Orangeburg native Townsend Sifly II now lives in Casa Grande, Ariz., where he is finishing his fourth year of service in the U.S. Border Patrol. This dry, semidesert stretches for 2,000 miles above the Mexican state of Sonora, and along southern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Many come on foot, using every kind of cover the land offers. Television shows them running, like frightened deer, across the barren landscape, sometimes into places where patrolmen are waiting. Many others have hidden on trucks, in boxes, barrels, garbage, etc.

In some years, 300,000 to 500,000 try getting into the United States, half without any entry papers. Their desperation is logical if not practical because Mexico can offer them work at $5 a day. In America, it's $60 or more.

Five mornings or evenings a week, Townsend and fellow officers drive 200 to 300 miles, searching their assigned territory for signs of escapees, or hiding places. Now that the force has become very efficient in the bigger cities and towns, far more of the 10,000 guards are being assigned to the less-populated territories the people try to infiltrate.

For security reasons, Townsend does not talk about the details of any of these captures, only that they take their prisoners to headquarters. They then send them to a detention facility and eventually back across the border.

As a youth in Orangeburg, he developed great interest in lawmen and their work. He often joined his father, Townsend "Towney" Sr. for coffee with a good friend, the late county Detective Everette LaFrance, where he listened raptly to the accounts of track downs, stake-outs and still busts.

This fascination continued through high school and the University of South Carolina, where he majored in business administration and criminal justice. Upon graduation he applied for several positions with law enforcement organizations but was turned down because of inexperience.

For the next two years he worked at car sales and other jobs until he was finally accepted and sent to the U.S. Border Patrol Academy at, of all places, the Navy Yard in Charleston (now in Arizona). Courses there included hard physical training, the Spanish language, immigration law and criminology. He graduated in 2001.

Within a month he was in Casa Grande, near Tucson, 30 miles above the border. However, he had taken a lengthy detour by Orangeburg to marry a Cordova sweetheart of long standing, Samantha Staup.

He now wore the standard Border Patrol uniform, green kaki, which included a heavy belt hung with a defense baton, an H&P, U.S. P-40 pistol and handcuffs. He says he liked the duty from the moment it began, even though the summer temperature would rise to 120 degrees.

"It's so dry we don't feel it," he says. "Our rains come from July through September and sometimes last for days. Winter brings colder temperatures dropping to a nighttime 40 degrees from November to January. But much as I love my friends and family I always hated the South Carolina humidity ... and mosquitoes.

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