The printing company he works for plans to move its base of operations to Pennsylvania next year, so he's started looking for different work. "I've worked a lot of dead-end jobs, but this offers security - it's a government job," he said of the Border Patrol.
Shennell Cooper, 22, of West Baltimore had never considered a job with the Border Patrol. "I didn't even know what it was," she said.
Cooper expects to graduate from Delaware State University this spring, and attended the job fair at the suggestion of her mother, who works for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Like border agents, her mother carries a firearm, so Cooper said the idea of working as a government law enforcement agent wasn't alien to her.
"I actually liked what I saw," she said. "And I used to run in school, so I could handle the physical part of it."
To work for the Border Patrol, applicants must pass physical tests that include push-ups, sit-ups and a cardiovascular step exercise. They must also pass a written test, which includes reasoning and language skills sections.
All new agents initially serve on the U.S. border with Mexico, and those who don't speak Spanish must go through an extra five weeks of training to learn the basics of the language.
Between October 2007 and February, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 260,000 people trying to cross U.S. borders illegally and seized more than 714,000 pounds of marijuana and 4,600 ounces of cocaine.
Quinones said the job typically requires a 10-hour workday because it's hard to predict when someone will try to cross into the country illegally.
He offered his last day working on the Texas border before being transferred to Miami as an example of the unpredictable nature of the job. He was training a new agent when a Ford Crown Victoria pulled into a checkpoint. He asked the driver if he could show the trainee how to inspect a vehicle. The man was overly cooperative - a sign he might be hiding something.
"We looked in the trunk and saw a gun," Quinones recalled. "We looked inside a wooden box in the trunk and found about $60,000 worth of crystal meth. It was a training exercise, but it ended up being a pretty good apprehension."
chris.emery@baltsun.com
