More than a dozen heavily armed Mexican soldiers accidentally crossed over the US border into New Mexico while searching for drug traffickers and gunrunners — and instead surrounded two American volunteers scouring the desert for lost migrants on Monday.
Abbey Carpenter and James Holeman, volunteers for the humanitarian group Battalion Search and Rescue that aids in searching for migrants lost in the southern New Mexico desert, came across the 18 confounded soldiers with the Mexican army, according to Border Report.
The soldiers had no idea they’d crossed the border. They told Carpenter and Holeman that they were looking for drug traffickers and gunrunners and asked what the pair was doing in Mexico, according to the outlet.
Carpenter whipped out her phone to show them her GPS tracker, which confirmed that they were in the US.
“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. That’s when I got nervous, like, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t have our phones out, taking pictures of them in US soil,’” she told Border Report.
After realizing they’d grossly overshot their destination, the soldiers quickly pivoted south back toward the border, Carpenter said.
The border in that part of New Mexico lacks proper delineation and is only marked by a simple wire fence that is easy to open, Coleman told the outlet.
“We were like: ‘Ha-ha!’ ‘Take a picture with me?’ ‘Blah-blah.’ But that’s because we knew we were in the US. If we had encountered them in Mexico, it would have been a whole different thing. Threatened? I would say that, just because of our American thinking being on US soil. Nervous? Yeah, bro. We were definitely nervous,” Holeman added.
As an extra precaution, Carpenter recorded the encounter and captured multiple videos of the group, including one photo showing the armed soldiers keeping watch in a white pickup truck with “Guardia Nacional” pasted on the side.
The soldiers’ uniforms also had badges of the Mexican flag on their arms alongside other military symbols.
Holeman noted that he and Carpenter spotted two Mexico-plated vehicles littered with bullet holes near the Mexican border earlier during their search.
For many migrants crossing the border, the final stretch through American deserts can be the most deadly, but the soldiers’ presence near the border isn’t out of the ordinary.
In February, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 National Guard troops to the border to help combat illegal migration and drug trafficking between the two countries.
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