Others make their own way on foot, often following railway lines or the few roads that are the only landmarks in the remote, open countryside.
“As some illegal migrants are on the verge of death when we find them, the first thing we have to do is provide them with medical attention,” Eberhardt said.
Border guards insist that it seems impossible to know how many are making it into Hungary illegally, but Eberhardt is confident the number is low.
“I cannot say we are detecting 100 percent of illegal border crossings, but somewhere very close to that,” he said.
The strip of border under Eberhardt’s watch is just one of five stretches of Hungary’s external Schengen borders with neighboring Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Croatia.
“Although 836 were officially caught in the green border in 2008, the real number of people is probably closer to 2,500,” he said.
The figures only tell part of the story: Children are not included in the official statistics on illegal immigration.
Eberhardt points to a room for mothers and children in the Szeged headquarters, where those apprehended are processed and either returned or sent into the asylum system. The grimness of the barred door and linoleum floor are eased only slightly by a few colorful posters on the wall, rubber play mats and a television.
Officially, more than 900 migrants had been picked up by the end of August, already more than last year’s total. And these were just those caught on Hungary’s part of the Schengen land border, which runs from the tip of Norway inside the Arctic Circle down to Slovenia on the Adriatic.
Saja, the genial sergeant, knows the “green border” like the back of his hand, including which drainage ditches and rows of bushes migrants use for cover.
Despite thermal-imaging cameras and helicopter backup — the EU has poured millions into tightening its expanded eastern border — he and his colleagues more often use simple hunters’ tricks. Inadvertently moving a seemingly innocent branch can betray a migrant’s passage to the guards.
Although they will sometimes try to evade capture by fleeing — into the cornfields, for example — once caught, the illegal migrants are usually passive and put up little resistance.
“They don’t try to fight,” Saja said. “They are usually pretty worn out anyway.”
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