Site Presented By
Friday, Jan 9, 2009
According to Scudder, the Border Patrol is seeking a difficult balance: It must enforce U.S. immigration laws, which require people to enter at an official port of entry, even while trying to reduce the risks for those who enter illegally. Like other U.S. officials, Scudder says blame lies not with federal policy, but with the smugglers who take money from migrants while promising safe passage into the country.
"We don't want anybody to die in the desert," he says. "Crossing illegally should not be a death sentence. But we're not the ones telling them to go there."
Scudder makes no apologies for Operation Safeguard. In the Tucson Sector, from October through June of last fiscal year the Border Patrol apprehended 371,593 crossers. From last October through the end of this June, the number was 249,354. "So we're down more than 120,000 apprehensions from last year, which was down from the year before that," Scudder says. "We were catching 1,400 people a day in Nogales when I started, but we don't catch 100 a day now. That shows what Operation Safeguard does -- it's a strong deterrent. So if it does shift people into the West Desert, where are those 120,000 missing people?"
Perhaps a few have become very good at eluding the Border Patrol. Certainly some are dying -- more than ever in the Tucson Sector, even though the death rate is declining along the rest of the border, according to a study released July 5 by the Mexican government. During the first six months of this year, according to the study, 167 migrants of all nationalities died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, 117 of whom were Mexicans. The study did not include earlier figures for all nationalities, but did report that 210 Mexicans had died during the same period in 2001, and 283 died during the first half of 2000.
By any measure, the human cost is unacceptable to the two church-based Arizona groups that are now venturing into the desert on their own.
The first to go into action was Humane Borders. Directed by Robin Hoover, pastor of Tucson's First Christian Church, Humane Borders is a system of 33 member organizations that since last year has set up water barrels along migrant routes through some of the most inhospitable borderland tracts in Arizona and California. Humane Borders advocates policy changes that would make it easier for Mexican citizens to enter and work here legally, and would alter the Border Patrol's fixation on urban crackdowns.
Hoover, a loquacious Texas clergyman with a doctorate in political science and a specialty in social ethics, is an unashamed media hound. "Part of our mission is to tell this story," he says.
Early in 2001, the group focused some of its effort on the Cabeza Prieta refuge, a rugged, saguaro-studded haven for the endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelope, stretching 56 miles along the Arizona-Mexico border. According to Tom Bauer, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, there are signs along the border warning of mortal risks facing those who try to cross the desert on foot. Clearly, the signs aren't always effective. There are open 10,000-gallon tanks on the refuge to serve the antelope, but a Mexican migrant would find them only by luck. When Humane Borders proposed to place other water tanks along routes used by migrants in the past, however, the Department of Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service objected. To preserve the wilderness, the agencies restrict vehicles to a single dirt road through the refuge. Remote tanks would have to be replenished by volunteers carrying heavy water bottles on foot, a "treacherous" situation in the heat, Bauer says.
The agencies denied Humane Borders access to the refuge. A few months later, in May, the 14 Mexican migrants died on the refuge. By some accounts, they were less than a mile from one of the water-tank sites proposed by the group -- an account vigorously disputed by Bauer.
In the aftermath of those deaths, Fish and Wildlife did allow 30-foot, blue-flagged poles to be erected at about 10 existing stock tanks on the refuge. That raises the likelihood that people, and not just antelope, will find them. According to Hoover, the Border Patrol has credited one of those flagged tanks with saving at least 33 lives.
That has not resolved the conflict, though. On July 3, a federal jury in Phoenix convicted Florida farmhand contractor Francisco Vazquez-Torres for his role in the immigrant-smuggling ring that organized the deadly border crossing, and an Associated Press report said he faces life in prison when he is sentenced later this year. And two Yuma attorneys, on behalf of 11 of the victims' families, have filed their $41 million claim against the Department of Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, charging that the government's decision to block Humane Borders from the refuge contributed to the deaths. The claim seeks $3.75 million for each family.
Bauer says he is "not certain" whether Fish and Wildlife has an obligation to the health and safety of illegal migrants, adding that there is "ongoing discussion" about such subjects within the agency. Critics, however, say the government clearly has obligations.
"The government has to take on the responsibility of doing something to safeguard folks who are crossing in these areas that are known to be dangerous," says James Metcalf, one of the lawyers filing the claim. "The legal status of the individuals doesn't mean the landowner can wave off all responsibility. And then there's the fact that you had an organization trying to come into a specific area and volunteer -- at no expense to taxpayers -- to place water stations that would have saved these lives."
Now the federal agencies have another four months to respond to the $41 million claim and possibly negotiate a settlement. If that fails, the attorneys say they will file a civil suit in U.S. District Court.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
