“The Shadow Catcher” by Hipolito Acosta with Lisa Pulitzer, published by Atria Books.

Category – True Crime

This is the story of Hipolito Acosta from being raised in a Texas migrant worker family until his retirement from the Department of Homeland Security.

Acosta, after several meaningless jobs and a stint in the United States Navy, joined the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service as a Border Patrol Agent.

Illegal Immigration from Mexico is big time business. Illegals not only include Mexicans, but Yugoslavian, Chinese, Japanese, Iranians, etc... The real horror of human trafficking is the number of young children that are abused trying to find their way to their parents.

The cost for transportation can run into the thousands of dollars with no guarantee that one will arrive in the U.S... Many die during the trip due to overcrowding and starvation.

Acosta tells several of his most meaningful undercover operations that tried to curtail this illicit trade.

Although the book is interesting and gives credence to the problem of illegal immigration, I found the book to be lacking in continuity and the writing to be sophomoric. I also found it to be a little “over the top” in his assessment of himself, not that he did not do great things, but he leads the reader to believe that he was the total driving force behind the Agency.