Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Mexican migrants are dying at record rates as they try to cross treacherous desert into Arizona. Critics blame the U.S. government -- and they're preparing to sue.
Jul 15, 2002 | A Mexican laborer who calls himself Alfonso sat in a small Nogales, Sonora, church with a dozen other men recently deported from the United States, eating a simple church supper and explaining why he would never again cross the border through the desert. The last time he'd tried, he and three companions wandered the sun-seared terrain for four days without water, reduced in the end to drinking their own urine before finding help at a remote ranch.
Alfonso was lucky. In June, when daytime temperatures routinely hit 110 F, 34 people died from heat exposure and dehydration in the Southern Arizona desert, most of them in small groups crossing illegally from Mexico. If the current trend holds, the toll for the year ending Sept. 30 will surpass last year's record of 78 deaths.
In response, the Border Patrol has recently added 100 agents and automated surveillance gear to what it calls the West Desert, the sparsely inhabited corridor west of Tucson into which all of New Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut could fit. But two groups of Arizona activists, one with a long history of aiding undocumented immigrants, are mounting their own campaign to bring water and medical care to the desert, saying the Border Patrol itself is to blame for policies that have pushed desperate migrants away from cities and into the most remote and dangerous desert entry routes.
"I have some trouble with [the Border Patrol] saying, 'We're out there, we don't need any help,'" says Rick Ufford-Chase, director of the community development organization BorderLinks and an elder at Tucson's Southside Presbyterian Church. "It's akin to somebody starting a house fire and going in to do a rescue."
Some predict that their efforts could lead to escalation of a conflict with federal agencies and U.S. immigration policy. In a skirmish early last year, the Department of Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service barred one group, Humane Borders, from providing relief to migrants passing through the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. A few months later, in May 2001, 14 of the migrants died -- and now two Yuma attorneys have filed a $41 million claim against the agencies on behalf of the victims' families.
The conflict has unfolded in a desert landscape that is starkly beautiful and so unforgiving that it is known as "the Devil's Highway." The Border Patrol's Tucson Sector begins just west of the twin border cities of Nogales, extends across the low, brown Sierrita Mountains, and includes the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, the Tohono O'odham Reservation, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and parts of Cabeza Prieta and Luke Air Force Range. It's a land of sand, silt and gravel mottled with such dusty-looking shrubs as creosote and bursage, dotted with spindly mesquite and palo verde trees and abounding in skin-shredding cacti.
Summer arrives in late May and lingers until early October. Temperatures hit or exceed 100 degrees for roughly 90 to 100 straight days, sometimes approaching 120. By day, shade is scant. Water flows only during and immediately after a rain, and this is the second year of a drought so severe that even the cactus are starting to wilt. Spend a day here in the sun without water, and your body temperature will rise as high as 108 degrees, cooking your organs; your rotting muscles will give off a bloodstream-clogging protein, and you will soon die of kidney failure or heart attack, probably following brain damage. "It is definitely some of the harshest climate and terrain in North America," says Ryan Scudder, a Border Patrol spokesman.
That has not stopped migrants from trying to make the trek. Only 20,000 visas are provided each year to Mexican workers, making the U.S. agricultural industry implicitly dependent on illegal migrant labor. And a busboy north of the border can earn in an hour what he would make in a day of hard labor in Mexico. Weighing the risks and benefits, many decide to immigrate illegally.
But the Border Patrol here is assigned to block their entry. Its Operation Safeguard -- the Tucson Sector counterpart to similar campaigns in California and Texas -- has, since 1994, concentrated its operation around the border towns of Nogales and Douglas, which in the mid- and late 1990s were the border's leading points of illegal entry for economic migrants and drug smugglers alike.
"We're not pushing people into the desert there," insists Scudder, "but if you have limited resources you're going to put your resources where there are the most crossings. That meant Nogales, and then when we got Nogales under control it shifted to Douglas. We're not trying to push people into harder terrain, because it's not just harder for them, it's harder for us."
Critics disagree, saying the U.S. policy is linked to a series of horrifying death-in-the-desert episodes -- at least 291 of them along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border last year. And even as the Border Patrol denies responsibility, it has acknowledged the problem and has moved to alleviate it. The Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue Team, or BORSTAR, is a medic-centered sideline to the agency's law-enforcement duties. Between Oct. 1, 2001, and July 4 this year, the team rescued 364 people in 89 separate events in the Tucson sector alone.
Now, besides adding agents to its force of about 500 in Nogales (out of 1,700 in the entire sector), the Border Patrol is also relying on images from flyovers and new electronic surveillance towers in the desert. Yet in the first week of July, two people died in an area patrolled by BORSTAR.
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