Smugglers Try to Leap Border Fence with Jeep

The rules of the smuggling game across the U.S.-Mexico border have been written unofficially for years: If a bad guy moving drugs or people encounters a border fence, you tunnel under it.

But a group of enterprising – or desperate – smugglers got caught trying an alternative method. They built a flimsy makeshift ramp and tried to drive over a U.S. Border Patrol fence near the Imperial Sand Dunes in Southern California.

A U.S. Border Patrol spokeswoman in Arizona told the Los Angeles Times that a pair of suspected smugglers tried to drive over a 14-foot-high fence in southeastern Arizona just after midnight Tuesday but abandoned the vehicle and fled back into Mexico as agents approached.

“That area is just west of the Arizona-California line,” spokesman Victor Brabble told the Times. “There’s a floating fence there that we move when the dunes move. I guess the only way to get past it is to scale it.”