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EDITOR'S NOTE: Last month, the governors of Arizona and New Mexico declared a state of emergency in response to the alarming levels of drug smuggling, human trafficking and criminal violence that besiege rural counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. With the debate over border security and illegal immigration reaching a new boiling point, we offer this look at life in the region through the eyes of the families who live there. In a three-part series, we'll visit both sides of "the line" between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico — one of the border's most remote, and troubled, stretches.
COCHISE COUNTY, Ariz.— THE MAN with blue shorts and running shoes and no name died here in a dry wash on the Fourth of July.
Ranchers Dennis and Deb Moroney were at home getting their kids ready for a holiday picnic at the time. Their friend, Jaime Wahl, arrived in a panic; minutes earlier, he'd found a dying man on a remote part of the ranch. The man was shirtless and unresponsive, his skin hot to the touch, and he had no wallet or ID — just a small amulet around his neck with an icon of St. Christopher, patron saint of safe travel.
By the time the ambulance and the Border Patrol arrived, the man was already dead.
"I made a little ocotillo cross for him," said Wahl, an ornithologist, pointing to the site where he discovered the man last summer while bird watching. The makeshift memorial was gone now too, likely
"You wonder if his family has anyidea what happened to him," said Wahl.
The Moroney's 20,000-acre ranch of high-desert scrubland is a bone-dry, rugged expanse of mesquite brush, ocotillo cactus and creosote bush, some 20 miles north of the Mexican border and 17 miles southeast of Tombstone, Ariz.
It is an unlikely place for a human highway, but the ranch is bisected by electrical transmission wires that run like a north-south axis through the property, and the coyotes who lead the immigrants use the wires as navigational landmarks. Each year hundreds, if not thousands, of immigrants cross through the Moroneys' ranch en route to pickup points further north.
"In every wash or low spot with shade, you half-expect to see people," said Dennis Moroney. While cross-border immigration has always been a part of their community, and vaqueros, or cowboys, from Sonora and other northern Mexican states have worked on southwestern American ranches for generations, the Moroneys and other ranching families along the border say the scale and scope of human immigration has changed in recent years.
Taking tougher routes
Beefed-up Border Patrol programs such as California's Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Rio Grande in Texas have sharply curtailed illegal imimmigration in both states. But the crackdown has funneled a staggering amount of people into the remote desert areas of Arizona and New Mexico.
Consider the numbers: In the past 11 months, the Border Patrol's Tucson sector alone has made more than 407,000 apprehensions, the vast majority of them Mexican nationals attempting to cross into the United States. The Tucson sector covers about two-thirds of Arizona's border with Mexico, but its apprehension totals amount to nearly 40 percent of all Border Patrol apprehensions this year nationwide. In 2004, the figure was even higher.
"There's just been a flood of people coming across the border here in the last five years," said Dennis Moroney. "I think it's terrible that these people are going to such extreme lengths to find work. I mean, we've always had people crossing the border, country-type people. But these people are urban, with no country skills."
"They don't have a clue what to do out here," added his wife, Deb. "They're totally unprepared, and often, they've been lied to and told that Phoenix is just over the next ridge."
When temperatures soar during the summer months, border families such as the Moroneys are overwhelmed with imperiled immigrants in need of water, food, or emergency medical attention for a fallen loved one injured or lost somewhere in the desert. Last year, they rescued a woman whose shoes were so woefully inadequate that the bottoms of her feet had "de-laminated" from severe blisters.
Never has the family withheld assistance. "When someone shows up dying on your doorstep like that, it doesn't matter what your position is (on illegal imimmigration)," said Deb. She and Dennis teach their children to refer to the immigrants as "travelers" and to save a portion of their allowances to buy emergency food and water for those in need.
Yet the Moroneys also have had frightening encounters with men who demand rides, telephone use, even beer. Salvadoran gang members once flashed Dennis $4,000 in exchange for a ride to Phoenix, which he declined.
His truck was stolen last year, and when police recovered it two weeks later, all the seats had been removed and plywood compartments with spaces for 21 people had been built into the cab and truck bed.
The vehicle's odometer showed it had been driven an additional 6,500 miles in the two weeks it was missing.
"Everybody who lives here has stories," said Dennis, his face and hands furrowed by long hours on horseback in the sun. "It's a relatively new and unsettling problem."
Last month, the climate of general lawlessness in the border region became an official crisis, after Democratic Govs. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Janet Napolitano of Arizona declared a state of emergency in their border counties in order to leverage new federal funding for increased enforcement.
The Border Patrol's Tucson sector already has hundreds of officers, new vehicles and the latest in high-tech surveillance equipment. Its officials point to an 8 percent decline in apprehensions from the previous year as a measure of their success, and see the shift to the border's more remote areas as proof that their interdiction efforts are working.
"We're pushing them out into more rural areas," said Andrea Zortman, spokeswoman for the Border Patrol's Tucson sector field office. "We've taken control of the urban areas, and the smugglers are growing more frustrated with us."
Most illegal immigrants caught by the Border Patrol are voluntarily repatriated back to Mexico. Having already spent most of their money on a coyote, many are penniless and hundreds of miles away from home. Often they reattempt to enter the United States over and over — with an escalating degree of desperation — until they're successful. A new federal program offers free flights back to southern Mexico for foiled border crossers, with the hope they won't attempt another risky journey or fall prey to the criminal elements who ply the streets of Mexico's gritty border cities. But few of those apprehended opt for the free flights.
As to the percentage of illegal immigrants who are ultimately successful, the Border Patrol makes no estimate. Some experts suggest only one out of every four or five are caught, and nearly all agree that once immigrants make it beyond the border's patrolled areas and reach the interstate highway system, their odds improve considerably. In the new immigrant boomtowns of Georgia, Arkansas, New York or Idaho, they'll earn at least 10 times what they would in Mexico. Demand for their labor is unabated; the Pew Hispanic Center estimates some 700,000 unauthorized immigrants enter the United States from Mexico each year.
Huge environmental impact
Yet such statistics cannot convey the physical impact of such a volume of people on places such as southeastern Arizona. Ranches along the border are strewn with littered water bottles, rusting cans, diapers, dirty clothes and plastic bags.
Grazing cattle swallow and choke on the trash. Gates are left open and fences cut, leaving cattle to wander onto roadways. Water lines that flow to stock tanks are regularly punctured and vandalized, allowing thousands of gallons to seep out into the desert. Theft and break-ins are so frequent, residents said, that they can't afford to leave their homes unattended for even a few hours.
Border ranchers said they spend thousand of dollars and up to 40 percent of their time simply undoing the damage inflicted by the droves of immigrants, smugglers and drug traffickers crossing their properties. In April, the group calling itself The Minuteman Project captured national headlines when it deployed hundreds of volunteer sentries along a 20-mile strip of the border due south of the Moroney ranch.
By most accounts, the group was successful at cutting off border crossings in their area and sparking a new debate on illegal imimmigration and border security. The flow of immigrant traffic on his ranch "fell to zero" while the Minutemen were active, Dennis Moroney said, though he denied the group access to his property.
Instead, the flood surged right around the Minutemen, like a river around a rock. In the Altar Valley, some 75 miles to the west, third-generation rancher John King said foot traffic "quadrupled" on his ranch since April.
"It's overwhelming," he said.
The King ranch lies north of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife refuge, and the tall mesquite brush offers shade from the sun and cover from Border Patrol helicopters. Like the Moroneys' ranch, the Kings' is blanketed with trash.
"You get used to having your horse always kicking cans and bottles around," said John Jr. "We'll find an injured calf that's been hobbling around for weeks with a tin can stuck on its hoof."
The Kings have collected tons of garbage on their property in recent years, everything from syringes to abandoned cars to a Wilson football. Along the wall of one building, the Kings have dozens of discarded bicycles leaned up against a tool shed that were left behind by cycling immigrants, which they store for donation to a local charity.
Then there are the bones: human skulls and other desiccated remains they've found strewn across the desert over the years, scattered by coyotes and picked clean by vultures. In May, they came across the skull of a child, "probably 6 or 7 years old," said Pat King.
"You get kind of callous," said her daughter-in-law, MaRae, "it just becomes part of life."
From October through July, 229 immigrants were found dead in the Arizona desert, according to a tally kept by the Tucson-based humanitarian group Derechos Humanos. And the toll has continued to rise through August. The group estimates more than 3,000 immigrants have died along the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1990s, and this year's totals are likely to be the highest on record.
The Kings, the Moroneys and other ranching families along the border say they would support the creation of a guest-worker program, as President Bush has proposed. If anything, they want something to restore order to the region. "I've always been taught that if you can't solve a problem one way," Dennis Moroney said, "you try another.
"These people are coming for a reason," he said. "Would they really come here if there were no jobs for them?"
MONDAY: Drug trafficking along the borders.
