I've written before about the scouts, but here's a fresh one worth your time. Down near Ajo, Arizona, Border Patrol agents came in fast off a helicopter, ropes down, and grabbed a man they believe was working as an active scout for a smuggling outfit. You can watch the footage for yourself over at Yahoo.

If you don't know what a scout is, let me explain it the way I'd explain it to a reporter standing on my south fence. The cartels put watchers on the high ground, the little peaks and ridgelines that overlook the smuggling corridors. Guy sits up there with a phone and maybe a thermal scope, and his whole job is calling out where the agents are. Group coming across gets told to hold in the brush, wait an hour, move when the truck turns around. A good scout can make a whole shift of agents chase ghosts while a load of people or dope walks clean through the back door.

So when agents take a scout off a hill, it's not a small thing. It's like pulling the eyes out of the operation. The guides running groups through that stretch of desert are suddenly working blind, and blind guides make mistakes. They push groups at the wrong time, they burn out water caches, they get spotted. I've seen it on our place. When the watchers go quiet, traffic drops or it gets sloppy, and either way the agents catch more of it.

The fast-rope part matters too. That's agents dropping straight out of a helicopter onto or near the position instead of driving an hour up a wash and announcing themselves with dust two ridges away. Scouts sit where they sit for a reason. It's hard ground, a long walk from any road, and for years that terrain was the escape plan. A helicopter with a rope on it turns that math upside down. There is no hill in Arizona far enough from a road to save you anymore, and guys on those peaks are figuring that out one arrest at a time.

Ajo country is brutal for this work. It's Organ Pipe and Tohono O'odham land out that way, big empty distances, triple-digit heat most of the year, and a legacy of trafficking that goes back generations. The agents working that corridor earn every dollar. When they pull something like this off, clean and fast and on camera, I take a certain satisfaction in it, because I know what those hills cost the people who have to work them.

The politicians will spin whatever they want out of a video like this. I don't care and neither should you. What matters is simple: a cartel lookout got taken off a hill, and a smuggling crew is running short one set of eyes tonight. That's a good day's work on any part of this border, and I don't need a press conference to tell me so.