Dying to flee Mexico for America: Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigrants

The Independant
July 27, 2014
by Tim Walker

The San Miguel crossing between Arizona and Mexico is a simple iron gate. Stretching away on either side is a border marked by concrete posts, which are driven into the Sonoran Desert scrub and strung with chicken wire that anyone could duck under without difficulty. For an undocumented migrant on foot, the hard part comes after the crossing: the long walk to safety, dodging the Border Patrol without succumbing to the harsh desert conditions.

On Wednesday morning, Mike Wilson crossed into Mexico to refill the water container at the station he maintains a few yards south of the border, and which has likely saved the lives of migrants who can drink before reaching the US. Some 20 gallons had gone since he last visited a month ago. Sometimes, he says, he finds the 50-gallon barrel bone dry. Wilson, who is 65, belongs to a small but passionate community of activists trying to reduce the number of migrant deaths in a state not known for its sympathy to their plight.

"Arizona has a reputation as an anti-immigrant state," says Todd Miller, author of the book Border Patrol Nation. "But there are many people throughout southern Arizona who organise not only to oppose anti-immigrant laws, but also to go into the desert and provide humanitarian aid... Mike is doing important and wonderful work."

Mr Wilson and his partner Susan have also offered food and temporary shelter to some of the more than 52,000 migrant children who have crossed into the US since October 2013, most of them fleeing violence in Central America. On Friday, Mr Obama met with the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and urged them to work with the US to help stem the flow of migrants, stating that many of those who have crossed the border will not be able to stay – with only the potential for some "narrow" circumstances for humanitarian or refugee status.

Mr Wilson, though he lives on the outskirts of Tucson, is a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, a Native American community of 25,000 on a reservation the size of Connecticut, sliced in half by a 75-mile stretch of the US-Mexico border. The Tohono O'odham (meaning "Desert People") have been on this land for thousands of years and, even after the border was drawn in 1854, could pass back and forth unimpeded, often via the San Miguel gate.

After 9/11, however, crossing anywhere but at official checkpoints became illegal. Those Tohono O'odham who lacked the correct paperwork were trapped on the Mexican side. Meanwhile, the Nation found itself at the frontline of a broader border crisis. As the US increased security in the urban areas where they had traditionally crossed, economic migrants from Central America moved to more isolated routes, such as the Sonoran Desert.

By the mid-2000s, tribal officials estimated that as many as 1,500 undocumented migrants per day crossed the border through the reservation. Having survived the treacherous journey through Mexico, many were killed instead by the desert. Since 2001, the Pima County medical examiner in Tucson has received an average of 164 bodies of border-crossers per year. Around half those deaths occurred in the Tohono O'odham Nation, making it the deadliest migrant trail in the US.

Humanitarian groups sprang up to combat the problem, including the NGO Humane Borders, which maps migrant fatalities to identify the most deadly areas of the desert, and then deposits water, food and medical supplies in those spots. The group's executive director, Juanita Molina, says Humane Borders drops up to 1,200 gallons of water per week during July, the most lethal month of the year. "Many Border Patrol officers and people in the community see us not as preventing deaths, but as aiding and abetting," she says.

To Mr Wilson's dismay, the Tohono O'odham Nation sided against the migrants. "They borrowed whole cloth the Department of Homeland Security's narrative, which describes undocumented migrants as potential terrorists," he says. The Nation's leaders even passed a resolution banning outside humanitarian groups from putting out water on the reservation – so Mr Wilson decided to do it himself. "I'm a one-man organisation, by design," he explains. "I have working relationships with other groups from the social justice community. But when I put out water, I do it as a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation."

Mr Wilson's first career was in the US Special Forces, and in 1988 he was posted to El Salvador during its civil war. "We were supposedly advisers, but our mission soon changed," he recalls. "We were to prevent as much as possible the human rights abuses by the military against the civilian population … after my experience in El Salvador, I really asked myself what side of the table of justice I wanted to sit on."

During the US-sponsored Central American civil wars of the 1980s, Tucson was the centre of the Sanctuary movement, a campaign offering safe haven to refugees. That dormant humanitarian infrastructure provided a foundation for more recent human rights efforts.

2002, Mr Wilson, by then a Presbyterian lay pastor, set up five water stations – one on the far side at the San Miguel gate, and four spread across the US side of the reservation, which he named St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke and St John. He was forced to replenish the water every couple of weeks. "I could barely keep up with the demand."
That was until Tohono O'odham Police confiscated four of the stations, leaving him with just the one on the Mexican side of the border fence. No one from the Nation's executive was available to talk to The Independent on Sunday, but Mr Wilson suspects the reservation's leadership stymied his efforts because it relies on federal funding for infrastructure, education and housing. "The federal appropriations are buying silence from tribal members," he says.

Since June, Mr Wilson has offered shelter to more than 50 women and children. Their latest undocumented visitors were a Salvadoran woman, her 13-year-old daughter and two toddler sons, who crossed the border last Sunday on their way to the woman's mother, who has lived in Maryland for 25 years. Wilson doesn't like to pry into his guests' pasts, but he can make educated guesses. “The mother probably fled to the US as a political refugee during the Sanctuary movement,” he says. “I didn’t tell the woman that I’d been in El Salvador. It might open old wounds.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dying-to-flee-mexico-for-america-arizonas-crackdown-on-illegal-immigrants-9630863.html

New Tucson center aims to ID migrants who die on trek north

Los Angeles Times
May 4, 2014
by Cindy Carcamo

Every year thousands of migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally into Arizona. Some make it to their destination. Others get picked up by authorities.

Hundreds more perish in the Sonoran desert. Some bodies are never identified and families of the missing can languish for years without word of their loved ones.

A new Tucson-based organization is hoping to change that.

On Saturday, the Colibri Center for Human Rights officially launched, hoping to address what its organizers call a “very serious human rights crisis on the border.”  The center, which is supported by the Ford Foundation and others, is an expansion of an earlier effort known as the Missing Migrant Project.

That project had already collected, organized and centralized information for what is regarded as the most comprehensive database in the nation on missing and unidentified migrants.

Since 2006, the group has made 100 matches in collaboration with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office.

 

Colibri, headed by executive director Robin Reineke, still helps people find their loved ones and track information on the dead and missing, but now also aims to educate people on the high number of deaths and disappearances along the southern border through research and storytelling.

For example, families of the missing will be able to post testimonials, detailing their struggle on the organization’s website. There’s also a section that shows the personal items carried by more than 2,400 migrants who died in the last 14 years during their attempt to cross the US-Mexico border.

Since 2006, about 2,000 people have filed missing person reports for those who have disappeared crossing the southern border. Most were last known to have passed through the Arizona corridor.

“The way we approach the project is the way a forensic scientists have approached mass disasters,” Reineke said. “There is a high number of missing individuals and high number of unidentified individuals. We do everything we can … and try to make a match.”

In Arizona alone, there are at least 900 unidentified remains, according to Pima County Medical Examiner data. Most of the migrants are from Mexico or Central America.

Although illegal immigration along the southern border has decreased in the last couple of years, deaths along the border are still numerous. About 165 people die every year crossing illegally into Arizona.

In places like Brooks County, Texas, deaths have drastically increased in the last couple of years, Reineke said. Colibri is also collaborating with officials there to help them with the issue.

The launch of the new organization coincided with the Tucson premiere of “Who is Dayani Cristal?” The film, a documentary about the journey to identify a man who crossed the border illegally into Arizona from Mexico, features the Pima County Office, Reineke and the work that eventually developed into Colibri.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-ff-arizona-immigration-migrant-database-20140503-story.html

Emergency calls in cross-border shooting released

KVOA News 4 Tucson
March 14, 2014
by Lupita Murillo and Michel Marizco

NOGALES - The family of a Mexican teen shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents after he allegedly threw rocks at agents over the Nogales border wall in October 2012 released the audio recordings of three phone calls made to Mexico's emergency phone system the night of the shooting.

The recordings illustrate a frantic series of events that led to the death of José Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16, that night. The FBI, which is investigating the shooting death, has declined comment citing the ongoing investigation.

The agency typically does not discuss open investigations and has given no details of the case. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Internal Affairs responded to the shooting incident that October 10 night, but has also declined to comment.

Isidro Alvarado is a Mexican security guard who says he was walking about 20 feet behind José Antonio when two people ran past him. That's when the shots rang out. He ran from the incident and called Mexico's 0-6-0, modeled on the 9-1-1 system in the U.S.

"They are shooting with a firearm. It appears to be an agent of the Border Patrol," he told the dispatcher. "Send patrols urgently. Urgently!"

Interviewed last Sunday in Nogales, Sonora, Alvarado said he saw the hands of two people reach through the bars that separate the two countries and open fire. "Two hands. The shots entered from two places," he said.

Alvarado and José Antonio's mother, Araceli Rodriguez, say U.S. investigators interviewed them at the Dennis DeConcini port of entry last summer.

In another call to 0-6-0 that night, a Border Patrol agent called in to report that someone may be hurt on Mexico's side of the border.

"I'm calling to report there were gunshots along the border line in Whiskey Number 3 and apparently there is someone hurt on the Mexican side," the agent told the dispatcher.

Whiskey Number 3 is a law enforcement designation for a graph of the area shared by law enforcement on both sides of the border. The shooting occurred about four blocks west from the DeConcini port of entry.

"About how many people are in the area?" the dispatcher asked him.

"On the Mexican side, I couldn't tell you. On our side, there are about five," the agent said.
"Are you alright?" the dispatcher asked the agent.

"Yes."

"Listen, and what were they doing? Were they damaging the border wall or something?" the dispatcher asked.

"They were throwing rocks."

"About how many shots did they fire?" she asked.

"How many shots were fired, do we know" the agent asked someone in English.

"Right now, I couldn't tell you," he tells the dispatcher.

"But there were various?" the dispatcher asked him.

"Yes."

Luis Parra is a lawyer in Arizona representing the dead teen's family.

"That recording is a valuable piece of information," he said. "It's basically a call, from witnesses, civilian witnesses, and it's also a call from the Border Patrol themselves recognizing that there were five officers at the scene and there were various bullets fired that evening."

José Antonio's family has said the dead teenager was not involved in the rock-throwing against the agents.

The incident began about 11:15 p.m. Border Patrol agents and Nogales, Ariz., police responded to a 9-1-1 call of suspicious men wearing camouflage pants and sweatshirts on International Street.

According to a Nogales Police Department report obtained by the News 4 Tucson Investigators, Officer Quinardo Garcia spotted two men matching the description and carrying bundles of marijuana strapped to their bodies.

They jumped the border wall and ran toward a residential area. Garcia chased the two men and called for backup, yelling at the men to stop. He lost sight of the two men and a Border Patrol agent joined him in the search.

At that point, Garcia wrote in his report, he heard fellow Nogales police officer John Zuniga alert that there were rocks being thrown over the border wall.

"Shortly after, I heard a loud noise, which I identified immediately as a gunshot, and following after, several more gunshots," he wrote in his report.

Officer Zuniga initially believed the gunshots may have come from Mexico. Garcia emerged from the area and met with Zuniga and Border Patrol agents "where I learned that a male subject that [sic] had been throwing rocks at agents from Mexico. The male subject had been shot by one of the U.S. Border Patrol agents," he wrote.

Garcia also noted that there were many medium sized rocks scattered around where the agents and officers had parked their vehicles.

An autopsy conducted by investigators in Nogales, Sonora, determined José Antonio was shot 11 times, mostly in the back, the shoulder blades and the back of the neck and head.

The case is one of at least 8 cases since 2010 where Border Patrol agents shot and killed someone the agency alleged was throwing rocks at agents. Many of those cases remain under investigation. Last week, Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher, under pressure from Congress and critics, released the Border Patrol's Use of Force policy and made public a directive to agents.

"Agents shall not discharge firearms in response to thrown or hurled projectiles unless the agent has a reasonable belief, based on the totality of circumstances, to include the nature and size of the projectiles, that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious injury," he wrote in the directive.

Art del Cueto, president of the Border Patrol's Tucson union, Local 2544, called that directive vague. "We never pull our guns unless we are in danger, anyway," he said after the directive was released. "What are agents supposed to do? Retreat? That's not an option."

Araceli Rodriguez, José Antonio's mother, says Fisher's directive has changed nothing.

"It's the same as it's ever been. It simply reminded agents of what they are supposed to be doing in the first place," Rodriguez said.

http://www.kvoa.com/news/emergency-calls-in-cross-border-shooting-released/

Migrant dies after falling from border fence

Nogales International
April 2, 2014
by Jonathan Clark

A 41-year-old man from El Salvador died this week after falling from the border fence in Nogales.
According to a statement from the U.S. Border Patrol, agents responded at approximately 5 a.m. on Sunday to a suspect attempting to illegally enter the United States.

“The subject, a Salvadoran male, attempted to return to Mexico and fell off the international boundary fence,” the statement said. “Medical services were rendered to the subject, who subsequently passed away from his injuries."

In an emailed statement, Gerry Castro, EMS division chief at the Nogales Fire Department, said paramedics arrived at the dead end of Short Street and found the man unconscious, approximately 18 feet from the fence on a surface described as “cement/rocky ground.” Border Patrol agents said he had been there approximately 15 minutes.

The man was suffering “obvious trauma to head and face and blood was present to those areas,” Castro said, adding that “some deformity” was noted on the victim’s right hand.

After starting CPR, the NPD crew took the victim to Holy Cross Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.

José Joaquín Chacón, the Salvadoran consul in Arizona, said an autopsy performed in Pima County showed that the man died of head trauma.

“Surely, the young man lost his balance and ended up hitting his head on the ground,” he said.

Another Salvadoran who was with the victim at the time was subsequently picked up by the Border Patrol, Chacón said, and he was allowed to interview the witness on Monday. The man confirmed that the two migrants had arrived at the border together, and that his companion had fallen while trying to climb the fence.

“It wasn’t, for example, an unfortunate case in which a Border Patrol agent was involved in firing a gun, or that there was an injury from a firearm or anything like that,” Chacón said. “There’s nothing like that.”

Consular officials have located the victim’s sister in California and a brother in El Salvador, but since the family members haven’t yet made a positive ID from the autopsy records, Chacón said, the consulate can’t release the man’s name.

However, he did say the man was from the coastal state, or “departamento,” of Usulatan, and consular records show that he had twice been deported from the United States.

“It’s one more tragedy in that the youth and people from our countries, in search of the American Dream, come and often find death,” he said.

Mass held nearby

The man fell from the fence a few hundred feet from the spot where Catholic bishops from across the county held a mass Tuesday to remember deceased migrants and call for Congress to enact immigration reform.

Chacón noted the coincidence.

“Yesterday, they were celebrating a mass precisely for the people who have died, and this Salvadoran died, by chance, on Sunday,” he said.

In 2011, the Border Patrol replaced the 10-foot-high landing mat fence that ran through Nogales with a stronger barrier measuring up to 30 feet tall. Since then, emergency personnel from the Nogales Fire Department have treated a number of fence-jumpers for broken ankles, legs and hips. In February 2012, a 44-year-old man from Oaxaca, Mexico died after falling from the fence on the west side of town and suffering head and neck injuries.

Last year, Border Patrol officials in Nogales floated the idea of hanging razor wire on the U.S. side of the fence, approximately 10 feet above ground, in hopes that it would discourage jumpers. However, the plan was scuttled after it was met with outcry in the community.

http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/migrant-dies-after-falling-from-border-fence/article_4f091ae6-bac0-11e3-a192-0019bb2963f4.html#.Uz3d0_nTzeU.email

Deaths will continue with or without immigration reform

Cronkite News
December 6, 2013
Brittany Hargrave

For nine years, Steve Johnston has toted gallons of water, food packages, clothing and blankets up and down Arizona’s rugged border terrain, leaving the provisions on immigrant trails into the U.S. in the name of saving lives.

While bipartisan supporters say that the U.S. Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill, S 744, will solve the nation’s illegal immigration problems if passed by the House of Representatives, Johnston offers a stark, contrasting view.

“I’m convinced S 744 will kill more people,” he says.

Johnston, 68, is a volunteer for the Tucson-based humanitarian-aid group No More Deaths, which is among several humanitarian and immigrant-advocacy groups that oppose the immigration bill, in part, for what they call its lack of foresight.

Johnston says the bill will “stress (volunteer) capabilities” by increasing border-enforcement efforts in Arizona and further funneling migrants into the most dangerous routes in the mountainous terrain of the Sonoran Desert.

He bases his prediction on trends from the past. Border enforcement strategies have been linked to a migrant-death rate in Arizona that has dramatically increased since the state became the most common entry point for illegal immigration into the U.S. in 1998.

Johnston’s prediction is plausible but not inevitable, says Doris Meissner, director of the Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton.

“A straight-line analysis is that deaths have remained high in Arizona and the bill is unlikely to lower those numbers and may even increase them,” she says. “However, the whole premise of comprehensive immigration reform is to create a system whereby people come into the U.S. to meet labor market demands and would be able to do so in a safe and orderly fashion. That should reduce reasons why people try to cross the southwest border illegally and thus decrease the number of deaths.”

There are several components of the bill that could impact migrant deaths and humanitarian work.
Primarily, S 744 calls for spending tens of billions of dollars on greater border-enforcement measures. This includes doubling the number of Border Patrol agents at the southern border to more than 38,000; constructing 700 additional miles of border fencing; deploying aircraft; building watch towers; and mandating area-specific technology such as camera systems, ground sensors and drones.

Much of those resources would be targeted toward high-risk zones like the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which in the 2012 fiscal year made one- third of the arrests of undocumented immigrants and one-half of marijuana seizures nationwide. Arizona already has 318 miles of some kind of border fencing, according to the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson and Yuma sectors. The remaining 70 miles have environmental obstacles that act as natural barriers.

Arizona became the focal point for illegal immigration as the result of a concentrated border-enforcement strategy that began in 1993 when “Operation Hold the Line” beefed up security with manpower and technology in busy illegal immigrant corridors into Texas. The Clinton administration followed with “Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994, increasing enforcement in the busiest illegalimmigration entry point – San Diego, Calif.

The strategy was aimed at forcing those who hoped to cross into the U.S. illegally into mountainous terrain with weather that fluctuates from blistering hot in the summer to frigid cold and snow in the winter acting as a deterrent. But it didn’t.

Migrant crossings and apprehensions plummeted in California and Texas following those policy changes, but they dramatically increased in Arizona. In 1992, there were just more than 95,000 apprehensions in the Tucson and Yuma sectors combined. By 2000, that number jumped to more than 700,000.

The apprehension numbers have now dropped to pre-1994 levels, the product of increased enforcement, fewer jobs available in the U.S. and an improving economy in Mexico. Deaths have not.

According to the U.S. Border Patrol, death counts have fluctuated between 170 per year and 250 per year since 2005. During that same period, apprehensions in the Tucson sector have decreased by 73 percent. The bottom line: The death rate is rising compared to reported apprehensions.

Those numbers alarm people like Gene Lefebvre, who was active in the 1980s Sanctuary Movement and who co-founded No More Deaths.

“Whether enforcement is high or low, people will try to come across if they believe they have more opportunities here,” Lefebvre says. “Over the years, numbers (of apprehensions) have been driven by the U.S. economy and jobs, as well as poverty on the other side.”

He says an improving U.S. economy will lead to more illegal immigration and more deaths in the desert.

“(The government) projected that people would die, but what they didn’t project, what they didn’t count on, was the desperation of people,” he says. “People came anyway.”

Data indicate fewer people are trying to cross illegally through Arizona, but the desperation of the people who do come over explains why the death count remains high, says Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, a professor at the University of Arizona and program coordinator for the Binational Migration Institute. Those who make the trip take more dangerous routes as enforcement blocks easier access points, she says.

“We’re talking about people who are looking at the risk in a very different way than you or I would,” she says. “You and I wouldn’t want to go through the desert. Being with family is an incredible push factor for people. Overriding the deterrents of going through the desert are factors people face in their hometowns – they can’t make enough money to buy food or medicine for their family. They’re willing to take that chance.”

The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner has found more than 2,000 bodies of suspected migrants in its jurisdiction since January 2001. It handles more unidentified remains than any other medical-examiner office in the country.

Humane Borders, another humanitarian-aid group based in Tucson, has worked with the Pima medical examiner office to put together a map plotting coordinates of migrant remains using geographic information system (GIS) software. The map also provides information concerning common demographics of migrants who die while crossing the border.

Because of advanced levels of decomposition, not all bodies can be identified when found. Still, the bodies that are identifiable by age, gender and cause of death offer a picture of who the migrants are: Eighty percent are male. Exposure is the cause of death in nearly 75 percent of cases. More than 40 percent of bodies are found on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation. Most of the dead were between the ages of 20 and 49.

According to Gregory Hess, the office’s chief medical examiner, the biggest problem working with hundreds of unidentified bodies per year is storage.

“The unidentified bodies don’t go anywhere fast,” he says.

After the investigation is complete and there is no positive identification, the office generally calls to have the bodies buried in the Pima County plot or cremated, Hess says. That can add up to thousands of dollars in costs per year to the county.

It’s tragedies like those that another component of S. 744 hopes to cut down. In addition to its focus on enforcement, the bill calls for construction of 1,000 distress beacons along nearly 2,000 mile-long U.S. – Mexico border.

Currently, there are 22 distress beacons in the Tucson sector and 24 distress beacons in the Yuma sector. Factors on where the distress beacons are placed include how remote an area is, how many agents are deployed in the area, number of immigrant deaths in the area and what technology is available to help patrol, says Nicole Ballistrea, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson sector.

Distress beacons were first installed in Arizona in 2002 and consist of tall red posts equipped with buttons that can be pushed in emergencies to call for help. The towers are solar powered and lighted at night. Instructions for pressing the button and sending a distress signal appear in multiple languages. The instructions do not say the beacon is connected to Border Patrol. After being treated medically, border crossers without appropriate documentation are deported.

The Tucson sector beacons have been activated about 180 times “over the last few years,” Ballistrea says. Other than that estimate, there is little information on how effective distress beacons are.
Johnston, of No More Deaths, approves of the distress-beacon component of S 744, but says he believes it could be improved if the beacons were equipped with cell-phone towers, so migrants in distress could use their cell phones in areas with poor reception.

“That’s the thing that will save the most lives,” he says. “Right now, migrants have to climb to the top of the highest mountain to get reception, and that’s very difficult. If the beacons have a cell-phone tower and use that ability, I’ll be in favor. Otherwise, it’s just a PR thing.”

The U.S. Border Patrol and local Arizona humanitarian groups have a checkered history. In the past, Border Patrol agents have ticketed humanitarian volunteers for littering after volunteers left water bottles and food out for migrants. Videos also exist of Border Patrol agents destroying the water and other provisions left out by the humanitarian groups.

Right now, relationships between the aid groups and the Border Patrol seem better, Johnston says. He attributes the improvement to Manuel Padilla Jr., who became the Tucson sector Border Patrol chief earlier this year.

“At the moment, the sector chief is sympathetic to our cause,” Johnston says. “Still, water is being destroyed. Blankets are still being taken away.”

Rubio-Goldsmith, who has studied the interaction between U.S. Border Patrol agents and border communities, says the Border Patrol has the difficult task of balancing justice and mercy.

“Border Patrol doesn’t like people going through their land, yet Border Patrol is there and they are supposed to help,” she says. “How they respond is kind of a mixed bag.”

Ballistrea says the Tucson sector Border Patrol maintains an “ongoing dialogue with multiple humanitarian groups.”

In instances where migrants coming into the country illegally become distressed, Border Patrol agents must “first and foremost act as humanitarians,” she says.

“Employees who disregard (their oath) and instead choose to violate the trust of the citizens they swore to protect will be held accountable,” she says. “Although (Border Patrol and humanitarian groups) may originate from different backgrounds, we share a common goal in saving lives. Agents are often called upon to shift from law enforcement to rescue mode in a moment’s notice.”

The best way to reform immigration policy is to work on economic policies affecting migrant workers and focus on the root motivator for why so many Mexican immigrants come to the U.S., Lefebvre says.

“There has always been a flow between the U.S. and Mexico,” he says. “People accepted that as a fact of life. Until 1994, (policies) were loose most of the time. When there was a tough economy, there were restrictions. When we needed workers, we encouraged them to come.”

In the past, workers would come from Mexico to work in the agriculture, construction or hotel industries. They would work for six months to a year, send money home and then go home themselves, Lefebvre says. Some came back and some didn’t.

“They preferred to live in Mexico, but came to the U.S. to save money for their families and for farmland,” he says.

S 744 would reform worker visas, and that change in system could stem the flow of illegal immigration, says Meissner, of the Migration Policy Institute. The bill, if passed, could also lead to more migrant rescues by increasing air surveillance, she says. It could lead to more humanitarian efforts from BorStar. If enforcement continues to increase in Arizona, the bill could shift primary migration patterns to Texas. And yes, she says, it could lead to more migrant deaths in the Arizona desert.

“It’s probably some of all of the above,” she says. “But, Border Patrol is quite successful at this point. Adding more policy on border enforcement doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because border enforcement alone is not a viable enough strategy.”

http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2013/12/deaths-will-continue-with-or-without-immigration-reform/

Sun, frost, thirst and bullets: A deadly border could become even more dangerous under Senate plan

NBC News June 26, 2013 by Bill Briggs The southwestern U.S. border has become an increasingly lethal snare: Brutal heat, desert freezes, harsh currents, poisonous snakes and sporadic gunfire are killing a rising number of undocumented migrants who are picking progressively treacherous routes to elude extra federal patrols. And the "border surge" — a Senate proposal to double U.S. agents on the Mexican boundary and extend 700 miles of fencing — would squeeze even more incoming migrants onto perilous and scorching overland paths, likely boosting the death toll of crossers from the 477 who perished attempting to enter America during 2012, experts say. “People are going into more dangerous areas. It’s probably very difficult to carry water the farther out you’re going,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, an Arlington, Va.-based group that researches immigration issues. He authored a March study that showed the death rate among people trying to illegally traverse the Mexican border soared by 27 percent last year while overall migration from Mexico continued to decline. “These aren’t camping trips. People aren’t preparing. Or, they may be taken in by smugglers … and that’s not the same as a family going together where they really care about what happens to one another,” Anderson said. Harsh weather and desolate terrain combine to cause the most common form of death on the border: a nasty blend of dehydration plus either overheated or over-chilled bodies, according to a University of Arizona study published this month that examined data from the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Examiner's Office. Among the 171 undocumented migrants who died last year while scaling the mountain-and-canyon-dotted border southwest of Tucson, 46 percent expired due to “exposure” to the elements, the Arizona report determined. About eight in 10 were from Mexico. “There’s nobody out there, nowhere to go for help. So a lot of times we’ll be out there, driving a dirt road or walking a remote trail, and encounter people who are lost, sick or injured — in pretty in bad shape — and who were praying someone would come by,” said Greg Boyce, spokesman for No More Deaths, a volunteer-aid group based in Arizona. Their volunteers include nurses, doctors and emergency medical technicians. During their search excursions near Tucson, group members sometimes summon medical helicopters and ambulances to rush the sickest undocumented migrants to local hospitals. They occasionally work in tandem with some of the 900-plus U.S. Customs and Border agents who are trained in trauma treatment, Boyce said. (Last year, Border Patrol officers made 1,333 rescues at or near the southwest boundary, according to federal figures). Boyce's group also leaves containers of water throughout that vast area — thousands of gallons to date. "The really tough cases involve somebody who is not in an acute emergency, but their health is suffering. They've already been out there two or three days and they’ve got another two or three in the desert until they reach a safe place,” Boyce said. “We know if they keep walking, their health will deteriorate. “In some cases, we’ll encourage people to turn themselves into the Border Patrol — if they want, they can try another day; it’s better than dying out there,” he added. “But our advice sometimes goes unheeded. They’re desperate.” At the southern tip of Texas near Brownsville, most of the undocumented migrants who cross the border come from Central America, said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights group. They skirt through the Rio Grande Valley, which is perched along the northern bank of the Rio Grande river that divides the United States and Mexico. Deaths in that area also rose in 2012, Isacson said, and some causes included snakebites and drownings in the swift currents of irrigation canals that wind through that sector or in the waters of the Rio Grande. But hundreds of those crossers were found dead well inside Texas, north of Brownsville and in a town called McAllen, halfway toward the coastal city of Corpus Christi. “On that primary highway north (of the border), there’s a Border Patrol checkpoint so the smugglers drop everybody off the road to get around that. It's probably only about a 10- to 12-mile walk through this scrub-land but that’s where they’re dying," Isacson said. “Most of these migrants have been held in a safe house for several days, maybe even on the U.S. side of the border, but have been poorly fed and not given much water. “In that area, it’s flat and there’s lots of bushes and mesquite that obscure your view. So people get lost. They end up going in circles,” he added. Gunfire, kidnappings Bullets also fly on the border. According to Isacson's tracking: “There have been as many as 20 cross-border shooting incidents in the last few years.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials confirmed that during the past two years there have been eight such fatal incidents involving their agents or officers. One case involved friendly fire. In October 2012, Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie, 30, was fatally shot after he and two fellow agents responded to something or someone triggering one of the thousands of ground sensors that dot parts of southeastern Arizona. An investigation found that when Ivie opened fire on two other agents, apparently mistaking them for smugglers, they returned fire and killed him. And in rare situations, abductions occur along the border. In May, armed gunmen kidnapped U.S. Marine Armando Torres III in Mexico — along with the Marine’s father and uncle — shortly after Torres exited south Texas to visit his father’s ranch in neighboring La Barranca, Tamaulipas. As of June 15, the FBI reported it was conducting an international probe. On June 4, Mexican soldiers rescued 165 people who had been kidnapped about three weeks earlier by a drug cartel and held in a small home along the U.S. line. Among the victims were 150 migrants from Central America who had planned to cross the border in the Rio Grande Valley. As Congress appears set to clamp down even harder on the U.S.-Mexico border with bolstered patrols and fencing, human-rights advocates like Isacson and Boyce contend that deaths among illegal migrants will spike as more of those people choose to head even deeper into the remote, desert scrub and higher into the mountains as they hike to enter America. Temperatures along those routes can reach 110 degrees. "If they’re going to double border patrol, they should at least quadruple or quintuple the portion of border patrol that is doing search and rescue," Isacson said. "That would save some lives." According to Customs and Border spokesman Bill Brooks, that agency already "has taken significant steps" to prevent the deaths of border-crossing migrants. "Most notably, (those steps include) the Border Safety Initiative (BSI), a humanitarian, bi-national strategy, designed to reduce migrant deaths and make the border safer for agents, border residents, and migrants, by training agents as first responders, EMTs and paramedics," Brooks said in an email. But if twice as many Border Patrol agents soon begin roaming the boundary — should the Senate bill becomes law — will the risk of migrant shootings by agents also rise? "If Border Patrol's manpower doubles, and it doesn't improve its current training and procedures for use of force and for dealing with abuses, then it's very likely that we'll see more episodes of violence and shootings," Isacson said. "There's really not enough for a doubled force to do — something that's been completely ignored in this debate," Isacson added. "The number of border-crossers apprehended per Border Patrol agent is now 19 per year. In 2000, it was 10-times that, 192 apprehensions per agent. In 1993 it was 327 ... There will be far less to guard against if the force doubles." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, however, that "common sense immigration reform legislation" must include measures that would tighten border security — along with crackdowns on employers that hire undocumented workers and a streamlining of the legal-immigration system. "The border security amendment agreed to by a bipartisan group of Senators is in line with that criteria," Napolitano said in a June 21 statement. "It will devote important additional resources to the robust border security system this Administration has put in place and strengthen what was already an unmatched piece of border security legislation.” http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/24/19120052-sun-frost-thirst-and-bullets-a-deadly-border-could-become-even-more-dangerous-under-senate-plan?lite&preview=true

Autopsy in Border Patrol shooting suggests trajectory from back and below

Nogales International
February 8, 2013
by Kurt Pendergast

The autopsy report of a 16-year-old Sonoran youth who was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent last October suggests that he was shot as many as 11 times and most of the shots struck him in the back.

What’s more, the apparent upward trajectory of some of the bullets raises questions about the position Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was in when he was shot on a Nogales, Sonora street after allegedly throwing rocks at law enforcement officers standing at least 10 feet above him behind the border fence on West International Street.

According to an independent expert who reviewed the autopsy report, one possible explanation for the discrepancy between the trajectory and the physical location is that the Sonoran physicians who conducted the autopsy confused the entry and exit wounds.

“Another one is that the story’s not right,” said Dr. Gregory Hess, chief medical examiner for Pima County. “There’s all kinds of different ways to look at it, but if the story’s correct and their trajectories are correct, then somehow the person that got shot would have had to have been off their feet.”
 

The report was signed by Dr. Absalon Madrigal Godinez and Dr. Javier Diaz Trejo, medical examiners in Nogales, Sonora who conducted the autopsy of Rodriguez’s body early on Oct. 11, 2012, less than 12 hours after he was shot. The NI obtained a copy of the report from Luis Parra, an attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family in Arizona, and then asked Hess to interpret the report’s findings.
 

Previous reports from attorneys and Sonoran officials put the number of bullets that impacted Rodriguez’s body at seven or eight. But Hess, who reviewed the report with the help of a translator from the medical examiner’s office, noted “maybe up to 10 or 11” gunshot wounds.
 

The trajectory of the bullets described in the report was from Rodriguez’s “back to his front, from his right to his left, and slightly upward,” Hess said, adding that the Sonoran medical examiners recovered six projectiles in Rodriguez’s body, according to the report.
 

In addition to the possibility that the medical examiners confused the entry and exit wounds, Hess noted that another possible explanation for the varying trajectory of the bullets could be that a number of rounds were fired in rapid succession, with the first rounds knocking Rodriguez to the ground before the subsequent rounds impacted.
 

However, determining which bullet impacted first if multiple rounds were fired is problematic, he said. “There’s no way, based on the autopsy, you can tell which one came first unless they were really separated in time, like a day or something like that, then you could look at healing and stuff like that,” he said.
 

When asked for comment on the autopsy report and an update on the investigation, a spokesperson for the FBI, the lead U.S. agency in the case, declined to comment on an ongoing investigation. The agency has declined to release any information on the case since taking over the investigation from the Border Patrol and Nogales Police Department on the night of the shooting.
 

A statement released by the Border Patrol in the wake of the incident said that an agent fired into Mexico, apparently striking one person, in response to rock-throwers who were attempting to disrupt a drug-smuggling attempt at the border fence.
 

The Elena Rodriguez family has not heard anything from federal agencies, other than the initial statements released directly after the shooting, said Parra, the attorney who, along with Roberto Montiel, is representing the family in Arizona.
 

“They believe that after three months, there should be at least some response from Border Patrol, from the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Justice,” he said.
 

“The family thinks it’s a tragedy and they’re insisting on having answers,” he said.
 

“We’re being respectful of the timeline of the investigation,” Parra said, noting that the investigation by Mexican authorities concluded in December. “But we do believe that at least some information should be provided at this point by the [U.S.] government.”

http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/autopsy-in-border-patrol-shooting-suggests-trajectory-from-back-and/article_34219a52-6fa6-11e2-bf9e-001a4bcf887a.html

Immigrant deaths soar in South Texas

San Antonio Express News December 30, 2012 by John MacCormack FALFURRIAS — Back in October, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney jousted about immigration issues in the second televised debate, the president made a remarkable assertion about control of the southern border.

“The flow of undocumented workers across the border is actually lower than it's been in 40 years,” he said.

And indeed, after a decade of increased enforcement that included construction of hundreds of miles of steel border wall and a doubling in size of the U.S. Border Patrol, the results are undeniable. The 327,577 people caught by the Border Patrol on the southern border in fiscal year 2011 were the fewest since 1970. And it was about one-third of the apprehensions made in 2005.

But don't try telling folks in Brooks County that things are under control. Here, apprehensions of immigrants crossing illegally, rescues of people lost in the brush and wild car chases all have increased markedly in the past couple of years. A far more tragic indicator: the death toll of those trying to sneak around the Border Patrol checkpoint south of town on U.S. 281 has risen dramatically.

By late December, the remains of 127 people had been found in the brushy ranchland around the checkpoint, nearly double last year's total and the highest anyone can remember. In 2010, 20 bodies were found.

“When you have 127 people die in your county in one year, it's too much. One body would be too much,” said County Judge Raul Ramirez, who recently ran out of space for “John Doe” burials at the county's Sacred Heart Cemetery and is looking for a new place to bury the unidentified dead.

  At Sacred Heart, their simple graves are marked with bright plastic flowers and small signs that tell what little is known, such as “skeletal remains” or “skull case” or “unknown female,” and the ranch where they were found.

Those that later are identified by DNA tests or other information are exhumed and sent back to their families, most often in Mexico or Central America.

The judge said the annual costs to his poor, rural county of dealing with illegal immigration and the unknown dead, including mortician fees and autopsies, run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. With an annual budget of about $6 million and just six full-time patrol deputies, Brooks County is ill-equipped for the task. And because it's not a border county, it receives very little state and federal aid.

“It all comes through Falfurrias. It's the No. 1 checkpoint in terms of seizures and illegal drugs,” the judge said, adding later, “I ask myself, why us?”

A busy December Already this year, one Brooks County rancher has found the remains of 16 people on his property, which straddles U.S. 281 near the checkpoint, far more than ever before.

“It's just been horrible. And there would have been a lot more deaths if the county didn't have a locator for 911 calls. Everyone has a cellphone,” said Presnall Cage, 67, whose 43,000-acre ranch is regularly traversed by large groups.

“They are coming across as bad as they ever have,” he added. “People say it's slowed down, but it doesn't seem that way to me.”

The deaths have risen markedly despite efforts by both the Border Patrol and local deputies to prevent them. The measures include hundreds of GPS markers spread around the brush that can help pinpoint 911 calls, flashing beacons that have water and panic buttons, and special Border Patrol units trained to save stranded travelers.

Although several hundred agents are stationed in Falfurrias, the vastness of the terrain and the heavy pressure from smugglers sometimes has them overmatched. All told, more than 2,600 agents work in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, trailing only El Paso and Tucson.

“What you're seeing now is the busiest this checkpoint has been since I came to this sector in 1995,” said Enrique Mendiola, a Border Patrol spokesman, who said that this year, the traditional winter lull never happened.

According to a large sign at the checkpoint, 36,075 pounds of drugs have been seized and 3,781 undocumented people have been apprehended here since Oct. 1.

While the Border Patrol does not release statistics for individual checkpoints, the December apprehensions of illegal immigrants here were more than double those of last December, according to unofficial sources.

The latest official statistics for the Rio Grande Valley Sector, which includes Falfurrias, show apprehensions surged by more than 60 percent from 2011 to 2012 for comparable 10-month periods, according to Mendiola. No one has a good explanation for why Brooks County is such a hot spot, and nothing as dramatic is happening around other South Texas checkpoints in Kenedy, Jim Hogg and Webb Counties.

  “If we knew why, we'd go after it,” said Mendiola, who thinks that the construction of the steel border fence in the eastern half of the Rio Grande Valley has pushed most illegal activity westward toward U.S. 281.

“You used to have one organization running drugs, another running people. That was all we knew,” he said. “Now we have transnational criminal organizations and it's a multi-commodity business.”

Chief Sheriff's Deputy Benny Martinez sees other factors. “In my opinion, it has to do with the enforcement in Arizona. They're shifting back to Texas,” he said of the human smugglers. “We're already had 250 to 300 rescues this year, either from cellphone calls or people we find in the brush. It's way more than in the past,” he said.

  In southern Arizona, another recent hot spot for illegal immigration, immigrant deaths peaked in 2010 at 252, forcing the medical examiner to hold bodies awaiting autopsies in refrigerated trucks. This year, the total likely will be below 160.

In Brooks County, encounters between smugglers and the law are becoming more frequent and more dangerous.

  “They're getting aggressive, in the way they are driving and the methods they use to get away. And once they are apprehended, they fight back,” sheriff's Investigator Danny Davila said. “We had one last week,” he continued. “We tried to pull him over, but he went through a ranch, fence line after fence line, until he came to another paved road, and then he was gone.”

“We couldn't stay with him because it was starting to get dark and we had lost sight of him,” he added. “It was not safe.”

Most of the illegal immigrant traffic seems to be headed for Houston, and Davila thinks that large criminal organizations in Mexico working with associates in that city have chosen U.S. 281 as their smuggling corridor.

“This is the path of least resistance. We're knocking down maybe 10 percent of what's going through the county. The volume has gotten phenomenal,” he said.

Deadly consequences

Much of the illegal traffic that goes northward through Brooks County follows backcountry roads into Duval County. There, similar chases occur daily, and often with the same result, an SUV crashing through fence lines into the brush.

“They never pull over. We get three to four bailouts on a good day. And for every bailout, maybe five others get through,” said Jose Martinez, chief deputy in Duval County. “We've already confiscated 325 cars this year from bailouts. We caught people in about fifty of those vehicles, but we hardly ever catch the driver,” he added.

The consequences for the human cargo often are deadly.

In April, nine people died near Palmview in the Valley when Border Patrol agents attempted to stop a minivan soon after it left a stash house. Eighteen illegal immigrants were in the van, driven by a 15-year-old, when it rolled over.

In May, a high-speed early-morning chase in Kleberg County that went through fenced ranchland ended with a man having his leg severed. The man, who never was identified, died of blood loss at the scene.

In October, two Guatemalans were killed after a DPS sharpshooter in a helicopter fired on a fleeing pickup that was carrying illegal immigrants near La Joya. The much criticized shooting still is being reviewed.

Unaccompanied children

During an eight-hour stretch one day earlier this month, in which reporters accompanied Border Patrol agents and Brooks County sheriff's deputies on calls around the county, the action was heavy. The day included a 300-pound marijuana bust and two arrests following a short car chase.

There were a total of three high-speed car chases. One involved a pickup carrying eight people that careened through a hotel parking lot before being abandoned. Finally, there was the discovery of a large group of men, women and children wandering aimlessly in the brush miles off U.S. 281. After being loaded into a white van, half the group of hungry, dirty people was taken to Border Patrol headquarters in Falfurrias to be processed. Most were Central Americans, who now make up a large percentage of those caught.

Among them were eight women and three children younger than age 12, including a Honduran girl, 11, who was traveling alone.

Humberto Martinez Vasquez Guzman, 18, from Guatemala, had come with his young wife, Silva Elena, in hopes of reaching relatives in Kentucky. He said they each had paid $6,500 to smugglers for the trip, only to be abandoned in South Texas, far short of their destination.

“We crossed the river at McAllen on Saturday, and on Monday night they brought us up here. They dropped us by the highway and left. We were walking three days in the brush without food,” he said on a recent day, the picture of complete defeat.

  Martinez said an earthquake that destroyed much of the housing in his hometown, Aldea San Marcos, near the Mexican border, had pushed him to attempt the perilous journey that had just ended so badly. “I've got to ask for help to avoid being returned. God knows I'm not lying,” he said.

But, Mendiola said, there was little likelihood of any of them staying in the United States. And despite his many years of dealing with similar unhappy endings, the veteran Border Patrol agent was moved to comment about the unaccompanied young girl.

“It's a sad thing to have an 11-year-old here like this,” he said of a slim child in a black T-shirt. “At her age,” he added, “I wouldn't even let my kid go three blocks, and these people are coming through three countries.”


http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Border-woes-no-longer-just-on-the-border-4155003.php

Border Patrol scrutinized over teen's shooting death

Arizona Republic
October 18, 2012
by Bob Ortega

NOGALES, Ariz. - There was nothing unusual about the call to the Border Patrol and Nogales police on Oct. 10 to report two men climbing the border fence to bring drugs into the United States.

It also was not unusual that once Border Patrol agents arrived at the scene and attempted to arrest the men, who were now fleeing back to Mexico, one or more people began to hurl rocks over the fence at the agents from the Mexico side of the border.

The decision by one or more agents to open fire on the rock throwers, though, is another matter. It is the subject of furious disagreement between the Border Patrol and critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and human-rights advocates, who say agents resort to deadly force too often. The Mexican government has condemned the shooting and called for a thorough investigation.

At least one Border Patrol agent fired shots through an opening in the fence. Moments later, Mexican police found the body of a 16-year-old boy on the ground in front of a medical office. Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez had been shot eight times. Police investigators marked 11 bullet holes on the walls of the medical office.

Elena Rodriguez is the 18th person to be killed by Border Patrol agents since January 2010, with all but two of those deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border, says Vicki Gaubeca, director of the ACLU's Regional Center for Border Rights, in Las Cruces, N.M. Eight of those killed allegedly had been throwing rocks at Border Patrol officers.

In the most recent incident, there are discrepancies between the Border Patrol's version of events and accounts of witnesses on the Mexican side of the border. The Border Patrol said its agent fired at someone who was throwing rocks at the agents over the fence. Elena Rodriguez's family has said all the bullets entered the boy's body from behind.

The discrepancies may be resolved: A Border Patrol spokesman says video cameras on the border fence were in operation during the incident. Those recordings have been turned over to FBI investigators. Sonora's attorney general also has requested a copy from the Department of Justice, the attorney general's spokeswoman, Sandra Hurtado, said.

The FBI was on the scene hours after the incident and has collected reports from the agents and Nogales police officers. It is standard for the FBI to investigate deadly incidents involving the Border Patrol.

Use of deadly force

Even before Elena Rodriguez's death, the ACLU, several members of Congress and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had this year called for an independent, comprehensive investigation into Customs and Border Protection's policies on use of force.

ACLU attorney Chris Rickerd has criticized agents' actions in several deaths involving border agents, including a March 21, 2011, incident in which a Border Patrol officer in Douglas shot a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, Carlos Lamadrid, three times in the back as Lamadrid fled into Agua Prieta, Mexico. Rickerd said the Border Patrol should explain what disciplinary actions it takes when agents violate use-of-force policies.

The Border Patrol didn't respond by deadline to questions from The Republic about what disciplinary actions, if any, have been taken related to the 18 deaths.

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel said the agency's use of force is based on the Department of Justice's policy. "Law-enforcement personnel are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law-enforcement partners and innocent third parties," he said.

CBP wouldn't provide additional details on its use-of-force policy. But rocks are considered potentially lethal, and the agency typically has not disciplined officers for firing at rock throwers.

The agency doesn't classify rock-throwing incidents separately from other assaults on agents, but Friel said that such incidents are the most common type of assault along the border, numbering in the hundreds over the past three years.

No agents have been killed in rock-throwing incidents. Since early 2010, seven Border Patrol agents have been killed on duty: five in vehicle accidents; one, Brian Terry, was shot by drug smugglers in 2010; and one, Nicholas Ivie, was shot in a friendly-fire incident two weeks ago near Bisbee.

Lt. Carlos Jimenez of the Nogales Police Department said it's common for drug cartels to hire people as border lookouts "and to tell them if something goes bad to throw rocks to distract or deter law-enforcement officers ... They'll pay anybody willing to do it, youths, old people. They don't discriminate by age or gender."

Elena Rodriguez's mother, Araceli Rodriguez, insisted that her son would not have been involved in drug activity and must have been walking in the area when he was shot less than four blocks from his home.

"He wasn't a bad boy," she said tearfully in an interview at her home in Nogales, Sonora. A framed photograph of her son surrounded by flowers stood on a nearby table.

"They killed my little boy, and I want to know why. I want to know why they shot him so many times, why they shot him in the back," she said. "We want justice."

The Border Patrol declined to discuss details of the Elena Rodriguez case, citing the FBI investigation.

Responding to the scene

Nogales, Ariz., police Officer Quinardo Garcia was the first of several officers to respond to a report, at 11:16 p.m. on Oct. 10, of two men climbing over the border fence from Mexico.

Garcia said in a report that he saw two men carrying bundles of marijuana on their backs, jumping down from the fence onto the Arizona side and running toward houses on a street facing the fence. He chased them into a driveway and lost sight of them.

Moments later, he said, the first of several Border Patrol agents arrived, along with a police K-9 officer, John Zuniga.

In his report, Zuniga wrote that he spotted the two men, who had dropped their bundles, trying to climb back over the fence into Mexico. After Zuniga and Border Patrol agents yelled at them to get down from the fence, Zuniga reported that he "heard several rocks start hitting the ground, and I looked up and could see the rocks flying through the air."

As he took his dog back to his vehicle, Zuniga heard gunfire. When he looked up, he saw an agent standing by the fence.

Neither Zuniga nor Garcia reported seeing shots fired.

"I then heard an agent say, 'There is one 10-7,' which means out of service or no longer alive," Zuniga wrote in the report.

The Border Patrol initially told the public that an agent had fired and someone "appeared" to have been hit. The agency has not said whether more than one agent fired shots.

Across the fence, in his home and medical office on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border, Dr. Luis Contreras Sanchez was surfing the Internet when he heard someone run past his window, followed by at least eight shots, he said in an interview with The Republic.

"I turned out the light, dove down and called the police," he said. "I didn't hear anyone screaming or yelling outside, or I'd have gone out."

Minutes later, police arrived, Contreras Sanchez said. He looked out and saw the boy face down on the sidewalk.

While Border Patrol officials said that the agent fired after rock-throwers ignored repeated orders to stop, Contreras Sanchez said he didn't hear such orders. The Nogales Police Department's reports don't mention orders for the rock-throwers to stop.

Actions criticized

To some Border Patrol critics, even if Elena Rodriguez was throwing rocks, the agent's response was not justified.

"If you see photos of where he was standing and where he allegedly was throwing rocks, from that distance, how lethal could those rocks be? How defensible is it to shoot someone?" asks the ACLU's Gaubeca.
The fence where the incident occurred was rebuilt a year ago as part of a project to construct more than 650 miles of new barriers mandated by Congress to tighten border security.

The new fence covers a 2.8-mile stretch from one end of Nogales to the other. Built of parallel beams constructed from a triple layer of rebar, concrete and steel, the fence averages 18 to 20 feet in height and has an extra steel barrier on top to make it harder to scale.

When it was completed during the summer of 2011, officials said the fence would better protect border agents from rock-throwers because unlike the old sheet-metal fence, which was 10 to 12 feet high, agents can see through it.

It may have had an impact. Border Patrol officers in the Tucson Sector, which includes Nogales, reported 251 assaults for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2011, a 40 percent drop from the previous fiscal year.

At the main border crossing in Nogales, the fence is at street level. Moving west, toward Contreras Sanchez's office, three blocks away, the fence climbs a steep hill on the U.S. side. Where Elena Rodriguez was shot, the base of the fence is 25 feet above street level; the top of the fence is roughly 45 feet above where the boy was shot.

The angle is such that it would be all but impossible for a rock-thrower to hit someone near the fence on the U.S. side.

Elena Rodriguez's family has hired a U.S. attorney, Luis Parra, to sue the Border Patrol.

Similar cross-border suits in recent years have been dismissed by U.S. courts. For example, 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez-Guereca was shot twice and killed by a Border Patrol officer in El Paso in June 2010, allegedly while throwing rocks as the agent arrested another youth.

The Department of Justice declined to prosecute the agent, saying he hadn't violated CBP's use-of-force policies or training. The department declined an extradition request by the state government of Chihuahua. Federal district courts twice dismissed suits by the family, alleging wrongful death and violation of the boy's rights. In both cases, U.S. District Judge David Briones ruled that U.S. constitutional protections don't apply because Hernandez-Guereca was a Mexican citizen and in Mexico at the time he was killed. An appeal to the 5th Circuit Court is pending.

David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, called the judge's ruling "a legitimate legal interpretation in the absence of any higher court ruling that suggests otherwise . . . It exposes one of the many challenges of the border region that are not well captured in national law."
He said firing a gun on one side of an international border doesn't necessarily create legal responsibility for the impact in the neighboring country.
Gaubeca said that while the Mexican government could ask to extradite the Border Patrol agent, the U.S. government can, as it has before, simply say no.

"How do you wrestle with the issue of causing harm on the other side of an international boundary, and what remedy is there for people who feel this is a wrongful shooting or an inappropriate use of lethal force?" Gaubeca asked.

This, she argues, is why it's particularly important for the Border Patrol to train its agents to defuse confrontations.

Since 2007, when the George W. Bush administration launched a major expansion, the Border Patrol has nearly doubled in size, to more than 21,000 agents. To recruit and quickly hire that many new agents, the Border Patrol reduced requirements, deferred background checks and omitted lie-detector tests that had been standard, and shortened training that officers receive, said John Carlos Frey, a filmmaker who this year produced a documentary on the patrol for the PBS program "Need to Know."

Rickerd, of the ACLU, said in a recent blog post that the Border Patrol should "make clear whether or not it abides by best law enforcement practices," in terms of the training it gives agents, whether it equips them with adequate protective gear that would reduce their need to use deadly force, and what plans it has to install dashboard-mounted and other cameras to record its agents' actions.

On Monday, as she waited to meet with state police for any news on the investigation, Araceli Rodriguez shared one of the many questions to which she'd like an answer: "Why didn't the Border Patrol agents just fire a warning shot in the air?"

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2012/10/17/20121017border-patrol-scrutinized-teen-shooting-death.html

Mexican officials question border agent's use of force in boy's death in Nogales

Arizona Republic
October 13, 2012
by Bob Ortega

As more details emerge about the shooting death late Wednesday of a 16-year-old Mexican boy in Nogales, Sonora, by a Border Patrol agent, Mexican authorities increasingly are questioning whether lethal force was needed.

The FBI, and Mexican federal and state police, are carrying out parallel investigations into the incident.

Nogales Mayor Ramon Guzman Munoz told the Associated Press that Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was shot seven times. Various news reports by Sonora broadcasters and newspapers described anywhere from five to 14 bullet holes on the wall of the building beside which the body was found.

Elena Rodriguez's death - following more than a dozen similar incidents along the U.S.-Mexico border since 2010 - has provoked condemnation from Mexican authorities and outrage in Mexican news media, in particular over the number of times the youth allegedly was shot. Twitter messages and comments on Mexican news sites routinely condemned the shooting as an "asesinato," or murder.

This is the fifth incident in Nogales since mid-2010 in which Border Patrol officers resorted to force after youths threw rocks at them. In three of those cases, agents fired their guns, killing a 17-year-old boy in January 2011 and wounding a man in January of this year.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Mike Friel said Saturday that the agency's "law-enforcement personnel are trained to use deadly force in circumstances that pose a threat to their lives, the lives of their fellow law-enforcement partners and innocent third parties."

Mexican officials have questioned the use of force before and filed diplomatic protests on several occasions, but Customs and Border Protection has not changed its policies on use of force in recent years, said Friel.

Sonora state police released a statement saying they found Elena Rodriguez's body, "with various gunshot wounds on different parts of the body," shortly after 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, lying next to the curb on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border fence. The body was found four blocks from the border crossing in downtown Nogales, at a spot where there is roughly a 10-foot vertical drop from the base of the fence to the street below.

According to the Border Patrol, several agents responded Wednesday night to reports that drug smugglers were carrying bundles into the U.S. As agents saw two men fleeing back into Mexico, people on the other side of the fence began to throw rocks at the agents. Agents ordered them to stop and when they didn't, an agent fired his weapon, hitting one of them, an agency spokesman said.

In interviews aired by several Mexican broadcasters, alleged witnesses said the youths were throwing rocks to prevent the Border Patrol from arresting the two men who were trying to climb back over the border fence after dropping bundles of drugs.

Ricardo Alday Gonzalez, a spokesman for Mexico's Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Friday that Mexican authorities will closely monitor the U.S. investigation into the incident, and cooperate with the FBI and other U.S. agencies, to "provide whatever support is necessary to ensure a transparent, exhaustive and accountable process in the United States."

He said Mexican federal and state law enforcement also "will not hesitate to request whatever assistance they require" from the FBI or other U.S. agencies.

The Border Patrol has declined to say what weapon the agent involved in Wednesday's incident fired. They also did not reply to queries about whether that agent is currently on leave.

The standard service firearm for Border Patrol agents is the .40-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol, which carries a 14-round magazine. Agents also have the option to carry an M-4 carbine identical to the one used by the U.S. Army, which has semiautomatic and automatic settings, Friel said. On the semiautomatic setting, the trigger must be pulled to fire each round; on the automatic setting, the rifle can fire multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger.

Border Patrol agents have access to non-lethal alternatives. In May of last year, for instance, a Nogales-based Border Patrol agent fired several rounds from a pepper-ball launcher at a suspected drug smuggler who was throwing rocks at him, and completed the drug seizure without injuries on either side.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2012/10/13/20121013border-agent-nogales-boy-death-shooting-questioned.html

Border Patrol Kills Rock-Thrower At Border Fence

ABC News
October 11, 2012
By RANDY KREIDER

Local police have confirmed that one person is dead after a Border Patrol agent fired his gun at a crowd throwing rocks across the border fence in Nogales, Arizona late last night, and Mexican media reports say the deceased is a 14-year-old male.

According to the Border Patrol, agents in Nogales were responding to a report of two suspected smugglers on a road that parallels the border fence at 11:30 p.m. when they saw the alleged smugglers drop a narcotics load on the U.S. side of the boundary and flee back into Mexico.

The Border Patrol told ABC Tucson affiliate KGUN that while the smugglers were trying to climb back over the fence, a crowd on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales, Sonora began pelting the agents with rocks.

"Subjects at the scene then began assaulting the agents with rocks," said the Border Patrol in a statement. "After verbal commands from agents to cease were ignored, one agent then discharged his service firearm. One of the subjects appeared to have been hit."

The Border Patrol says it then notified the Mexican government of the shooting, and is "fully cooperating with the FBI-led investigation" now underway.

Nogales Police confirmed to KGUN that one person died at the scene.

A reporter for the Mexican radio station XENY took a photo of emergency personnel removing the body from the street, and reported that the victim was male. Other Mexican media have reported that the person who died at the scene was a 14-year-old male. The Border Patrol declined to confirm the age and gender of the deceased when asked by ABC News.

In June 2011, a Border Patrol agent in San Diego, California fatally shot a suspected border crosser who was allegedly perched on top of the border fence, throwing rocks and wood with exposed nails at agents while they attempted to arrest other suspected border crossers, authorities told ABC affiliate KGTV in San Diego.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/border-patrol-kills-rock-thrower-border-fence/story?id=17456759

‘Angels’ search for migrants’ bodies

The Brownsville Herald
October 7, 2012
by Ildefonso Ortiz

FALFURRIAS — Miles and miles of brush filled with hidden dangers, dehydration and high temperatures line the road awaiting many undocumented immigrants who try to circumvent U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints in Falfurrias and Sarita.

The trek has led many of those migrants to graves that line the municipal cemetery in Falfurrias.Small metal plaques that read “unknown male remains” or “unknown female remains” mark the end of the journey for many immigrants and leave their families back home with questions about their fate.

“The bodies here are just the ones that have been found and most of the time they are found only by accident,” said Rafael Hernandez, the director of Angeles Del Desierto, a nonprofit that searches inhospitable areas looking for stranded migrants — and their bodies.

While the group is based in California, the repeated calls that it receives about migrants traveling through the Rio Grande Valley prompted Hernandez to make the drive east in an effort to establish the networks needed to have his group search the areas around the checkpoint.

“I have gotten about 200 reports of missing migrants that were traveling through this area,” he said. “Unlike California or Arizona, most of this land is private property so we have to make contacts with the ranch owners so they will let us search through their property.”

Angeles Del Desierto attempts bringing closure to families, said Hernandez, who arrived with a list of missing migrants he hopes to find or rescue.

In 2012, Border Patrol has rescued about 300 immigrants and recovered more than 150 bodies in the Rio Grande Valley sector to date, said agency spokesman Enrique Mendiola.

“On top of the extreme weather, you have the dangers presented by the wildlife out there: coyotes, wild pings and rattlesnakes are just some of them,” Mendiola said, adding that immigrants also suffer from dehydration. “They are not able to carry enough water with them and if they do find water it is from a contaminated source.”

During his trip to the Valley, Hernandez trekked through one of the ranches searching for migrants and trying to survey the area to determine the dangers that migrants face. The biggest obstacles Hernandez faced were the “no trespassing” signs posted at many ranches.

With a backpack filled with emergency supplies and a cell phone, Hernandez walked for several miles searching for bodies or migrants in need of help. A cell phone is the best survival tool because migrants can dial 911 if they need help and authorities can pinpoint their location for rescue effort, he said.

“Sadly enough we were not able to find any migrants,” Hernandez said.

“We were, however, able to identify the body of a 12-year-old boy we had been looking for.”

Elmer Calinga Ceballos traveled from El Salvador to the U.S to seek a better life and reunite with his family; however, his journey ended on a table at the Elizondo Mortuary in Mission, where officials hadn’t been able to identify him.

Hernandez helped provide preliminary identification, which prompted the Salvadoran consulate to get involved and make arrangements to have the body sent home for burial.

When bodies turn up, the local sheriff’s office becomes involved.

Investigators at the Brooks County Sheriff’s Office have noted a sharp increase in the number of bodies discovered, said Chief Deputy Urbino “Benny” Martinez.

In 2010, deputies found 22 bodies. That figure had nearly tripled by 2011, when they found 64 bodies. But those numbers pale in comparison to the 95 bodies found so far this year.

Deputies find bodies at all stages of decomposition, including corpses that have been reduced to skeletal remains.

“This is a very sad case because these individuals are placed in the trust of unscrupulous individuals who will not hesitate to leave them to their fate,” Martinez said.

An additional danger is the predatory nature of the coyotes — guides — who sometimes sexually assault the women they’ve been paid to smuggle north, Martinez said, adding that his department is investigating five such cases.

“What makes it difficult to investigate is that many times all we have to go on is a nickname or a tattoo,” Martinez said. “The victim doesn’t know who that individual really is.”

Smugglers sometimes force illegal immigrants to carry drugs, leaving them exposed to federal prosecution.

“For the most part, they are hardworking people,” Martinez said. “The best choice would be for governments to have some way to fix this immigration problem so these individuals can travel in a humane fashion.”

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/local/article_b9ad0ca4-10f3-11e2-a700-0019bb30f31a.html

The Border Effect

The American Prospect
September 18, 2012
by Frank Clifford

For the aid workers who found 14-year-old Josseline Jamileth Hernández Quinteros in the Arizona desert, it is hardest to forget the little things, the beaded bracelet around a tiny wrist, the bright green sneakers, the pink-lined jacket, and the sweatpants with the word “Hollywood” across the backside. She was a wisp of a girl, barely 5 feet and 100 pounds, no match for the rough terrain or subfreezing temperatures.

No one can say for sure that Josseline died because of heightened security measures along the U.S. border with Mexico. Yet, to the volunteers who found her lying under a bush, her head resting on a rock in an unnamed creek bed, Josseline’s death was a predictable consequence of American policy, in particular, the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which mandated construction of enough fencing to cover about one-third of the U.S.–Mexico border across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The goal was to foil unlawful entries, especially by drug dealers and terrorists. Josseline was neither. A native of El Salvador, she was on the last leg of a 2,000-mile quest to reunite with her mother. She was, nonetheless, an illegal alien.

Josseline and her ten-year-old brother were among thousands of children who head north from Mexico unaccompanied by parents or relatives. The two were with a group of adults that had entered the U.S. near Sasabe, Arizona, probably through an unfenced area. The gaps in the fence are as strategically positioned as the fence itself, in this case routing Josseline’s group through the Tumacacori wilderness, a spiny, mountainous badland that poses a challenge to the most experienced hikers. Spanish soldiers had a name for places like this, El Despoblado, the emptiness.

Josseline’s group had been walking two days north of the border when the girl became violently ill. She insisted that her brother continue without her. What happened to her after that is a mystery. Dan Millis, a staff member of the Tucson office of the Sierra Club, came upon her body while he and other volunteers were putting out containers of water for thirsty migrants. By then Josseline had been separated from her group for several weeks. Her brother had been reunited with the family in California, and they had reported that she was missing, according to writer Margaret Regan who covered the story for the Tucson Citizen. It was winter and cold enough for snow to spot the Arizona mountainsides. Josseline’s weakened condition probably made her susceptible to hypothermia. It is tempting to think that such a death is relatively painless, but dying of exposure isn’t a matter of fading dreamily into a coma. Death by cold typically advances slowly from violent shivering to loss of motor skills. Victims become disoriented and often lose the ability to act rationally. With nighttime temperatures hovering around freezing, Josseline had taken off her shoes and both of the jackets she had been wearing. Once the body’s temperature approaches 90 degrees, the shivering may become convulsive, seizure-like. As the body temperature continues to drop, the victim loses consciousness. Breathing becomes irregular, signaling the onset of pulmonary edema and ultimately respiratory and cardiac failure.

In another era, Josseline’s death might have engraved itself on our imagination, like the missing kids whose faces were reproduced on milk cartons. As an illegal, though, Josseline stands little chance of achieving a martyr’s place in a society inclined to accord her a status once reserved for bastards. But if she is not to be remembered as an innocent victim of a merciless law, how should Josseline and others like her be remembered? As collateral damage? As criminals? Many won’t be remembered at all, their unidentifiable remains as desiccated as the bones of wild animals that have perished from the same harsh conditions. The naturalist Craig Childs, who has spent much of his life combing deserts of the Southwest for the half-buried tools, utensils, and other grave markers of the Paleo-Indians, describes the land as a vast cemetery: “It changes a place to know that it still has physical ancestry. … You feel the oldness in the ground. … I thought that if there were such things as ghosts, I was stirring them by passing through here.”

Since the early 1990s, when the first section of the modern border fence was built, we have reconsecrated the ground, increasing the population of the dead by about 6,000. As the fence and other defensive measures have made the arduous crossing even harder, the mortality rate has risen. By 2009, the risk of dying while crossing the border in Arizona was 17 times greater than it was a decade earlier, according to one analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, and since 2009, the mortality rate has nearly doubled. About 10 percent of the fatalities are children. Along Arizona’s border with Mexico, that can mean 18 to 25 children die each year. The body count is at best an educated guess, since many of the missing have never been found. We know more about the prehistoric dead than some of the more recent casualties whose only markers are cast-off clothing and empty water bottles.

Seen from a distance, the border fence is a tantalizing mirage, a piece of land art in the tradition of the Spiral Jetty or The Lightning Field, its concrete supports and steel-mesh panels rendered immaterial like a long, hard road that seems to liquefy in the harsh light. Up close, it’s more imposing, the apotheosis of a junkyard fence. In the history of cross-border insults, it ranks with Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the U.S. government’s Harmon Doctrine denying Mexico’s right to water from the Rio Grande or Colorado River. Only, in this case, injuries have been inflicted on the culture, commerce, and environment on both sides of the border. Design flaws in the fence have caused floods that cost lives and resulted in several million dollars of damage to homes and businesses in Arizona and Mexico. Mountains in one California wilderness were dynamited to make way for the fence. In Texas, private property has been seized, elsewhere ranches trashed, and everywhere wildlife habitat damaged and ancient migration routes blocked.

Border fortifications are likely to remain in place and even grow if many in Washington have their way. Under legislation that has passed the House, the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Border Patrol would be vastly expanded. The effects on people’s livelihoods, on topography, and on natural resources would be felt across an area larger than New England. The push for even more security is due in part to people’s misperception of what the fence is supposed to accomplish. Its apparent fragility is not a mirage, as evidenced by the ladders, the 149 tunnels, and the holes in the mesh panels that make long stretches of the fence look like a patchwork quilt. In 2010 alone, more than 4,000 holes were cut. Yet it was never meant to be an impenetrable barrier. Don’t mistake the fence for something it isn’t, then–Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News five years ago: “I think the fence has come to assume a certain kind of symbolic significance, which should not obscure the fact [that sealing off the borders] is a much more complicated problem.”

All of the bluster during the Republican primary about building a double fence (Michele Bachmann), electrifying it (Herman Cain), or extending it the entire length of the 1,950-mile border (Mitt Romney) missed the point. The fence is simply one component in the militarization of the border, a $90 billion project that marshaled thousands of Border Patrol agents and National Guard, deployed manned aircraft and aerial drones, established military-style bases and a network of radio-transmission towers, and carved thousands of miles of new roads in national parks and wildlife refuges. In the end, it is a system quite different from what was originally envisioned. It is designed less to stop people from crossing the border illegally than to apprehend them once they have crossed; it slows them down and makes them easier to catch once they are in the United States.

The strategy is comparable to football’s prevent defense, in which the team playing defense doesn’t attempt to stop its opponents from crossing the 50-yard line but concentrates its efforts on preventing a touchdown. “A speed bump in the desert” is the way one Border Patrol official describes the fence. The Government Accountability Office reported in May that the strategy assumes that nearly 90 percent of apprehensions are going to be made after people have entered the country illegally. The Border Patrol put it this way: “Illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.” The fence funnels people into some of the roughest country along the border, into places like the Tumacacori wilderness, Josseline’s final resting place. A more cynical take on the policy is that apprehensions drive budgets, and if you deter people from crossing the border, you won’t apprehend as many. As one official puts it, “Agencies thrive on numbers.”

One look at the groups of travelers gathered on the Mexican side and it’s clear from their flimsy sneakers, cotton pullovers, and quart-sized water bottles that most are unprepared for the 20 to 30 miles of hellish terrain that lies ahead, where temperatures routinely soar above 100 degrees in summer and often drop below freezing in winter. Anyone who has hiked in the desert knows how deceiving it can be. Terrain that appears flat from a distance turns out to be a steeply furrowed maze of arroyos and canyons, cliffs and cul-de-sacs. Long-distance trekkers cache water and nonperishable food before heading out, as it is almost impossible to carry sufficient quantities of either. Many migrants give themselves up when they become too sick or weak to go on, or they are abandoned by coyotes, their paid guides. You see the ones who can’t continue standing meekly at highway checkpoints, waiting to be processed and deported.

There have been fences along the border with Mexico for more than a century. They just weren’t designed to keep people out. Strung with barbed wire, the first ones were erected to segregate American and Mexican cattle. The federal government didn’t start putting up pedestrian fences until 1990. The first one was built in San Diego where the number of apprehensions was approaching 500,000 per year. The fence started at the Pacific Ocean and continued several miles inland. Sixteen years later, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the wave of migrants trying to sneak across from Mexico was beginning to recede. But in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the specter of jihadists toting bombs across the desert and the more routine threat of Mexican drug gangs moving tons of product north provided the impetus to build what is there now. Today, a combination of pedestrian fence and vehicle barriers extends intermittently across 650 miles from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley to 1,300 feet out into the Pacific. The longest stretch is in Arizona where the illegal traffic has been heaviest in recent years.

From the beginning, the idea of walling off the border struck critics as an outdated approach to national security, a throwback to the era when we built a line of forts to protect the pioneers. It wasn’t the Berlin Wall we were re-creating but Fort Apache. As in olden days, soldiers patrol on horseback. Volunteer militiamen scour the hills for signs of invading campesinos. Along a particularly gnarly stretch of desert on Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Reservation, Indian scouts, known as Shadow Wolves, follow the trail of smugglers who wrap their shoes in fabric to cover their tracks as they guide migrants or transport drugs.

Two assessments of border security issued this year, one by the Congressional Research Service and the other by the Government Accountability Office, found that the Border Patrol has gained “effective control” of about 50 percent of the border with Mexico. Although the Border Patrol reports that it has caught 18 million illegal aliens since the mid-1990s, the number has plummeted in recent years, from 1.6 million in 2000 to 340,000 last year. At least for now, El Norte is no longer Mexico’s magnetic north. The Pew Hispanic Center reported a few months ago that the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed. The population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S. is almost one million fewer than it was five years ago. The report concluded: “The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.” The causes are many: an uptick in Mexican employment, a sharp decline in that country’s birth rate, the scarcity of jobs in the U.S., and a record number of deportations under President Barack Obama. There is also the fear of tangling with the murderous drug cartels that control access to the border on the Mexican side.

The border fortifications have made a difference, though it is hard to gauge how much since the trend in illegal migration had been heading downward for five years before the Secure Fence Act was passed. Fencing the border has stopped some people. A 15- to 20-foot fall from its top to a graded road or concrete apron at its base is comparable to a plunge from a diving board into an empty swimming pool. The Border Patrol and local medical personnel have reported concussions, broken limbs, and other injuries serious enough to prevent the victims from venturing any farther into the U.S.

So far, the decline in the illegal-immigrant population has not made a difference in official policy. There have been few calls for the president to tear down the fence. Just the opposite. In Arizona, a campaign is under way to raise money to build an additional 200 miles of border fence. The Texas Department of Public Safety is launching a fleet of gunboats to patrol the Rio Grande, the river that forms the state’s border with Mexico. The Obama administration is preparing to build 14 more miles of fence in South Texas.

Obama made light of Republicans’ obsession with border security with a joke about moats and alligators. But he has deported twice as many people as George W. Bush did during his first term, while deploying 1,200 National Guard and doubling the size of the Border Patrol to 22,000. As CNN’s Paul Begala said: “President Obama has put more boots on the ground on the Mexican border than any president since Woodrow Wilson was chasing Pancho Villa.”

If the border has become a safer place—as crime statistics strongly suggest—it hasn’t become safe enough in the view of many members of Congress. Lately, they have been focusing on what they see as a particularly vulnerable component of Obama’s border policy—the environment. Congressional conservatives say environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act are limiting the Border Patrol’s access to borderlands frequented by migrants and smugglers. The Government Accountability Office investigated the claim and reported back to Congress that, except in a few instances, environmental laws have not impeded law enforcement. But neither the GAO’s findings nor the denials of officials from both the Obama and Bush administrations have slowed the progress of the bill recently passed by the House. One of the most sweeping anti-environmental laws ever proposed, it would essentially nullify laws protecting parks, wilderness, and wildlife within 100 miles of the nation’s northern and southern borders. It would override century-old protections of Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, and Big Bend National Park in Texas, as well as sacred Indian sites such as Montana’s Chief Mountain and nearby Sweet Grass Hills. The bill would permit the construction of military installations, roads, airstrips, and communication towers anywhere within the 100-mile zones. Federal law-enforcement officers would be free to drive on or off roads on public or tribal land.

America’s Southwestern deserts have been sacrificed to national security for more than half a century. We exploded the first atom bomb in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto and detonated 1,000 nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site. During World War II, the Army trained nearly one million soldiers, most famously General George S. Patton’s tank battalions, on 18,000 square miles of California and Arizona desert. Today, Southwestern deserts are home to our largest missile and bombing ranges. No doubt because deserts, like the Tumacacori, are inhospitable to human life, we have treated them as if they had no life of their own.

The routes most heavily used by migrants and smugglers in recent years have been across the desert between El Paso, Texas, and the California border, a 30 million–acre wedge of land bought from Mexico in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. The first American to survey these lands, John Russell Bartlett, described them in 1854 as an “unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless. … One becomes sickened and disgusted with the ever-recurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing.” A bookseller from New York with no formal education beyond high school, Bartlett traveled across the desert in a private coach, which he made into a bed at night. There, he found relief from the monotony of the landscape by reading Adolph Erman’s Travels in Siberia. Heading west from El Paso, Bartlett’s party lost its way in sandstorms, fought brushfire, and warded off hostile Indians. Bartlett himself was laid low with typhoid.

If the beleaguered surveyor sometimes failed to appreciate his surroundings, he was not unlike a modern tourist speeding across the apparently lifeless region. Then as now, the desert camouflages its assets. The area that Bartlett explored, extending across southwest New Mexico, northern Mexico, and east--central Arizona, is known today as the Madrean Archipelago or more informally as the Sky Islands. A checkerboard of isolated mountains separated by vast tracts of scrub, the region teems with life. It is home to nearly twice as many types of mammals as is Yellowstone National Park. Animals that thrive here do so by virtue of extraordinary resourcefulness. Bighorn sheep find water by goring open barrel cactus and devouring its moist pulp. Kangaroo rats metabolize water from seeds and plants. The key to survival for dozens of species is unfettered access to habitat on both sides of the border. Mule deer, puma, black bears, bighorn sheep, jaguar, ocelot, Mexico’s last free-ranging bison herd, and the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn must be free to move back and forth to search for scarce forage and water, to escape wildfires and drought, and to find mates. Now, many of them can’t do that. The fence, along with the noise and lights of generators and radio towers, has inhibited or simply blocked their movement. The Sky Island Alliance, a conservation group, says that only three viable migration corridors are left along the eastern third of Arizona’s border with Mexico, about 120 miles. Some species have already lost 75 percent of their historic range.

The pressure on wildlife is not due entirely to border fortifications. Millions of migrants trooping across the countryside have taken a toll as well, leaving mountains of trash, starting fires, polluting springs, vandalizing historic sites, and scattering wildlife. Officials of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on Arizona’s southern border, were compelled to close two-thirds of a 330,000-acre park to the public because of the dangers posed by narcotics traffickers. In 2002, after a park ranger was shot to death by two suspected drug smugglers, Organ Pipe was declared the most dangerous park in America by the park rangers’ branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. If the militarization of the border has made parks like Organ Pipe safer for visitors—and park officials insist it has—it has not provided a respite for harried wildlife.

Border Patrol base camps carved out of wilderness, speeding jeeps, and all-terrain vehicles have cut thousands of miles of unauthorized roads through national parks and wildlife refuges, compacting soil and diverting moisture. Unchecked, the process destroys the plants that hold scarce desert water in place and provide sustenance for ranchers’ cattle and wildlife. Three years after the installation of vehicle barriers prevented smugglers from driving north through the park, officials there reported a 40 percent increase in unauthorized roads, mostly due to Border Patrol activity. A recent study of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented a vast network of new roads, forged by the Border Patrol, that had caused an alarming level of damage. “We are disturbed by both the magnitude and the extent of the impacts we recorded,” the study said. “We did not expect to find almost 8,000 miles of vehicle trails through wilderness.”

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security pledged $50 million to repair environmental damage, but the release of that money—less than $9 million so far—has been slow. Even that allocation has outraged some conservatives. Arizona’s governor, Republican Jan Brewer, ridiculed one project to study the impact of the border fence on jaguar that range between northern Mexico and southern Arizona. In June, the House prohibited Homeland Security from spending any more money on repairing environmental damage along the border, with the sponsors of the ban referring to the payments as “extortion.”

The U.S.–Mexico border was once a co-dependent region with communities on both sides profiting from a daily exchange of goods and services, a hybrid culture with its own food, music, and commerce, where members of the same family lived on both sides, and businesses relied on an international clientele. Nogales, Arizona, for example, depended on Mexican consumers for 70 percent of its sales-tax revenue. Not only has the fence changed all that, it has cut people off from their own property. In South Texas, where the winding Rio Grande traces the border with Mexico, the fence had to be built on higher, dryer ground. Erected inside U.S. territory, it has separated some American farmers from their fields. John McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association, estimates that 35,000 to 50,000 acres planted with onions, cabbage, leafy green vegetables, and citrus are being trapped between the fence and the river.

Today, many critics of the fence are people it was supposed to protect—ranchers, farmers, and urban refugees who have been most vulnerable to the trespassing, littering, and petty thievery by migrants trooping north across their land. Arizona rancher John Ladd is one of the critics. His family has been raising cattle along the Arizona–Mexico border in the small community of Palominas for more than a century. A 15-foot-high section of fence runs along the 10-mile-long southern boundary of Ladd’s land. “They cut their way through it in a heartbeat,” says Ladd, standing next to a section of steel mesh that had been expertly peeled back. A sieve when it comes to stopping people, the fence acts as a dam. When it storms, rock and dirt pile up behind the fence, capturing the runoff that used to spread out across Ladd’s land and irrigate his pastures. When the water eventually does find a path through the fence, it gushes, cutting deep gullies and bypassing the high ground and the plants that feed Ladd’s cattle. Skinny calves bring skimpier profits. If too much water accumulates behind the fence, the area floods as it has several times along the Arizona border. The flooding killed two people and caused several million dollars in damage to hundreds of homes and businesses in Nogales and the smaller towns of Sonoyta and Lukeville in 2008. “The hydrology is tricky,” Ladd says. “You need to spend a little time out here to understand how it works. But they didn’t listen to us.”

Federal land managers warned Homeland Security officials that the design of the fence could impede normal drainage patterns during heavy rains. They didn’t heed the warnings, because they didn’t have to. The laws requiring consultation in such matters had been waived. Even though the fence was built through some of the richest wildlife habitat in the Southwest, Congress empowered Homeland Security to ignore every major environmental statute—the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and 30 other laws protecting historic structures, farmland, and American Indian relics and grave sites. As all-encompassing as it is, the waiver is a modest precursor of the legislation now making its way through Congress.

“It’s the wildlife that’s suffering the most,” says Ladd, noting the decline in the mule-deer herd that used to browse on his ranch. “We had about 200 that migrated seasonally between here and Mexico. After they finished building the wall in October, our herd has declined 70 percent from what it used to be.”

Nowhere is wildlife more abundant along the border than in the Malpai Borderlands, about 50 miles east of Ladd’s ranch. The Malpai is a tableau of grassland, marshy bottoms, and cottonwood thickets that extend from the emerald palisades of the Peloncillo Mountains to Mexico’s Sierra del Tigre. If the Sky Islands have an epicenter, the Malpai certainly qualifies. A 50-acre patch of scrub supports more rodents than does the state of Pennsylvania. In just one of the mountain passes, more species of reptiles and amphibians are found than in any other place in America. The mix of mountain and forest is ideal habitat for some of the most striking creatures in the wilds, among them the aplomado falcon, the parrot-like elegant trogon, and the jaguar, which until recently was thought to be extinct in the U.S. Slightly larger than Rhode Island, the Malpai is home to just 100 families, who have grown accustomed to surprise visits by both hungry humans and animals.

Warner Glenn is perhaps the best-known resident. His craggy features have graced the pages of menswear catalogues for many years. The kitchen wall of his modest ranch house is pocked with bullet holes where he and his wife, Wendy, dispatched a pair of rattlesnakes that had crawled behind the refrigerator. A hunting guide as well as a rancher, Glenn photographed a jaguar in 1996, laying aside his rifle and allowing the animal to escape. Glenn was violating a century-old Western code when he chose to let the animal live, but his decision became a model of Malpai conservation.
Working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Glenn and his neighbors have restored springs and vegetation, reintroduced bighorn sheep, and preserved the habitat of two dozen threatened species. One family alone spent two years rescuing a dwindling population of endangered Chiricahua leopard frogs by replenishing water holes and building an artificial stream. Their work earned the Malpai ranchers a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and gave credence to their opposition to the sort of border fence that has wrought havoc on John Ladd’s ranch. Although vehicle barriers have been built along the Malpai’s border with Mexico, they do not block wildlife migration. Now the ranchers worry that the legislation being pushed by congressional Republicans could jeopardize much of their conservation work.

More than 40 percent of our Southwestern borderlands are administered by federal agencies responsible for enforcing many of the nation’s environmental laws. Congressional critics say that these laws have made the federal lands a sanctuary for migrants and drug dealers who have crossed the border. In at least one instance, the critics say, a fleeing murderer was able to escape to Mexico through a wildlife refuge because the Border Patrol was locked out. Environmental laws have “jeopardized the safety and security of all Americans,” says Rob Bishop, the Utah congressman who sponsored the bill that would exempt the Border Patrol from the laws along the northern and southern borders.

In a rare alliance, ranchers and environmentalists along the northern and southern borders have joined to condemn Bishop’s bill. John Ladd has been one of the most outspoken. “It’ll take them a month to wreck country we’ve spent 40 years trying to build up,” he said. “How are they going to watch over a 100-mile swath of border when they can’t guard it now? I’ve had people busting through the fence every day since Thanksgiving, 15 carloads since February. This waiver is just an excuse to tear up more countryside.”

More than one agenda is being served by the bill. At least 10 of the 17 organizations listed as supporting it are advocates of more motorized travel in parks and wilderness. Bishop is one of the most stalwartly anti-environmental legislators on Capitol Hill. The group Republicans for Environmental Protection—now known as ConservAmerica—gave his environmental voting record a minus rating on two of its past three congressional scorecards. “His voting record is usually one of the worst,” said David Jenkins, the organization’s vice president for government and public affairs. “He’s philosophically against public land protection.” Lynn Scarlett, deputy secretary of the interior under George W. Bush, says she believes that Bishop’s push for a border waiver has less to do with national security than with his desire to weaken environmental protection of public land. “The facts do not bear out their argument that federal land management has obstructed law enforcement,” she says. “But by cloaking their agenda as a national-security issue, the people for it may gain enough traction.”

Curiously, a bill sold as an anti-crime measure is being pushed at a time when crime rates in border communities have been lower than those of larger, more distant cities. El Paso has remained one of the safest cities of its size in the U.S., despite the horrific violence in neighboring Juarez. Moreover, the emphasis on policing remote sections of mountains and deserts along the border may be misplaced. A national threat assessment by the Justice Department recently pointed out that almost all of the cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin entering the U.S. comes in vehicles and railcars through urban ports of entry. “Most experts do not consider the Southwest border between [ports of entry] to be the most important point of vulnerability to [weapons of mass destruction] or other types of drugs and contraband,” the Congressional Research Service told Congress earlier this year.

That is not to say the borderlands are crime-free. From the days of Geronimo, renegades and outlaws have found a refuge in the Malpai. It gave cover to Apache holdouts long after the tribe had formally surrendered in 1886. William “Curly Bill” Brocius and Ike Clanton of OK Corral fame were among dozens of outlaws who found sanctuary in these mountains. Migrants and drug smugglers have been slipping through the canyons and passes for decades. Across the entire length of the border, ranchers frequently report thefts and break-ins. The desert is still the preferred pathway north for most foreign-produced marijuana, according to the Justice Department. Border Patrol agents and other government employees have been attacked. Two agents were fatally shot during the past decade. Another was run over and killed by a fleeing suspect. The circumstances of their deaths and other border crimes have made headlines around the country, none more prominently than the fatal shooting of Robert Krentz, a Cochise County, Arizona, rancher and member of the Malpai group.

Phil Krentz says that when his brother was shot, he had gone to help a migrant he thought was in trouble. The murder remains unsolved, though authorities suspect the killer was a drug smuggler who fled into Mexico. Krentz’s death galvanized congressional supporters of Bishop’s bill to expand the Border Patrol’s authority. In a letter urging passage of the 100-mile waiver, Bishop implied that Krentz’s murderer might not have gotten away if the Border Patrol had access to the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge through which the suspect escaped to Mexico. “His murderer chose to exploit vulnerabilities on federal land to traverse in and out of the United States,” wrote Bishop in a letter to House colleagues. “It is no coincidence that at this same location, the Border Patrol access has been limited by land managers who have literally locked out Border Patrol vehicles.” Bishop was wrong, according to the Government Accountability Office, which found that the Border Patrol had its own set of locks and keys to the San Bernardino Refuge. Moreover, Krentz’s neighbor, Wendy Glenn, says that her husband accompanied a federal law--enforcement agent through the refuge in pursuit of Krentz’s killer. “They had access,” she says. “The Border Patrol was in there. Warner was there with them, following the tracks from the kill site to the border. When Bishop came down here, I told him access wasn’t a problem.”

Bill McDonald, who owns another ranch nearby, says that authorities had no chance of catching the killer with or without access to the refuge. “The killer was back in Mexico before Rob Krentz’s body was found.”

Bishop’s proposed waiver of environmental laws is an ironic tribute to Krentz. He believed in conservation and, along with McDonald, was a member of the Malpai Borderlands Group. Like the Glenns, McDonald thinks waiving environmental laws would be damaging to lands that taxpayers have spent millions of dollars trying to protect. “I have to abide by the environmental laws. Why shouldn’t the Border Patrol have to?”

McDonald describes himself as a conservative Republican, an opponent of gun control and government meddling. But like many of his neighbors, he goes his own way when it comes to the border, where day-to-day experience more than ideology tends to shape people’s views. These ranchers aid needy travelers, regardless of their immigration status, help hunt down criminals, and show fresh Border Patrol recruits how to go easy on the land.

“What I’m saying will sound like heresy,” McDonald says. “We appreciate what the Border Patrol is trying to do, but militarization alone won’t work. I’m not downplaying the dangers. We’re pretty cautious around strangers. We’re all armed. But it’s not right when people from another country can’t visit their relatives. If you want to make this country safer, you need to move people out of the shadows.”

***

Seen from a distance, the border fence is a tantalizing mirage, a piece of land art in the tradition of the Spiral Jetty or The Lightning Field, its concrete supports and steel-mesh panels rendered immaterial like a long, hard road that seems to liquefy in the harsh light. Up close, it’s more imposing, the apotheosis of a junkyard fence. In the history of cross-border insults, it ranks with Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the U.S. government’s Harmon Doctrine denying Mexico’s right to water from the Rio Grande or Colorado River. Only, in this case, injuries have been inflicted on the culture, commerce, and environment on both sides of the border. Design flaws in the fence have caused floods that cost lives and resulted in several million dollars of damage to homes and businesses in Arizona and Mexico. Mountains in one California wilderness were dynamited to make way for the fence. In Texas, private property has been seized, elsewhere ranches trashed, and everywhere wildlife habitat damaged and ancient migration routes blocked.
Border fortifications are likely to remain in place and even grow if many in Washington have their way. Under legislation that has passed the House, the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Border Patrol would be vastly expanded. The effects on people’s livelihoods, on topography, and on natural resources would be felt across an area larger than New England. The push for even more security is due in part to people’s misperception of what the fence is supposed to accomplish. Its apparent fragility is not a mirage, as evidenced by the ladders, the 149 tunnels, and the holes in the mesh panels that make long stretches of the fence look like a patchwork quilt. In 2010 alone, more than 4,000 holes were cut. Yet it was never meant to be an impenetrable barrier. Don’t mistake the fence for something it isn’t, then–Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News five years ago: “I think the fence has come to assume a certain kind of symbolic significance, which should not obscure the fact [that sealing off the borders] is a much more complicated problem.”
All of the bluster during the Republican primary about building a double fence (Michele Bachmann), electrifying it (Herman Cain), or extending it the entire length of the 1,950-mile border (Mitt Romney) missed the point. The fence is simply one component in the militarization of the border, a $90 billion project that marshaled thousands of Border Patrol agents and National Guard, deployed manned aircraft and aerial drones, established military-style bases and a network of radio-transmission towers, and carved thousands of miles of new roads in national parks and wildlife refuges. In the end, it is a system quite different from what was originally envisioned. It is designed less to stop people from crossing the border illegally than to apprehend them once they have crossed; it slows them down and makes them easier to catch once they are in the United States.
The strategy is comparable to football’s prevent defense, in which the team playing defense doesn’t attempt to stop its opponents from crossing the 50-yard line but concentrates its efforts on preventing a touchdown. “A speed bump in the desert” is the way one Border Patrol official describes the fence. The Government Accountability Office reported in May that the strategy assumes that nearly 90 percent of apprehensions are going to be made after people have entered the country illegally. The Border Patrol put it this way: “Illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.” The fence funnels people into some of the roughest country along the border, into places like the Tumacacori wilderness, Josseline’s final resting place. A more cynical take on the policy is that apprehensions drive budgets, and if you deter people from crossing the border, you won’t apprehend as many. As one official puts it, “Agencies thrive on numbers.”
One look at the groups of travelers gathered on the Mexican side and it’s clear from their flimsy sneakers, cotton pullovers, and quart-sized water bottles that most are unprepared for the 20 to 30 miles of hellish terrain that lies ahead, where temperatures routinely soar above 100 degrees in summer and often drop below freezing in winter. Anyone who has hiked in the desert knows how deceiving it can be. Terrain that appears flat from a distance turns out to be a steeply furrowed maze of arroyos and canyons, cliffs and cul-de-sacs. Long-distance trekkers cache water and nonperishable food before heading out, as it is almost impossible to carry sufficient quantities of either. Many migrants give themselves up when they become too sick or weak to go on, or they are abandoned by coyotes, their paid guides. You see the ones who can’t continue standing meekly at highway checkpoints, waiting to be processed and deported.

***

There have been fences along the border with Mexico for more than a century. They just weren’t designed to keep people out. Strung with barbed wire, the first ones were erected to segregate American and Mexican cattle. The federal government didn’t start putting up pedestrian fences until 1990. The first one was built in San Diego where the number of apprehensions was approaching 500,000 per year. The fence started at the Pacific Ocean and continued several miles inland. Sixteen years later, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the wave of migrants trying to sneak across from Mexico was beginning to recede. But in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the specter of jihadists toting bombs across the desert and the more routine threat of Mexican drug gangs moving tons of product north provided the impetus to build what is there now. Today, a combination of pedestrian fence and vehicle barriers extends intermittently across 650 miles from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley to 1,300 feet out into the Pacific. The longest stretch is in Arizona where the illegal traffic has been heaviest in recent years.
From the beginning, the idea of walling off the border struck critics as an outdated approach to national security, a throwback to the era when we built a line of forts to protect the pioneers. It wasn’t the Berlin Wall we were re-creating but Fort Apache. As in olden days, soldiers patrol on horseback. Volunteer militiamen scour the hills for signs of invading campesinos. Along a particularly gnarly stretch of desert on Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Reservation, Indian scouts, known as Shadow Wolves, follow the trail of smugglers who wrap their shoes in fabric to cover their tracks as they guide migrants or transport drugs.
Two assessments of border security issued this year, one by the Congressional Research Service and the other by the Government Accountability Office, found that the Border Patrol has gained “effective control” of about 50 percent of the border with Mexico. Although the Border Patrol reports that it has caught 18 million illegal aliens since the mid-1990s, the number has plummeted in recent years, from 1.6 million in 2000 to 340,000 last year. At least for now, El Norte is no longer Mexico’s magnetic north. The Pew Hispanic Center reported a few months ago that the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed. The population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S. is almost one million fewer than it was five years ago. The report concluded: “The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.” The causes are many: an uptick in Mexican employment, a sharp decline in that country’s birth rate, the scarcity of jobs in the U.S., and a record number of deportations under President Barack Obama. There is also the fear of tangling with the murderous drug cartels that control access to the border on the Mexican side.
The border fortifications have made a difference, though it is hard to gauge how much since the trend in illegal migration had been heading downward for five years before the Secure Fence Act was passed. Fencing the border has stopped some people. A 15- to 20-foot fall from its top to a graded road or concrete apron at its base is comparable to a plunge from a diving board into an empty swimming pool. The Border Patrol and local medical personnel have reported concussions, broken limbs, and other injuries serious enough to prevent the victims from venturing any farther into the U.S.
So far, the decline in the illegal-immigrant population has not made a difference in official policy. There have been few calls for the president to tear down the fence. Just the opposite. In Arizona, a campaign is under way to raise money to build an additional 200 miles of border fence. The Texas Department of Public Safety is launching a fleet of gunboats to patrol the Rio Grande, the river that forms the state’s border with Mexico. The Obama administration is preparing to build 14 more miles of fence in South Texas.
Obama made light of Republicans’ obsession with border security with a joke about moats and alligators. But he has deported twice as many people as George W. Bush did during his first term, while deploying 1,200 National Guard and doubling the size of the Border Patrol to 22,000. As CNN’s Paul Begala said: “President Obama has put more boots on the ground on the Mexican border than any president since Woodrow Wilson was chasing Pancho Villa.”
If the border has become a safer place—as crime statistics strongly suggest—it hasn’t become safe enough in the view of many members of Congress. Lately, they have been focusing on what they see as a particularly vulnerable component of Obama’s border policy—the environment. Congressional conservatives say environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act are limiting the Border Patrol’s access to borderlands frequented by migrants and smugglers. The Government Accountability Office investigated the claim and reported back to Congress that, except in a few instances, environmental laws have not impeded law enforcement. But neither the GAO’s findings nor the denials of officials from both the Obama and Bush administrations have slowed the progress of the bill recently passed by the House. One of the most sweeping anti-environmental laws ever proposed, it would essentially nullify laws protecting parks, wilderness, and wildlife within 100 miles of the nation’s northern and southern borders. It would override century-old protections of Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, and Big Bend National Park in Texas, as well as sacred Indian sites such as Montana’s Chief Mountain and nearby Sweet Grass Hills. The bill would permit the construction of military installations, roads, airstrips, and communication towers anywhere within the 100-mile zones. Federal law-enforcement officers would be free to drive on or off roads on public or tribal land.

***

America’s Southwestern deserts have been sacrificed to national security for more than half a century. We exploded the first atom bomb in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto and detonated 1,000 nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site. During World War II, the Army trained nearly one million soldiers, most famously General George S. Patton’s tank battalions, on 18,000 square miles of California and Arizona desert. Today, Southwestern deserts are home to our largest missile and bombing ranges. No doubt because deserts, like the Tumacacori, are inhospitable to human life, we have treated them as if they had no life of their own.
The routes most heavily used by migrants and smugglers in recent years have been across the desert between El Paso, Texas, and the California border, a 30 million–acre wedge of land bought from Mexico in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. The first American to survey these lands, John Russell Bartlett, described them in 1854 as an “unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless. … One becomes sickened and disgusted with the ever-recurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing.” A bookseller from New York with no formal education beyond high school, Bartlett traveled across the desert in a private coach, which he made into a bed at night. There, he found relief from the monotony of the landscape by reading Adolph Erman’s Travels in Siberia. Heading west from El Paso, Bartlett’s party lost its way in sandstorms, fought brushfire, and warded off hostile Indians. Bartlett himself was laid low with typhoid.
If the beleaguered surveyor sometimes failed to appreciate his surroundings, he was not unlike a modern tourist speeding across the apparently lifeless region. Then as now, the desert camouflages its assets. The area that Bartlett explored, extending across southwest New Mexico, northern Mexico, and east--central Arizona, is known today as the Madrean Archipelago or more informally as the Sky Islands. A checkerboard of isolated mountains separated by vast tracts of scrub, the region teems with life. It is home to nearly twice as many types of mammals as is Yellowstone National Park. Animals that thrive here do so by virtue of extraordinary resourcefulness. Bighorn sheep find water by goring open barrel cactus and devouring its moist pulp. Kangaroo rats metabolize water from seeds and plants. The key to survival for dozens of species is unfettered access to habitat on both sides of the border. Mule deer, puma, black bears, bighorn sheep, jaguar, ocelot, Mexico’s last free-ranging bison herd, and the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn must be free to move back and forth to search for scarce forage and water, to escape wildfires and drought, and to find mates. Now, many of them can’t do that. The fence, along with the noise and lights of generators and radio towers, has inhibited or simply blocked their movement. The Sky Island Alliance, a conservation group, says that only three viable migration corridors are left along the eastern third of Arizona’s border with Mexico, about 120 miles. Some species have already lost 75 percent of their historic range.
The pressure on wildlife is not due entirely to border fortifications. Millions of migrants trooping across the countryside have taken a toll as well, leaving mountains of trash, starting fires, polluting springs, vandalizing historic sites, and scattering wildlife. Officials of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on Arizona’s southern border, were compelled to close two-thirds of a 330,000-acre park to the public because of the dangers posed by narcotics traffickers. In 2002, after a park ranger was shot to death by two suspected drug smugglers, Organ Pipe was declared the most dangerous park in America by the park rangers’ branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. If the militarization of the border has made parks like Organ Pipe safer for visitors—and park officials insist it has—it has not provided a respite for harried wildlife.
Border Patrol base camps carved out of wilderness, speeding jeeps, and all-terrain vehicles have cut thousands of miles of unauthorized roads through national parks and wildlife refuges, compacting soil and diverting moisture. Unchecked, the process destroys the plants that hold scarce desert water in place and provide sustenance for ranchers’ cattle and wildlife. Three years after the installation of vehicle barriers prevented smugglers from driving north through the park, officials there reported a 40 percent increase in unauthorized roads, mostly due to Border Patrol activity. A recent study of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented a vast network of new roads, forged by the Border Patrol, that had caused an alarming level of damage. “We are disturbed by both the magnitude and the extent of the impacts we recorded,” the study said. “We did not expect to find almost 8,000 miles of vehicle trails through wilderness.”
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security pledged $50 million to repair environmental damage, but the release of that money—less than $9 million so far—has been slow. Even that allocation has outraged some conservatives. Arizona’s governor, Republican Jan Brewer, ridiculed one project to study the impact of the border fence on jaguar that range between northern Mexico and southern Arizona. In June, the House prohibited Homeland Security from spending any more money on repairing environmental damage along the border, with the sponsors of the ban referring to the payments as “extortion.”
The U.S.–Mexico border was once a co-dependent region with communities on both sides profiting from a daily exchange of goods and services, a hybrid culture with its own food, music, and commerce, where members of the same family lived on both sides, and businesses relied on an international clientele. Nogales, Arizona, for example, depended on Mexican consumers for 70 percent of its sales-tax revenue. Not only has the fence changed all that, it has cut people off from their own property. In South Texas, where the winding Rio Grande traces the border with Mexico, the fence had to be built on higher, dryer ground. Erected inside U.S. territory, it has separated some American farmers from their fields. John McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association, estimates that 35,000 to 50,000 acres planted with onions, cabbage, leafy green vegetables, and citrus are being trapped between the fence and the river.
Today, many critics of the fence are people it was supposed to protect—ranchers, farmers, and urban refugees who have been most vulnerable to the trespassing, littering, and petty thievery by migrants trooping north across their land. Arizona rancher John Ladd is one of the critics. His family has been raising cattle along the Arizona–Mexico border in the small community of Palominas for more than a century. A 15-foot-high section of fence runs along the 10-mile-long southern boundary of Ladd’s land. “They cut their way through it in a heartbeat,” says Ladd, standing next to a section of steel mesh that had been expertly peeled back. A sieve when it comes to stopping people, the fence acts as a dam. When it storms, rock and dirt pile up behind the fence, capturing the runoff that used to spread out across Ladd’s land and irrigate his pastures. When the water eventually does find a path through the fence, it gushes, cutting deep gullies and bypassing the high ground and the plants that feed Ladd’s cattle. Skinny calves bring skimpier profits. If too much water accumulates behind the fence, the area floods as it has several times along the Arizona border. The flooding killed two people and caused several million dollars in damage to hundreds of homes and businesses in Nogales and the smaller towns of Sonoyta and Lukeville in 2008. “The hydrology is tricky,” Ladd says. “You need to spend a little time out here to understand how it works. But they didn’t listen to us.”
Federal land managers warned Homeland Security officials that the design of the fence could impede normal drainage patterns during heavy rains. They didn’t heed the warnings, because they didn’t have to. The laws requiring consultation in such matters had been waived. Even though the fence was built through some of the richest wildlife habitat in the Southwest, Congress empowered Homeland Security to ignore every major environmental statute—the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and 30 other laws protecting historic structures, farmland, and American Indian relics and grave sites. As all-encompassing as it is, the waiver is a modest precursor of the legislation now making its way through Congress.
“It’s the wildlife that’s suffering the most,” says Ladd, noting the decline in the mule-deer herd that used to browse on his ranch. “We had about 200 that migrated seasonally between here and Mexico. After they finished building the wall in October, our herd has declined 70 percent from what it used to be.”

***

Nowhere is wildlife more abundant along the border than in the Malpai Borderlands, about 50 miles east of Ladd’s ranch. The Malpai is a tableau of grassland, marshy bottoms, and cottonwood thickets that extend from the emerald palisades of the Peloncillo Mountains to Mexico’s Sierra del Tigre. If the Sky Islands have an epicenter, the Malpai certainly qualifies. A 50-acre patch of scrub supports more rodents than does the state of Pennsylvania. In just one of the mountain passes, more species of reptiles and amphibians are found than in any other place in America. The mix of mountain and forest is ideal habitat for some of the most striking creatures in the wilds, among them the aplomado falcon, the parrot-like elegant trogon, and the jaguar, which until recently was thought to be extinct in the U.S. Slightly larger than Rhode Island, the Malpai is home to just 100 families, who have grown accustomed to surprise visits by both hungry humans and animals.
Warner Glenn is perhaps the best-known resident. His craggy features have graced the pages of menswear catalogues for many years. The kitchen wall of his modest ranch house is pocked with bullet holes where he and his wife, Wendy, dispatched a pair of rattlesnakes that had crawled behind the refrigerator. A hunting guide as well as a rancher, Glenn photographed a jaguar in 1996, laying aside his rifle and allowing the animal to escape. Glenn was violating a century-old Western code when he chose to let the animal live, but his decision became a model of Malpai conservation. Working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Glenn and his neighbors have restored springs and vegetation, reintroduced bighorn sheep, and preserved the habitat of two dozen threatened species. One family alone spent two years rescuing a dwindling population of endangered Chiricahua leopard frogs by replenishing water holes and building an artificial stream. Their work earned the Malpai ranchers a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and gave credence to their opposition to the sort of border fence that has wrought havoc on John Ladd’s ranch. Although vehicle barriers have been built along the Malpai’s border with Mexico, they do not block wildlife migration. Now the ranchers worry that the legislation being pushed by congressional Republicans could jeopardize much of their conservation work.
More than 40 percent of our Southwestern borderlands are administered by federal agencies responsible for enforcing many of the nation’s environmental laws. Congressional critics say that these laws have made the federal lands a sanctuary for migrants and drug dealers who have crossed the border. In at least one instance, the critics say, a fleeing murderer was able to escape to Mexico through a wildlife refuge because the Border Patrol was locked out. Environmental laws have “jeopardized the safety and security of all Americans,” says Rob Bishop, the Utah congressman who sponsored the bill that would exempt the Border Patrol from the laws along the northern and southern borders.
In a rare alliance, ranchers and environmentalists along the northern and southern borders have joined to condemn Bishop’s bill. John Ladd has been one of the most outspoken. “It’ll take them a month to wreck country we’ve spent 40 years trying to build up,” he said. “How are they going to watch over a 100-mile swath of border when they can’t guard it now? I’ve had people busting through the fence every day since Thanksgiving, 15 carloads since February. This waiver is just an excuse to tear up more countryside.”
More than one agenda is being served by the bill. At least 10 of the 17 organizations listed as supporting it are advocates of more motorized travel in parks and wilderness. Bishop is one of the most stalwartly anti-environmental legislators on Capitol Hill. The group Republicans for Environmental Protection—now known as ConservAmerica—gave his environmental voting record a minus rating on two of its past three congressional scorecards. “His voting record is usually one of the worst,” said David Jenkins, the organization’s vice president for government and public affairs. “He’s philosophically against public land protection.” Lynn Scarlett, deputy secretary of the interior under George W. Bush, says she believes that Bishop’s push for a border waiver has less to do with national security than with his desire to weaken environmental protection of public land. “The facts do not bear out their argument that federal land management has obstructed law enforcement,” she says. “But by cloaking their agenda as a national-security issue, the people for it may gain enough traction.”
Curiously, a bill sold as an anti-crime measure is being pushed at a time when crime rates in border communities have been lower than those of larger, more distant cities. El Paso has remained one of the safest cities of its size in the U.S., despite the horrific violence in neighboring Juarez. Moreover, the emphasis on policing remote sections of mountains and deserts along the border may be misplaced. A national threat assessment by the Justice Department recently pointed out that almost all of the cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin entering the U.S. comes in vehicles and railcars through urban ports of entry. “Most experts do not consider the Southwest border between [ports of entry] to be the most important point of vulnerability to [weapons of mass destruction] or other types of drugs and contraband,” the Congressional Research Service told Congress earlier this year.
That is not to say the borderlands are crime-free. From the days of Geronimo, renegades and outlaws have found a refuge in the Malpai. It gave cover to Apache holdouts long after the tribe had formally surrendered in 1886. William “Curly Bill” Brocius and Ike Clanton of OK Corral fame were among dozens of outlaws who found sanctuary in these mountains. Migrants and drug smugglers have been slipping through the canyons and passes for decades. Across the entire length of the border, ranchers frequently report thefts and break-ins. The desert is still the preferred pathway north for most foreign-produced marijuana, according to the Justice Department. Border Patrol agents and other government employees have been attacked. Two agents were fatally shot during the past decade. Another was run over and killed by a fleeing suspect. The circumstances of their deaths and other border crimes have made headlines around the country, none more prominently than the fatal shooting of Robert Krentz, a Cochise County, Arizona, rancher and member of the Malpai group.
Phil Krentz says that when his brother was shot, he had gone to help a migrant he thought was in trouble. The murder remains unsolved, though authorities suspect the killer was a drug smuggler who fled into Mexico. Krentz’s death galvanized congressional supporters of Bishop’s bill to expand the Border Patrol’s authority. In a letter urging passage of the 100-mile waiver, Bishop implied that Krentz’s murderer might not have gotten away if the Border Patrol had access to the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge through which the suspect escaped to Mexico. “His murderer chose to exploit vulnerabilities on federal land to traverse in and out of the United States,” wrote Bishop in a letter to House colleagues. “It is no coincidence that at this same location, the Border Patrol access has been limited by land managers who have literally locked out Border Patrol vehicles.” Bishop was wrong, according to the Government Accountability Office, which found that the Border Patrol had its own set of locks and keys to the San Bernardino Refuge. Moreover, Krentz’s neighbor, Wendy Glenn, says that her husband accompanied a federal law--enforcement agent through the refuge in pursuit of Krentz’s killer. “They had access,” she says. “The Border Patrol was in there. Warner was there with them, following the tracks from the kill site to the border. When Bishop came down here, I told him access wasn’t a problem.”
Bill McDonald, who owns another ranch nearby, says that authorities had no chance of catching the killer with or without access to the refuge. “The killer was back in Mexico before Rob Krentz’s body was found.”
Bishop’s proposed waiver of environmental laws is an ironic tribute to Krentz. He believed in conservation and, along with McDonald, was a member of the Malpai Borderlands Group. Like the Glenns, McDonald thinks waiving environmental laws would be damaging to lands that taxpayers have spent millions of dollars trying to protect. “I have to abide by the environmental laws. Why shouldn’t the Border Patrol have to?”
McDonald describes himself as a conservative Republican, an opponent of gun control and government meddling. But like many of his neighbors, he goes his own way when it comes to the border, where day-to-day experience more than ideology tends to shape people’s views. These ranchers aid needy travelers, regardless of their immigration status, help hunt down criminals, and show fresh Border Patrol recruits how to go easy on the land.
“What I’m saying will sound like heresy,” McDonald says. “We appreciate what the Border Patrol is trying to do, but militarization alone won’t work. I’m not downplaying the dangers. We’re pretty cautious around strangers. We’re all armed. But it’s not right when people from another country can’t visit their relatives. If you want to make this country safer, you need to move people out of the shadows.”

http://prospect.org/article/border-effect