where do you work at? -Truck driver, okay, how long you been a truck driver for? -I'm part of the, uh, Mobile Enforcement Team, the MET. And, uh, our job is to solely focus on drugs coming in. Lately, we've been seeing a lot of cocaine and methamphetamines. Anything to declare, man? -Cash? -Drugs? [Officer Gombash] All right, I'm just gonna take a quick look in the back, okay? So we'll rove pre-primary, start checking cars. And once we see a car we like, go and talk to them, get a feel for them as a person,

how they're reacting to our questions. All right, I appreciate it, man. You have a good day. -Hey, how are you doing? Where are you headed to, man? [Officer Gombash] If their story doesn't add up or anything, we'll send it in, look through the car a little bit more and every once in a while, we get lucky. [Officer Gombash] Okay. All right, so you've been here for a month, for your girlfriend?

-Okay. [Officer Gombash] Okay. He's from out of state. His story is a little odd. All right, man, we're just gonna go over here, okay? So, we're gonna check him out a little bit further and see what's going on with him. I was looking at his crossings.

He's been claiming that he's, uh, been here for a month, visiting his girlfriend. Checking his crossings, it doesn't match his story at all. -Refer to secondary. [Officer Gombash] It's a little odd when they're not telling the truth. And, uh, it draws your suspicion level up quite a bit. [♪ suspenseful music playing] -Oh, what do we got here? Looks like a bundle, right?

-It looks like a bundle, but it's just a noise-canceling foam that they use. So it's okay. -Okay, just, uh, run our density meter over it. See if any of the panels or doors are stuffed with anything. Uh-oh. -There's something there, huh?

-All right, so, there was a higher reading on the floor in some parts of the floor, so bring it back to Z-portal. -The spare tire look good. The tank look good. The quarter panels look good. He's clear. [Officer Gombash] So with this guy, he showed signs of deception within his story and, uh, when you come through a national border, yes, we do have to be a little bit nosy to, to find out, uh, if you're good or not. And, uh, he seemed all right.

[Chief Augustino] Sir, right here is fine. -Here is fine? -Yup. Everybody got gloves? This is pretty heavy. We've got some boxes. We'll see what he's got here. He matches a trend that we've seen where people are illegally exporting narcotics and electronics. -Yo. -What you got? -13 iPhones. -Are they new? -Looks like brand new. -I got one here that's new. -We got a LG Nokia cellphone.

-And a Nokia X-100. -And I got seven laptops and three tablets. And that's clearly inconsistent with his story. So the question is, why is he being untruthful? So we're probably gonna detain this stuff. We can stop looking, 'cause we're gonna take it back and finish in secondary, where we can kind of match up the manifest with all the stuff he has.

I'm gonna go up and break the news to him. All right, you have a lot of electronics in those bags. We're gonna go through what you have manifested and we're gonna compare it to what's in those bags. -'Cause I, I can tell you right now there's inconsistencies.

-What we're doing here is conducting highway interdiction. I just try to look for license plates on the vehicle to look for, uh, subjects inside the vehicle. Any vehicle that might react to my presence here. Smugglers from L.A. area, they come down to pick up humans, people that just crossed the, the international border fence. And they do, sometimes they do this not even knowing that what they're doing is illegal. The main smugglers, all they care is making a profit. And by doing that, sometimes young, young people, people that they don't even know what they're doing, they come down here thinking, "Oh, we're just gonna pick up people and make some money."

When in reality, what they're doing is smuggling. [Agent Contreras] My partners right next to me, they saw on observation an indicator that got their attention to interdict the vehicle. [radio chatter] [siren] [Agent Contreras] This person is super nervous. So we're gonna see if we can get, uh, a consent to, to perform a K-9 sniff in the car and see why he, why he's nervous.

[Agent Contreras] Good boy. He's alerting to the vehicle. [Agent Contreras] So we're just gonna find out why, what is the dog alerting to it. Good boy. Good boy, Papa. Good boy. Okay. -Okay. He's claiming he's an Uber driver. He went to pick up a friend and happened to get a flat tire. I explained that what the dog is trained to detect.

He says that he doesn't do any drugs. So we're just doing a quick inspection to see why the dog alerted. [♪ suspenseful music playing] There's no, uh, contraband. There's no compartments in the vehicle. After doing a quick 7-point of the vehicle, we didn't see anything that can tell us that the vehicle might be used to transport narcotics. [Agent Moreno] I asked, out of curiosity, what he was doing in the area. He said that, uh, he came down from L.A. He ended up getting a flat tire.

He said he was here to pick up some friends of his from Calexico, but he didn't know who his friends were or, or where they were at. So, um, it's a little out of the ordinary to have somebody come down so far south, uh, and then just go back just after a flat tire. Where are his friends? What happened to his friends? He may be here to either load people or narcotics up. But he may be a gentleman who's just here for his days off, like he told me. Obviously, there is no law that has been broken, so we're just gonna send him up the road and that'll be the end of this.

[plane approaching] [Chief Augustino] All right, this way. We have over nine bags full to the gills with multiple electronic items. If it turns out that he does not have the proper paperwork and this is unmanifested items, the items will be seized.

-Tablets and laptops. -Quite a bit. -This is the second box that I opened. Um, it has all cell phones. It looks like they're all, uh, Apple here. -These look new. -They're new. -Yeah, these are new. -Yup. -Wow. -800 bucks each at least. Or some of them are like 1500. -Wow, that's a lot of money right there, yup. -That's thousands and thousands of dollars. -It could be upwards of $100,000 worth of merchandise here.

[Officer Griffin] So, 20. 50. And these are the rest. [Chief Augustino] Okay. -So, what? He's 10 over? -Yeah. -Or "ish" really? He's got 90 phones, he's manifested 80. He is off, so it justifies the fact that we brought him back here. But because he did file the paperwork, it's not enough for us to make a big deal about it. I appreciate your time and your cooperation on all this. We're gonna help you repack and then we're gonna make an effort to get you another flight outta here, um.

-Yeah, and, and we've had a lot of trouble with people exporting items that are unmanifested. -Yeah, makes sense. [Chief Augustino] We have to make decisions every day on travelers coming in and out of the United States. Assuring that there is safety for our country is my number one concern. The type of items he's exporting does match previous trends that we've seen. But at the end of the day, he's gonna be okay to travel. -No cash, weapons, drugs? -Okay, man. All right, man. Have a good day.

-Where are you headed to today? -Hmm? [♪ suspenseful music playing] -That's not supposed to be there. Hey, I think I got something in the backseat. There's an anomaly behind the back passenger seat. Yeah, it looks like a bundle. -10-4. -All right, sir, can I go ahead and get your keys? [in Spanish] Thank you. -So right now, it looks like some of the officers on our team saw indicators that it could be a loaded vehicle, pre-primary.

They're escorting the subject down right now in handcuffs. And bringing it back to Z-portal, our X-ray machine, to see what more we can find. -There we go. [Officer Gombash] The X-ray does show anomalies in the area that we suspect to be loaded. We'll go back to our Area 51, tear the vehicle apart, see how much we have, and what we have. [Officer Gombash] We got one right here. -Take it out, keep going.

-Oh, yeah. It's lit, dude. -Right now, it looks like there's a, there's gonna be some stuff in the seat and then here in the trunk. -Hey, we got another compartment too. I don't know if it's loaded or not, but it, I was trying to peel it all back but I can't get into it. [Officer Gombash] Right now, it looks like we're seeing a aftermarket compartment within the trunk. The caulking on it, it, it just stands out, it doesn't look factory.

It looks like almost like Play-Doh is plastered on there. Fortunate for us because it's easier to spot. -Here, just let me pull it. -Oh, yeah. -You got a bundle? -It's gonna be all over the bottom. -Yeah. -Take that bumper off.

-It's empty? Yeah, it's empty. [Officer Cooper] So, I'm just gonna take out one of them to take a sample out, just to test it. -We just got a report of a possible smuggling vehicle. It's a blue, older model Trailblazer, so I'm pulled over right now and I'm watching to see if it comes up here. There's a road here, it leads down to the border. And so, somebody could go down there, be down there for just a few minutes, and then come back out.

It's very indicative of migrant smuggling. And so, it could be worth doing a vehicle stop. Here it comes right now. That's it right there. There's an agent behind it. Another agent, he's gonna do a vehicle stop on it and we'll back him up. Is it good? -Okay.

-So, we have the driver and we have two migrants he was smuggling. He's advising this driver that he's placing him under arrest. Sometimes we find migrants in the trunk of vehicles and it could be 100 degrees out. And that really just highlights how little these criminal organizations care about the migrants they're smuggling. And they really are just a commodity. Unfortunately, there's been instances where they have not made it and we've had dead bodies in the back of vehicles and trunks.

-Find anything? -People have always wanted to come to America. I don't think that's a new thing. I think what's changed is some of the circumstances you've seen in other countries around the world. You have a lot more people that are fleeing significant poverty, natural disasters, oppressive governments.

-Okay. -For CBP, our message is always the same, don't cross the border illegally, don't trust the smugglers, don't put your life in danger, do things the right way. And we encourage people to do that and not to put their lives in danger by trusting smugglers. [Officer] Let's see what we got. [Chief Augustino] Being such a small team, we kinda need to be all over the place. So my A-TCET team is back outside checking packages going outbound. [Officer Sanders] This one here is manifested as, like, a toy. We usually check a lot of those, 'cause a lot of times we'll see it in the toys.

-We've seen a big uptick in ketamine and more serious narcotics going outbound in packages. We're also seeing a lot of cocaine going outside to Europe and other places where Europe connects to. -Yeah, I think we'll run this one. -Well, this here is coming from Los Angeles, California going to Belgium. It's marked as some bed sheets. We'll definitely take a look at this one.

We have another one from L.A. Same thing, new bed sheets, from a different, a different person in, in California. But it's going to Belgium. It's not too often you get two of the same boxes from different people with bed sheets in them. I'll take this one. Grab one of those. All right.

How are we looking on that one? -Looks good. -All right. Let's try these bed sheets here. -Well, maybe you wanna pop that one. -All right. -Looks identical. -We are seeing anomalies in these packages, so we're gonna pop that open and make sure it, it is what it's supposed to be.

-A double box? -It's a box within a box. Vacuum seal. -Not bed sheets. It's gonna be the same vacuum-sealed bags as the other one. -There you go. [plane approaching] -This is Biscotti Mints. -This one is called MAC. -We're gonna test it just to make sure.

You get a strong odor as soon as you open the package. It doesn't take much. If it is positive for marijuana, it will turn this purple color here. See, it's already turning purple. It's positive for marijuana. [Officer] That one lit up right away. That's a real strong product. So we're gonna take this back to the A-TCET office. Gonna start the seizure process on it.

All right. Let's see what we got here. 2.6 keys. Between the two shipments, over in Belgium, you're looking at around $25,000. -Over the past two years, the United States has actually become a source country for marijuana.

The price difference between here and over in Europe funds a lot of other transnational criminal organizations. They're using this marijuana to launder money, to fund other criminal activities. So at face value, it doesn't look like it's such a big deal, but the criminal organizations that it's supporting is actually the main story behind us doing the seizures. -Put these in some seizure bags. [Officer] We're gonna get a hold of HSI. They're going to try and get a hold of the dispensary, find information on the export, and they'll take over from there.

[Chief Augustino] Being such a small team, we get a chance to see a little bit of everything. And I actually like it that way. I definitely get my steps in for the day. [Officer Gombash] Right now, Officer Cooper, he's gonna test the substance that was found in the vehicle. We take safety precautions with a lot of fentanyl coming through right now.

Fentanyl is extremely dangerous. -A lot of times, they're getting creative with how they wrap the packages. Sometimes they'll line it with different chemicals, vacuum seal it just to try to hide the smell so that our K-9s don't alert to it. It's hardened. It's crystal. And that normally is the characteristics that go along with meth. But we're still gonna test it just to be sure. All right.

[♪ dramatic music playing] And it's positive for meth. -Let's put this on the scale and see how much we have. -Here we go. So we've got 9.52 kilos. -Luckily, Officer Cooper here, my teammate, encountered this guy while I was on the other side of the bridge. And he was loaded. So it is a really good feeling that you were correct on your, your instincts.

-It's very important to me, just because I've seen what it can do to families. And that's why I strived to get on this team specifically. Because instead of waiting for this stuff to come to us, we actually go get it. We all take pride in that.