Shadow Wolves

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Paul Smith
  • 316th Training Squadron
GOODFELLOW AIR FORCE BASE, Texas --  In 1972, the U.S. Congress recognized the unmatched tracking skills of the Native Americans of the Southwest by establishing the Shadow Wolves unit, an elite group of Native Americans tasked with the pursuit and apprehension of drugs and illegal-immigrants along a portion of the Mexican border.

The unit operates primarily within the Tohono O'odham Nation's territory, which includes 76 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border. The Tohono O'odham Nation insists the law enforcement unit employ agents who are at minimum one-quarter Native American in ancestry. About 20 agents track drug runners using both traditional tracking methods and modern law-enforcement technology. The unit is one of the most successful in the world and has leant their expertise to five other country's border patrolling agencies.

Since their inception, the Shadow Wolves have operated under the purview of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. In of 2006 the unit was returned to ICE oversight and proceeded to seize more than 31,000 lbs. of marijuana in their first nine months as a 15-member team. It is estimated the Shadow Wolves are single-handedly responsible for a yearly average of 60,000 lbs. in illegal drug seizure.

Drug runners, called "mules," are usually young, unemployed men picked up off the streets of Mexico by drug cartels who pay top dollar for anyone who is willing to make the treacherous crossing into Arizona. The Shadow Wolves believe they only catch about ten-percent of the drugs that are being smuggled into the states from Mexico.

The Shadow Wolves employ a technique called "cutting for sign," which consists of searching for and interpreting small clues in the desert that give information about drug runners moving through the landscape. The sign can be anything from a single fiber left on a bristly shrub, to a pebble that has been turned over by a light footfall, further analysis, called "cutting" reveals precise details.

While the Shadow Wolves' skills have been honed in their native lands in America, they are much sought after for their ability to see what others cannot. Members of the team have gone to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and to the American-Canadian border to share from the wealth of their tracking knowledge. The team prides themselves on employing the skills that have been handed down from generation to generation, but they have seamlessly adopted the modern technologies used by other U.S. border agencies. The Wolves' ties to the land and their culture run deep, but they also execute their duties with a deep sense of national responsibility.