Law enforcement officers in San Diego, and beyond, are mourning the violent death of a Baja California state police commander who helped detain U.S. fugitives in Mexico.
U.S. officers rushed to the scene where Abigail Esparza Reyes lay fatally wounded in Tijuana this month in a shootout with an escaped California inmate. They filled the pews two days later during her funeral mass at Tijuana’s Metropolitan Cathedral. And they have been raising money to help the son and daughter she left behind.
Esparza, 33, worked as an international law enforcement liaison officer for Baja California. She headed the Tijuana office of a 14-member unit known as Cazagringos, or Gringo Hunters. Its members focus on detaining U.S. fugitives – convicted and suspected murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers and others who flee to Mexico. The job involves working closely with U.S. law enforcement agencies, who are barred from making arrests in Mexico.
“Though we may stand on opposite sides of a border, the bond among those who serve knows no boundaries,” reads a U.S. online fundraising appeal on behalf of her family that has raised close to $30,000 as of this week. “Abigail was a sister in blue, and her sacrifice deserves our respect, our gratitude, and our support.”
Dressed in plainclothes, members of several U.S. agencies attended her funeral Mass, including the U.S. Marshals’ Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the San Diego Sheriff’s Office, and San Diego Police. Their presence was a silent testimony to the strong cross-border bonds developed over years of successful collaboration with Esparza’s unit.
But later that day, the U.S. officers were noticeably absent from a memorial ceremony at police headquarters honoring Esparza, the Tijuana investigative newsweekly Zeta reported. Members of U.S. law enforcement routinely attend such ceremonies, and the fact that they were “disinvited” shows a rift in the relationship, Zeta’s article said.
Gen. Laureano Carrillo, Baja California’s Secretary of Security and Civilian Protection, told Zeta that when U.S. officers had requested to attend the ceremony, he responded that “this was a private event, with the family, with her casket, and the institution.”
Esparza died April 9 while leading a small group of agents closing in on their target: a U.S. citizen named Cesar Hernandez, who escaped custody last December in Kern County. He’d been serving an 80-year to life sentence on a 2019 conviction of killing a man in Los Angeles County. After the shooting, Hernandez was also initially able to escape Mexican police, but was arrested on April 18 in Tijuana, and remains in custody in Baja California where he faces charges of killing Esparza.
At the April 11 memorial service, Esparza’s fellow state agents angrily demanded the removal of the commander who oversaw the failed operation, and decried working conditions.
Days later, at the Baja California governor’s April 16 morning news conference, Gen. Carrillo said the operation remains under review, but conceded that it had been poorly executed with insufficient personnel.
U.S. Marshals who were nearby, “but not involved in the shooting incident rendered aid to Commander Esparza Reyes before she succumbed to her injuries,” according to a written statement from the Marshals Service.
Esparza was remembered by the Marshals Service as an excellent teammate who was “extremely well respected for her investigative skills and years of service.”
A single mother of two, she held her own in a “world of machos with guns” one of her colleagues told ABC News. She “rose quickly through the ranks,” said Christopher Teal, the U.S. Consul General in Tijuana. “She gave her life in search of a safer future for all.”
The day-to-day collaboration with Mexican law enforcement leads to strong local relationships that persist through tensions at the national level.
“When you become a liaison officer, you become part of a big family on both sides of the border, and it never goes away,” said Alejandro Lares, a former Tijuana police chief and international liaison officer for his department.
“You develop a relationship, and you have deep feelings when something happens to them,” Steve Duncan, a retired special agent with the California Department of Justice, told me. “You’re working with them, you realize what they go through, that it’s a different reality.”
Baja California’s fugitive hunting unit dates back to the early 2000s. Normally, the work is low-profile and the agents often operate undercover. But their dangerous work has been gaining visibility.
The team is featured in a new A&E series called “Fugitive Hunters Mexico,” which follows the agents as they capture their targets and turn them over at the U.S. border; Esparza appears in Episode 7 as “Carmen,” an agent with shoulder-length hair who is calmly and competently doing her job. Later this year, Netflix will release a new drama series, “Gringo Hunters,” inspired by a 2022 Washington Post article about the unit where her work is also featured. Wondery’s Spanish-language podcast, Cazagringos, a 34-episode series, was launched last year and focuses on Baja California’s unit.
Esparza had been determined to become a police officer, even though her mother begged her not to, the Washington Post reported in 2022. She’d worked as a state officer for 11 years, the past eight years in the international liaison office.
Esparza is survived by her children, ages 12 and 13, who will be raised by her parents, according to the fundraiser post. She also leaves behind a grieving law enforcement family on both sides of the border.
Check the Numbers
I’ve heard it more than once, from friends who routinely travel between San Diego and Tijuana. They tell me fewer people are crossing from Tijuana to San Diego since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
There’s a lot of misinformation about the border these days, and it’s easy to be misled. So I reached out to Joaquin Luken of the Smart Border Coalition, who follows the statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Though crossings dropped immediately after Trump’s inauguration, it’s now pretty much back to normal, he said.
“The week after Jan. 20th, it was significantly noticeable that fewer people were crossing, especially by car,” Luken said. “You would still see pedestrians, but you saw fewer cars coming. But that quickly changed, maybe in two or three weeks.”
Luken said that overall, though, the CBP numbers show no significant overall drop in northbound travel through the seven ports of entry that make up the San Diego Field office (Tijuana, CBX, Otay, Tecate, Calexico, Calexico East, Andrade). Comparing February 2024 with February 2025, numbers fell from 5,540,000 to 5,435,000. There was a similar drop between March 2024 (6,153,000) and March 2025, (6,043,000.)
A more pronounced downward trend, however, involves pedestrian crossers. From 1,633,000 in March 2024 to 1,524,000 in March 2025.
For the San Ysidro Pedestrian Port of Entry, the numbers fell from 22,500 per day in March 2025 to about 20,500 a day–a drop of close to ten percent.
“It will be interesting to see how April behaves,” Luken said. “Because of Semana Santa and a lot of people coming for Spring Break, that will be something to really look at.”