The west end of the Organ Pipe National Monument vehicle barrier: illegal cross-border traffic has been funnelled into Cabeza Preta National Wildlife Refuge.
The most recent issue of Earth Island Journal has hit the stands, and the word “Immigration” is on the front cover in red 144-point type. And yet we’ve gotten no letters. I expect them any moment.
I was cautious. My article says very little that can be contested. The damage to the desert is stark. The risk of crossing the desert is great. The social forces that compel people to endure that risk are complex and widespread. The people who endure the risk are human.
And yet I expect letters from people who will be outraged that I did not blame the individual migrants for leaving trash in the desert, who will be outraged that I did not blame the government of Mexico for failing to imprison its people within its borders, who will be outraged that I drew a human portrait of a Border Patrol agent, who will be outraged that we mention the subject at all, even though the damage to the desert is a preventable result of US law enforcement policy and I said so.
It’s a bit of a luxury to be able to anticipate those arguments. It’s a luxury to be able to make those arguments. It’s a sweet goddamn luxury to be able to pay two dollars for a head of lettuce instead of making two dollars for half an hour of harvesting lettuce. And yet I expect those complaints. I confess that the more Spanish California becomes, the more Asian, the better I like it. I confess that I find California too crowded by more than half. Do those feelings contradict each other? Very well. They contradict each other. Here’s the win-win solution: close the eastern border of the state. Build the wall Santorum wants to pay for, but build it along the Continental Divide. Most of the damage I see being done to my state is done by migrants from the east. Like me. Do I contradict myself? Very well.
I published part of the story I wrote for the Journal on this blog a few weeks back. Here’s another excerpt, below the fold.
The SUV lurches, starting and stopping, along the rutted dirt road. We pull a few yards forward and stop again. Behind the wheel, Anthony Povilitis examines the roadside to our left. Ben Zenk speaks from the passenger seat. “Single or multiple?” “Multiple,” says Povilitis. “Recent or entrenched?” “Entrenched.” “Faint or distinct?” “Distinct.” Zenk holds a large yellow Global Positioning System unit out the passenger side window, slowly gets a fix on our location as the satellites register, then punches a few keys on the unit to record information about the set of tire tracks Povilitis is describing. We pull forward another 20 yards or so and repeat the process.
Povilitis is a biologist working with Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument’s Border Impacts Monitoring Program. Zenk is a National Park Service cartographer. Their task today: document all apparent vehicular impact within ten meters of the Puerto Blanco Road, which stretches 18 miles or so from the pavement at Arizona state route 85 to the southwest corner of the National Monument. It is slow going. Away from the highway, in just about every place where the topography could conceivably allow a wheeled vehicle to plow through the desert, there is at least one set of tire tracks heading north into the wilderness.
Arizona’s Sonoran Desert has long tortured migrants, whether they’re Mexican laborers or Anglo easterners seeking a route to the California goldfields along the old Camino Del Diablo. Still, due mainly to their remoteness and forbidding nature, the Arizona borderlands were for many years as undisturbed a natural landscape as existed in the lower 48 states. In the years since the Tohono O’odham and Hia Ced O’odham were evicted from this part of their historic range, the land between Organ Pipe and Yuma became a despoblado, an unpopulated wilderness, visited only by desert rats, biologists, military personnel, and those desperate people willing to walk across as much as 60 miles of waterless trail, often in triple-digit temperatures, for a chance to pick lettuce and tomatoes for less than minimum wage.
The land is unpopulated only on the US side. Route 2 hugs the Mexican side of the line from Sonoita, near Organ Pipe, to Mexicali. You can take a bus from Sonoita or San Luis and get to just about any spot on the border between them with no more than a few minutes of walking.
And in the 1990s, increasing numbers of people did just that. Dissuaded from crossing at relatively comfortable spots such as San Diego, El Paso, or Nogales, they crossed from remote Mexican settlements such as Los Vidrios and walked into the backcountry of Organ Pipe, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, or the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range. A staggering number of them died. The Tucson-based humanitarian group No More Deaths estimates that 3,000 people have died crossing this section of the border since 1998 — more than died in the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. The summer temperature in the desert regularly exceeds 110 degrees, and a person at rest requires about two gallons of water a day in that kind of heat. Most migrants carry less than two gallons for a several-day trek, exposing them to dehydration, fever, and death by organ failure.
Migrants on foot pose some threat of damage to the environment. There’s the trash issue: It’s estimated that each migrant crossing here leaves eight pounds of garbage in the desert. Bighorn sheep, pumas, and the endangered Sonoran pronghorn often rely on isolated water sources for survival. Some of these sources hold very little water, and can be drained by desperate people on foot. Even if there’s enough water for everyone, the regular presence of people can spook sheep and pronghorn, causing them to abandon crucial watering holes. Foot traffic damages fragile desert soils. On occasion, desperate migrants will light signal fires to attract rescue: These fires often spread, as happened recently near milepost 66 of Route 85.
But the environmental impact of hiking migrants pales compared to that of people driving across the border. Few migrants can afford their own cars, and fewer still can afford to risk losing their cars in a dry wash 40 miles from the nearest tow truck. It is the smugglers who drive through the wilderness, hauling migrants or contraband or both, working with organized groups on both sides of the border. The vehicles are stolen off the streets of Tucson, Phoenix, or Los Angeles. If a smuggler has to abandon a vehicle, it’s no great loss to his employers. Since the year 2000, an estimated 450 miles of illegal roads have been gouged out of the soil in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument alone, and Organ Pipe accounts for just 36 miles of border: There’s more than 100 miles to go from the west edge of Organ Pipe to San Luis. Aside from crushing the desert soil and damaging plant life — probably the greatest impact — the abandoned vehicles leak toxic fluids into the ground, and discarded lead-acid batteries pose a special threat to wildlife.
Faced with the enormous and accelerating damage to the desert posed by illegal cross-country driving, land managers started asking some years back for a barrier that would block vehicles from crossing the border, while allowing wildlife continued passage. The request languished for lack of funding until August 2002. In that month, Organ Pipe Cactus NM Ranger Kris Eggle was shot and killed when he apprehended a group of smugglers in the Monument’s backcountry. Organ Pipe’s vehicle barrier was put on the front burner.
Our path along Puerto Blanco Road rarely takes us out of view of the barrier. It is five feet high, more or less, with posts of alternating height spaced five feet apart, and a cross-bar welded between them. It’s high enough for coyotes and coatis to walk under, and low enough for pronghorns to leap — and for low-flying birds like the endangered cactus ferruginous owl to avoid as well. A maintenance and patrol road runs along the base of the barrier, paralleling the old road. It isn’t just outlaws who drove off-road out here: Zenk and Povilitis note that most of the recent tire tracks seem to be mere shortcuts between the roads, probably made by Border Patrol agents on patrol. Povilitis frets. “Much more of this, and the space between the roads is going to be just a 50-yard-wide sand pit.” The Border Patrol also routinely uses wheeled vehicles in local wilderness areas when chasing people down, though Organ Pipe’s Supervisor Kathy Billings told me that her staff is routinely and promptly notified, after the fact, so that the impact of Border Patrol activities can be inventoried. For his part, [Border Patrol Agent Michael] Crelia characterizes these off-road pursuits as a “necessary evil,” and claims his agents go off-road only when absolutely necessary. Before heading out into the field, Crelia told me, agents are trained in local ecological issues, and are given a list of local wild animals and plants to avoid disturbing.
Still, individual Border Patrol agents’ attitude toward the landscape can seem somewhat cavalier. An agent drives toward our SUV about ten miles in, and as the road is too narrow for us to pass in that spot, he swings out past us, his right tires digging a new gouge in the soil. A couple weeks ago, Zenk tells us, NPS staff found some trash up in a tree in the far northwest corner of the Monument. Retrieving it, they found that it was a bag from the Circle K in Ajo, with an empty soda bottle and container of nachos, and a receipt from before dawn that morning.
Fresh tracks between the two roads are common, but most of the tracks heading north into the desert are significantly older. It’s the consensus among Monument employees I spoke to that the barrier has drastically reduced vehicular incursions into the National Monument. But that success comes at a price.
At the Monument’s southwest corner Povilitis disables the truck’s ignition, speculating idly on our fate should our ride be stolen while we’re out of earshot. He, Zenk, and I don backpacks and hike into the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The 860,010-acre Cabeza Prieta has long been the symbol of wild American desert, the back of beyond, accessible only by rugged and treacherous roads and unforgiving of greenhorns. It is home to 400 species of plants and about 300 of animals, including 212 bird species. This is my first visit, despite a lifetime of desert travel. I look toward the mountains. Brilliant saguaro fruit and a few stray ocotillo blooms provide flashes of red against the sere landscape. A few flowers struggle to open on organ pipe cacti. A range of mountains far off, perhaps the Growler Range, shimmers in the 105-degree heat. I turn to Zenk. “I can’t imagine being confronted with the task of walking from here to Interstate 8 in summer, with a couple gallons of water.” Zenk shakes his head. He is intimidatingly lean, not a spare ounce on him. He’s barely sweating in the heat; he runs marathon-length races in the desert summer for fun. “No way,” he says, finally. “No way I’d want to do that.”
The vehicle barrier ends at the Monument Boundary. To the west the fence is a flimsy few strands of barbed wire. The barbed wire lies on the ground in places. Two hundred yards in, past a sandy dry wash, a broad stretch of fence has been beaten into the soil by countless passing tires. You could turn off Route 2 and drive across the border here without slowing: The road is just that broad. It heads straight north and disappears behind a wall of thornscrub and saguaros. Later, I will trace its course in satellite photos: It runs north for about five miles, weaves back into the National Monument, and from there joins up with a metastasizing network of roads covering the National Monument and the Wildlife Refuge.
If sealing the border cities has driven migrants into the desert, then the Organ Pipe vehicle barrier has repeated the process on a smaller scale, funneling traffic into the Refuge. Cabeza Prieta’s Refuge Manager Roger Di Rosa predicted this. In August 2003 he told the Tucson Citizen, “It’s ludicrous if Organ Pipe does it [builds the barrier] to just end right there at that boundary. We’ll just get ripped apart.”
And that is, in fact, what has happened. The damage to Cabeza Prieta can be seen from space. In many places, such as the Growler Valley, this epitome of desert wilderness resembles nothing so much as an Off-Road Vehicle park. The Border Patrol has set up a backcountry camp in the refuge, Camp Grip, to augment Cabeza Prieta’s meager ranger staff, and some claim that damage in the area has slackened somewhat. But in the Mojave desert in California, scars from tank treads made during World War II training exercises are still distinct. It may be hundreds of years before Cabeza Prieta recovers, and that’s if the vehicle traffic is stopped. Until it’s stopped, the roads will keep getting wider. The soils here are often sandy — “moon dust,” the locals call it — and a well-used road can develop sand traps that can eat a Humvee. (The Cabeza Prieta’s roads are harder on Humvees, in fact, than the shattered roadways of Iraq.) When a road develops a sand trap, both smugglers and agents drive around it, widening the road, or creating a handful of parallel roads heading the same direction. Where two such roads meet, the intersection often becomes a broad circle with no living thing in it, up to a hundred yards wide.
The good news is that federal government is building a vehicle barrier along the remainder of the Arizona border west of Organ Pipe. The bad news is that they started in San Luis. When the barrier is completed, Cabeza Prieta will get some protection. Until then, the unfinished barrier will serve as a tighter and tighter funnel pointed at the heart of Cabeza Prieta.
