Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Contraband: Seized At The Border’ on Max, A Series In The Style Of ‘Cops’ But Specific To Traffic Between The US And Mexico 

In the nine-episode Discovery production Contraband: Seized at the Border, now streaming on Max, interdiction operations are conducted by officers of the United States Customs and Border Patrol, otherwise known as the largest federal law enforcement agency inside the Department of Homeland Security. There are 28 border crossings shared between Texas and Mexico, and Contraband: Seized at the Border follows the action at various points on that grid – always from the perspective of the authorities – as people are caught using various methods to try and smuggle drugs, weapons, and even other people into the US.    

CONTRABAND: SEIZED AT THE BORDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: An aerial shot of Pharr International Bridge, which connects the city of Pharr, TX to Reynosa in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. “Due to pandemic restrictions,” a narrator tells us over close-ups of semi trucks idling at the border crossing, “Mexican cartels are seeking new methods of smuggling drugs into the US.”

The Gist: Methods, we soon learn, that include building secret drug compartments into shipping pallets, a smuggling tactic that on this particular day is sniffed out by United States Customs and Border Patrol officers using X-ray equipment. The tractor trailer licensed to haul “carrots” is directed to an inspection building, where an officer takes a drill to the pallets. A duct taped parcel inside is punctured, “white substance detected,” and a quick field test reveals that it’s cocaine. Officers proceed to put aside the produce and pry apart every pallet in the trailer – what happens to all of those carrots? – and soon their stack of contraband includes packets of coke, heroin, and methamphetamine. All told, the drug seizure amounts to over two million bucks in street value. 

Each episode of Contraband: Seized at the Border tracks a few different instances that occur at the major crossing points. When a woman on foot and carrying a six-month-old baby can’t seem to answer a few basic inquiries about the child, she is detained and questioned further; we are told that parents who might have previously crossed illegally will hire someone to later smuggle in their babies. While the woman is a US citizen and has the child’s birth certificate, her story breaks down after some pointed questioning from USCBP personnel. Elsewhere, an outstanding warrant pops up on a passenger in a vehicle, a group of women try and fail to smuggle small amounts of pills in their bare essentials, and another motorist is caught with ammunition in a cake box and a long rifle impersonating a fluorescent light. She did not declare these items. Also, she might have considered hiding them a little better.

“Never ceases to amaze me what they carry and where they’ll hide it,” a border patrol officer in Brownsville says while tossing the contents of a suspicious vehicle. And at the Juarez crossing, where the woman caught with the rifle was 55, an officer says her age proves that “they never know who will be carrying stuff like this,” because those caught smuggling have recently trended toward minors and young women. It’s a point driven even further home later, when a man and his family returning to the US from Mexico are stopped. Inside their SUV full of family vacation stuff are two plastic tubs of mole sauce and giant bags of candy that are actually full of crystal meth.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Nat Geo productions in the same vein as Contraband: Seized at the Border have included Border Wars and Border Security: America’s Front Line. And the 2020 Netflix limited series Immigration Nation, filmed during the height of the Trump administration, took a look at the issue from the differing perspectives of border patrol agencies, those detained, and their legal representation.

Our Take: The stories we see in the first episode of Contraband: Seized at the Border feature individuals who were trying to get away with something. Of that there is no doubt. Secret compartments built into shipping materials that are stuffed with street drugs? A dad using his wife and family as cover to smuggle meth inside candy and cooking sauces? Come on. That’s utterly shameless, and Contraband acknowledges more than once that the border patrol’s ongoing battle with the cartels takes many evolving forms. But it also adopts the POV of a surveillance state as it peers through security cameras mounted at border crossings, includes onscreen place names as if transmitted from some central computer, and leans heavily on the prospect that meth and other street drugs are constantly coming into the US via Mexico. Especially meth: the drug figures into two episode titles out of nine in the first season of Contraband.

It doesn’t ever come right out and say it. But the tone of this series feels determined to scare not only potential smugglers about what’s happening on the ground at America’s southern border, but viewers, too. Officers chalk up singular wins, but traffic and people stream endlessly through the crossings. Those trucks carrying carrots legitimately and cocaine illegitimately aren’t going to catch themselves. But the somewhat sour subtext of Contraband: Seized at the Border is that the battle is ongoing, there are threats everywhere, and none of it is ever going to end.  

Sex and Skin: Nothing here, though we hear some audio of CBP officers conducting full body searches inside a private examination room. Contraband wants its viewers to know that secreting the drugs you’re smuggling in your underwear is the oldest trick in the book.

Parting Shot: “It’s a sad situation that they had to bring the family into his negative lifestyle,” an officer says of the man smuggling meth in his mole. “This is gonna affect them. I mean, to see their father handcuffed and taken away for trying to perform illegal activities…” and Contraband: Seized at the Border lingers on the digitized faces of a family separated.

Sleeper Star: A supervising officer at the Progreso International Bridge crossing lays out the narrative of a day in which the CBP can claim victory. “One pill interception led to the next pill interception. We stopped the lady, she gave up a name, and then from that person, we’re able to stop the next group. We did not penalize those three girls today. We found that the information they were able to give up and that my officers were able to secure from that is gonna be of much more value. So, we’re gonna take that as a win today. A typical day in PGR.” 

Most Pilot-y Line: In an exchange that feels representative of what officers at the border encounter all of the time, a woman attempting to smuggle a baby learns pretty quickly that her story is super flimsy. “You don’t know anything about this girl. You don’t know her date of birth. You tell me that you see her every other week and you have no pictures of her. I think the child is not who you say she is.”

Our Call: STREAM IT if you’re a fan of this format, which hasn’t really changed all that much since the minute Cops debuted in 1989, or if you’re just a fan of watching bad actors get pinched and cautionary tales presented exclusively from a law enforcement perspective. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges