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Craig Hudson

The Customs and Border Protection officer padded and pawed through a maze of luggage and passengers surrounding Dulles Airport baggage carousel, following his nose on a hunt for contraband. He settled next to a passenger with a gray and black backpack, fresh off a flight from Istanbul.

Freddie, a trained agriculture dog with the Beagle Brigade, seemed to have caught the scent of prohibited goods and sat down, a signal to his partner. His human handler, agriculture specialist Melissa Snyder, addressed the passenger.

“Apples? Orange? Bananas? Meat? Is it meat? I’m just going to look, okay?” she said to the man before he unzipped his satchel.

The confused passenger, who apparently only spoke Russian, revealed a purple plastic bag holding the illicit items: nine apples.

Freddie sat again, and Snyder rewarded him with a Milk-Bone for his successful hunt.

Found on the streets just a few years ago, Freddie is now one of six dogs on the sharp-nosed Beagle Brigade patrolling Washington Dulles International Airport for plants and meat products that travelers are prohibited from bringing into the country to prevent disease or infestation by foreign plants, insects or microbes.

And as the holiday season approaches, Customs and Border Protection expects a rise in travelers — who often don’t know the rules or the risks — carrying fruits and delicacies from tourist adventures or meats like snake or camel that provide familiar tastes from faraway homelands.

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The Beagle Brigade are employed by Customs and Border Protection nationwide as guardians at the point of entry, to halt the flow of goods that could harm native plants and livestock, and damage the U.S. agricultural markets.

“You don’t want to start paying $15 for your box of cornflakes because a bug got in and decimated our wheat crop. That’s why we’re here,” said Christopher Brewer, agriculture chief for the port of D.C. “Freddie is one of the layers we use to enforce the rules.”

Four days a week, Freddie and Snyder work from 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. The canine is either training to learn new scents of prohibited plants and proteins or sniffing his way through arrivals — typically from Africa and the Middle East during their shift.

Freddie looks more like a bluetick hound, according to his human partners, but his nose is all beagle. He has tracked down citrus, mangos and other fruits, as well as a variety of meats: cane rat, pigeon and, in September, two pounds of snake from Equatorial Guinea.

“It’s usually unidentified meat,” Snyder said. “We’re not sure what it is.”

Freddie was found walking down a traffic median in Georgia about four years ago and was brought to a training program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Officials vet the canine candidates for temperament, behavior and ability to be trained at the USDA academy, officials said.

“We have five primary scents that they are trained on down in Georgia,” Snyder said. “Apple, citrus, mango, beef and pork. But he’s definitely expanded beyond that now.”

Recently, he learned camel and has been training on African plums that were in season, said Snyder, who studied and taught medicinal botany at Brigham Young University in her home state of Utah before joining Customs and Border Protection four years ago.

The USDA sends menus of seasonal foods and holidays, festivals and religious observances, that help agents prepare for influxes of particular products, said Josue Ledezma, Customs and Border Protection’s K-9 supervisor.

For example, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot often brings travelers carrying a citrus called etrog. Egypt’s mango season concluded in September when Freddie alone nabbed 188 kilograms (414 pounds) of mangos.

Mangos can carry Mediterranean fruit flies, while citrus from just about every other place in the world is prohibited to protect groves in the United States.

“Any passenger that pops positive, we’ll take them in the back, go through their bag, remove the contraband, which we’ll either chop or put in a bag to incinerate it,” Brewer said.

Hidden behind mirrored walls and doors, a squeaky conveyor belt rolls through an X-ray machine inside the inspection chamber, where agricultural specialists take a closer look at bags flagged by the beagles.

Freddie and Snyder escorted the Russian-speaking passenger into the area, where agents discovered sliced meat in addition to his apples.

The fruit and meat were removed from his bag and placed with other confiscated foods on a stainless steel table: raw sausage, packaged chorizo, a couple dozen tiny, unripe eggplants from Mexico.

The eggplant needed to be sliced open to check what insects might be hitting ports of entry, Brewer said.

And a bag of dried honeycomb was particularly troubling.

“We’re sensitive to honey … there are a lot of funky diseases that can decimate our honey bee population,” Brewer said.

Agents have seized a whole side of a cow cut into quarters; half a raw smoked fish filled with maggots; and chickens — beheaded just before departure, officials said.

Often the seizures are traditional comfort foods for immigrant communities.

“It’s their taste of home,” Brewer said. “Most of it is they either think they can’t get it here or it’s just a taste of home they desperately want. … A lot of first-time travelers just don’t realize you can get most everything here, so they try to bring it.”

But the risks of letting passengers bring in grandma’s home cooking and $800 prosciutto are too great, officials say.

“Stuff like that, that’s normally what we don’t want to come in because we have zero idea where it was manufactured, what’s in it.” Brewer said. “It’s very important we don’t inadvertently introduce an animal disease here that doesn’t already exist here.”

2014 Pulitzer Finalist for Breaking News - a lead writer of The Washington Post staff coverage of the deadly Navy Yard Shootings

First Place National Press Club Journalism Awards for Breaking News 2014 for Navy Yard coverage

Masters in Journalism, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. 

B.A. American Studies, George Mason University

Clarence Williams is the night reporter for The Washington Post on the "night cops" beat, where he has spent nearly two decades chasing breaking news and writing in-depth, issues-based features about police, fire and rescue, and other public safety issues in and around Washington.

Clarence Williams

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Dulles Airport’s Beagle Brigade sniffs out travelers’ prohibited foods

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