Tired of waiting for the federal government to fix the border, Sheriff Mark Dannels decided to take matters into his own hands. A personal run-in with a Mexican cartel only cemented his motivation to rid his county of cross-border crime. . . .

The major new effort started in January 2017 and the formula Dannels adopted is simple: Place hundreds of cameras to detect traffickers and smugglers, catch them, and prosecute them.

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“We put our cameras in areas where Border Patrol wasn’t going,” he said. “We went to the river areas, we went into the mountain areas, we went to the desert areas. And this is based on intel from our ranchers and our community folks saying, ‘We have a problem on our property.’ We’ve gone to private lands and we put those cameras strategically in areas where it helps identify the smugglers.”

The sheriff’s border team, called SABRE (Southeastern Arizona Border Region Enforcement), run by Sgt. Tim Williams, has placed 400 trail cameras in the county so far—with an estimated 700 to be up and running by year’s end. . . .

Interdictions of illegal aliens and drugs increased as cameras caught more activity. The SABRE team has two National Guard members watching the cameras 24/7 and another two analyzing the footage and photos that are captured.

Some trends started emerging, according to Williams. The cartel significantly increased their scouting operations, drug smuggling routes were changed, drug mules were now being recruited from outside the local area, and drug smuggling routes turned into human smuggling routes. (Excerpt from The Epoch Times.)