EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – A heavily armed 18-man Mexican army patrol allegedly crossed into U.S. soil this week and surrounded two Americans exploring a trail in the Bootheel of New Mexico.
Abbey Carpenter and James Holeman used a camera and a cellphone to record the Monday encounter south of Hachita, New Mexico, and shared photos and videos with Border Report.
The two members of Battalion Search and Rescue – a group of volunteers that look for lost migrants in the southern New Mexico desert – said the soldiers thought they were still in Mexico until shown a GPS locator map proving otherwise.
“I never felt threatened. When I got nervous was when I showed them that they were in the United States and I had my phone out and we were documenting they were where they shouldn’t be,” Carpenter said. “That’s when I got nervous, like, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t have our phones out, taking pictures of them in U.S. soil.’”
One of the videos shows a Mexican army truck approaching the pair’s vehicle and soldiers getting off and approaching carrying rifles. A photograph shows a white Mexican National Guard pickup with soldiers keeping watch of their surroundings.
Holeman said the soldiers told him they were looking for drug traffickers and gunrunners and asked him what he was doing in Mexico. Holeman said he and Carpenter earlier had seen two shot-up vehicles with Mexican license plates at another trail near the Mexican border.
Carpenter said she showed the soldiers through a locator app on her phone that they were not in Mexico, but in the U.S. The soldiers turned their vehicles around and headed back south.
Coleman said that stretch of border lacks the U.S. steel bollard barriers that can be seen from Santa Teresa to Columbus, New Mexico. A simple wire fence marks the U.S.-Mexico border, and it has gates that are easy to open.
“We were like: ‘Ha-ha!’ ‘Take a picture with me?’ ‘Blah-blah.’ But that’s because we knew we were in the U.S. If we had encountered them in Mexico, it would have been a whole different thing,” Holeman said. “Threatened? I would say that, just because of our American thinking being on U.S. soil. Nervous? Yeah, bro. We were definitely nervous.”
The Mexican National Guard garrison commander in Juarez, Mexico, referred questions about the alleged incident to the agency’s Mexico City headquarters.
Border Report also asked the U.S. Border Patrol by email if the agency is aware of the alleged incursion and is awaiting a response.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in February sent 10,000 National Guard troops to the border with the U.S. in an effort to combat illegal migration and fentanyl trafficking to the United States as President Donald Trump threatened Mexico with tariffs.
ProVideo in Juarez, Mexico, contributed to this report.
