While I’m busy grinding away at the article I’m working on, not to mention getting ready for Lauren’s visit tomorrow (!) and thinking of an answer to the question Holly asked me this morning, here’s a little preview of the Border Patrol section of the article.
“Whenever the soil is disturbed, there’s a faint color change.” Mike Crelia peers at a line of workboot tracks that head through a thick stand of tamarisk and up an embankment. “Fresh sign will actually be a different color than when it’s a day or two old. And even if there’s no wind, there’s always insect activity. Ants will walk across the footprints, or other insects will, and they leave sign of their own. You can gauge how old sign is by the amount of insect tracks across it. This guy came through here not long ago. Maybe a couple hours.”
We crawl, stooped over, through tunnels in the tamarisk. Crelia, Public Lands Liaison Agent with the Border Patrol’s Wellton, AZ office, sweats only a little in the 114-degree afternoon sun. An Oklahoma native who’s lived in Yuma for eight years, he’s used to the heat. “This stretch of land between here and the river is pretty much a no-man’s land,” he tells me. “It used to grow crops, but nothing can grow here now. The aliens hole up here after they come across the river and then they try to make a break for it. If they make it into that settlement over there, Gadsden, then it’s much harder for us to apprehend them.”
Gadsden is a small Arizona town, a housing development really, a dozen miles southwest of Yuma, half a mile east of the Colorado River — and Mexico. Between the river and Gadsden lies a gauntlet. Above the tamarisk bosque is a levee road, its shoulders twenty feet of dust on which a set of workboot tracks would stand out boldly. (The Border Patrol drags the shoulder regularly, towing bars weighted down with tires. Any sign on this road is fresh.)
Across the road is a wastewater canal with steeply sloping concrete banks. The United States uses nearly all the water in the Colorado River watershed, tapping reservoirs from Wyoming to California. The Colorado’s delta on the Sea of Cortez is usually dry. What little water enters Mexico is brackish, left over from evaporation across a thousand miles of desert. A desalination plant in Yuma removes salt from local agricultural runoff before it’s discharged into the river at the border. The wastewater canal carries the removed salt to the Sea of Cortez. Migrants must cross the canal, either by way of heavily monitored bridges, or by swimming it. A week from today a group of four migrants will attempt to swim the canal. Three will make it. Its steep banks and deceptively swift water claim lives on a regular basis.
Beyond the canal is another road, also dragged regularly by the Border Patrol, and an empty field with furrows parallel to the canal. Footprints show readily against the plowed soil. Border Patrol vehicles cruise up and down both sides of the levee, and remote-controlled cameras atop high platforms sweep the area. Border Patrol agents and National Guardsmen monitor the cameras from an air-conditioned room in Yuma. At night the cameras automatically switch to infrared, sensing the body heat of any living thing walking across the field.
It seems unlikely that anyone could make it across the barrier here, but people do: hundreds of them a year. And they leave their mark on the landscape. “It looks like they’ve been building here,” says Crelia, pointing to a rude thatch hut made of tamarisk branches. The entire thicket, several miles long, seems shot through with crawling tunnels and branching paths. Except, that is, where it has been burned. “They’ll set fires sometimes as a diversion,” says Crelia. We’d just driven past one patch that had burned the whole quarter-mile to the river. Where the bosque is unburned, a staggering amount of trash lies on the ground. There are plastic water jugs, discarded soda cans and sports drink bottles. There are trash bags. “The aliens put their clothing in the bags to cross the river,” says Crelia. “When they get across, they put the clothes back on and leave the bags.” A large proportion of the clothes get left behind as well, from the looks of the place, as well as what Crelia calls “foam shoes”: blocks of foam or carpet the migrants wrap around their feet to obscure their tracks. There are Kleenex boxes here as well, presumably used for the same purpose.
The trash extends, literally, as far as the eye can see. It’s safe to assume that among the plastic and fabric and cardboard lies abundant human waste, given the continuous presence of people waiting for hours, perhaps days for a chance to run into the United States. This stretch of the US border is an environmental and public health disaster. But it is not the worst such disaster. It is not people on foot who pose the greatest threat to the environment of the Arizona borderlands. A crew of laborers could clean this trash up in a few weeks. Farther east, in the remote outback of the Sonoran Desert, environmental destruction of a different sort is taking place, and that damage may take hundreds of years to heal — if it ever does.
We climb into the Border Patrol truck. Crelia drives us south along the levee road at a fair clip. Sand has drifted across the road, and at one point the truck fishtails perilously close to the bank. “Do you guys ever lose one of these trucks in the canal?” I ask, trying to appear nonchalant as my knuckles turn white gripping the door handle. Crelia laughs. “You know, there’s nothing prettier than the night-time out here as the bar lights on a sinking truck flash, reflecting in the water.” I chuckle. At the water line in the canal, a tiny burrowing owl watches us go by, its head turning impassively. “It happens now and then,” Crelia continues. “It’s not easy to live that kind of thing down.”
Past the Port Of Entry at San Luis, AZ — the US counterpart to the city of San Luis Rio Colorado across the line in Sonora — the bigger threat to the borderland makes itself clear. We drive down the border road, a fifty-foot-wide strip of scorched earth paralleling the frontier. A middle-aged man sits in the shade of a Mexican building, its north wall astride the border. There is no fence between him and el Norte. He sees our Border Patrol truck, holds both hands up to us palms forward and shakes them, smiling, as if to say “No, no. I’m not crossing.” Crelia chuckles. “He’ll try later.”
Through much of San Luis Rio Colorado the border is sealed by a 20-foot corrugated steel wall, but outside town that gives way to a few strands of barbed wire, and in places that wire lies on the ground. For the next hundred or so miles one set of tire tracks after another blasts across the border from Mexico Route 2, making up hundreds of miles of illegal roads heading for Interstate 8. Carved by the vehicles of smugglers, whose cargo may be migrants or contraband, the roads scar what was some of the wildest, least-trammeled, utterly formidable desert to be found in North America. There is not a single desert valley between San Luis and Nogales that is not criss-crossed by dozens of these illegal roads. This is a desert in which the Salt Trail, a footpath rarely used in the last century, is still as plain and distinct as when it saw regular use. These illegal roads may be here for centuries to come, and there are more miles being carved every year.
[to be continued]
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
2 comments on "The Border Patrol bit"There’s a part of Holly’s second question that seems inextricably linked to the entire topic of immigration in North America. I have been fortunate to have a very detailed family history, on both of my own parents’ sides, going back to the genomes first alighting on these shores, as well as some tribal records for the ones who were already multi-millenia residents. And what has always fascinated me is how they were physically tough people, able to withstand regularly working hard in weather conditions that i personally find intolerable and unacceptable.
And now we lambast those that are demonstrating the capacity to live and work in similar harsh realms, and try to keep them out, and chastize them as a class and as a race. What are we afraid of??? Considering that the bulk of US produce gets from seed to market through the massive use of labor that works in these very harsh conditions, and considering that it isn’t the anglo, english speaking kids from the suburbs that are doing that work, we need to really sit back and reflect on what it is we expect from this nation as a whole. Someone has to weed the lettuce in plus triple digit temps, and it sure ain’t gonna be no kid from Berkeley or Denver.
It’s great that you’re writing about this, Chris. In addition to the as-usual-compelling first-person account of something I know only from movies, and there unreliably, I was struck by this: “You can gauge how old sign is by the amount of insect tracks across it.” Huh! Now that’s fascinating. I thought I knew quite a bit about tracking, but I’ve never heard this - is that because this clue only works in the desert, or does it also work in damp northern climates? Seems unlikely, but I’m going to look closer the next time I’m following a deer trail.