STUCK IN MEXICO

What happens when you go from Yuma, Arizona, to Algodones, Mexico, for a day of shopping for prescription drugs, dental cleaning, or cheap haircut without a passport. A friend of mine whose wife let him go across the border by himself found out. He didn’t realize until he and a buddy tried to get back into the USA that he didn’t have his passport with him. Surprise: he was directed to a detention area until he could somehow get his passport brought to him. His buddy volunteered to go back to Yuma to get it from the man’s wife. Trouble is she was not at home and it took some time to finally track her down to a certain beauty parlor. The passport finally got to the border station and my friend got sprung. It wasn’t something he would want to do again but he said it was interesting observing the other people placed in the detention area. He said one woman was taken aside because she was carrying $350 in diet pills. This is a no-no. Custom regulations are that you can bring back across the border only enough medicines for your personal use. She was fined $700, twice the value of the pills which were also confiscated. Through it all my friend kept his sense of humor. He joke that “guess we’ll be seeing a lot of skinny Custom and Border Patrol people in the months to come.”