US Guardsmen's Impact Begins to Show at Border
 Barbara Barrett - Raleigh News & Observer
| | California Army National Guard Maj. Daniel Markert, left, learns how to use a truck-mounted infrared scope as U.S. Border Patrol agent Efren Burciaga, right, looks on along the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, Wednesday, July 19, 2006. More than 900 California Army and Air National Guard personnel have reported for duty at Naval Base San Diego and are undergoing processing and training or have already taken up duties to augment federal agents along the U.S.-Mexico border in California. (AP/Denis Poroy) |
Not five minutes after the boatload of immigrants slipped across the Colorado River at dusk, the Border Patrol trucks arrived.
First, trucks tear down a dirt road and cut their headlights. The migrants call the trucks "dog catchers" because they resemble animal-control vehicles. Then the helicopter with its deafening blades, dips and circles, casting spotlights across the water and the mountainside, again and again and again.
On the Mexican side, above the town of Los Algodones, Francisco Lopez watched and listened. He has been waiting for a month, he said, sleeping under shade trees and scrounging for food. Three times he almost crossed.
"They're here day and night," said Lopez, 42, who traveled from the state of Michoacan, Mexico, hoping to reach Long Island. "When I got here, I was surprised to see so much force on the other side."
The show of force now includes Operation Jump Start, which President Bush announced in May. About 6,000 National Guard troops are coming to reinforce the Border Patrol, including 200 from North Carolina who started work last week in Arizona.
The extra security is pushing immigrants into remote areas, including harsh desert and mountains, forcing them to rely on smugglers more often and leading those who are caught to make repeated attempts that sap their strength and money. Many walk for days with little food or water.
"Short-term, you might see more deaths, because they think they can beat the system," said Lt. Col. Randy Powell, commander of the N.C. Guard's 252nd Combine Arms Battalion and a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police sergeant.
Over time, he said, the death toll should drop.
But just before the N.C. Guard arrived, an 11-year-old girl was found in the remote Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation in cardiac arrest on a 108-degree day. Olivia Nogueda, wearing pink sneakers and traveling with her older sister to Atlanta to meet their parents, was declared dead July 22 at the reservation hospital.
Since then, in two eastern Arizona counties, seven others have died, including two women and a 12-year-old boy.
Last year, as the Border Patrol increased enforcement around urban areas, more than 460 immigrants died trying to cross the border, nearly half in Arizona.
"The more difficult you make it for people to cross, the more people will die," said Joseph Nevins, spokesman for Tucson, Ariz.-based No More Deaths, a coalition of humanitarian border groups.
The Border Patrol has increased its efforts to save the people it's hunting. But Nevins predicted the Guard's presence will make things worse.
Last week, Yuma Sector Chief Ronald Colburn thanked North Carolina's troops: "Psychologically, you have helped us create this 800-pound gorilla," he said.
`It's more hard' to cross
Word has spread throughout Mexico: The Guard is coming."I read the newspapers," said Hector Encinas, 29, who lives in the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado, just south of San Luis, Ariz. He used to cross routinely to work, paying $300 a trip. Now the price is $1,500. He used to help others, but no more.
"It's more hard right now," said Encinas, standing in the shade near an opening in the border wall where three Border Patrol trucks were parked. "Because, you know, they got a fence, more soldiers, more Border Patrol."
Of the Guard, he said, "They're cool. They're cool." He knows the troops aren't allowed to apprehend anyone and must call in border agents.
Still, in the more urban Mexican crossing points south of Arizona, something has changed.
In Los Algodones, tucked in the crook of the Mexico border with California and Yuma, Ariz., Fabiola Salazar, 25, figures the "polleros" - chicken herders - make up 30 percent of summer business at her family's grocery. Every morning, the smugglers buy water and food for the traveling chickens - "pollos" - who gather at dusk in the park.
Business is way down lately, she said.
Guadalupe Murrieta, 45, washing dishes in her home in the shadow of the corrugated border fence in San Luis Rio Colorado, never liked the immigrants who wander through at night, making her afraid for her children and grandchildren. It's quieter, she said, and the constant helicopter noise is little bother.
And in Nogales, Mexico, the coyotes - smugglers - shake their heads at the busloads of immigrants returned daily from the United States.
Eugenio Lexva, yelling to the men to try again, try again, said the Guard will make a difference.
He has a good guide, Lexva said, and his immigrants have never been caught taking the $1,200 trip to Phoenix. But he thinks increased security may force him to send people along more far-flung routes.
"In the desert," Lexva said, "it's dangerous."
Deadly heat, prickly obstacles
What sends immigrants farther out are the images of the National Guard standing watch. The N.C. troops are scattered in strategic spots along the western half of the Arizona border, including some posts so distant they're best reached by helicopter.
In San Luis, the North Carolinians work under camouflage nets, setting up observation points every quarter-mile on the levee above stretches of dirt and fields of tall, swaying grasses.
That first night out, Spc. Chris Mirisola, 34, of Greensboro settled on a boulder below the levee's gravel road and peered into the darkness through a scope that can detect heat. He scanned from left to right, searching for moving dots that could be illegal immigrants.
The scrutiny is pushing immigrants toward a land so vast that travelers can walk three days before crossing a paved road. During heat like last week's, with temperatures climbing toward 115 degrees, the immigrants can't carry enough water.
The Sonoran Desert is littered with their castoffs: empty water bottles, shoes, jackets. The daytime heat is blistering, and only a very brave man would walk at night, said the Rev. Robin Hoover, founder of Tucson-based Humane Borders Inc.
During a bumpy, four-hour drive to fill four remote water stations west of Tucson, Hoover pointed out all the cacti lying in wait: the towering cartoon-like saguaro, the prickly pear, the jumping cactus, whose quills seem to leap at any poor fool brushing past it.
Yet people get through. Some 60 miles north of the border lay evidence of a recent pickup.
Two dozen backpacks were discarded among the cacti. Some held deodorant or unopened tuna cans; Hoover unfolded a scrap of paper with a Florida hotel phone number scrawled across it. Among the bags was a Hello Kitty purse, containing a single peso and two sanitary pads, the possessions of an adolescent girl.
Because more men are staying in the United States, more are sending for their families. In 2003, Hoover said, apprehensions showed that 11 percent of immigrants were women. Yet they accounted for 25 percent of the deaths.
In eastern Arizona, the bodies go to the Pima County medical examiner, where Bruce Parks holds onto them until they're identified. Last week, he had about 120, some dating to 2004. He keeps some in a refrigerated truck, though the county is working to build a morgue annex.
"It's obviously a terrible tragedy for relatively young people to be dying under these circumstances," said Parks, chief medical examiner, hours after an autopsy on 11-year-old Olivia. "This may be the year we see a downturn. That would be nice."
Guard `a human wall'
In Mexico, some residents aren't so sure.
Immigrants pass through the cotton and alfalfa fields around Rebeca Moreno's tienda, a store, two miles from the Colorado River, ignoring the signs warning "Peligroso!" - dangerous.
Sweeping the dust from her front walk, Moreno said the immigrants are plentiful even in the rural areas. She walked though the back of her store to an open window. Pointing across the cotton field, she said in Spanish: There is the river, behind the trees. The immigrants walk there and try to swim across.
They're caught, sent home and try again. A man died right there, she said, pointing to a spot in the dirt road.
In the United States, N.C. Guard Sgt. Christopher Fuller, 32, of Angier, works with Hispanic immigrants on construction sites he oversees. He recalled the time his wife brought the couple's 6-month-old daughter, and how the workers gathered to coo at the infant. It made him think of how in America, "we've got it a lot better than a lot of other countries."
From the soldiers' vantage point on the levee, the boys playing just inside Mexico are barely dots on thermal vision scopes.
They can't see the detail: A barefoot 4-year-old named Randy Pineda heaved rocks into the canal. His 12-year-old brother, Jesus, dumped a dead puppy in the dry Colorado River bed that separates the countries, and then danced in the sand.
Up the dirt road, young men were checking their chances as evening drew near. They lit trash fires that can obscure the heat of their bodies.
One man shinnied up a wire to peek above the wall; a few others pretended to fish in the canal as they chatted with a Border Patrol agent on a bicycle.
"It's like another wall, a human wall," said Ricardo Mann, 47.
But it does have holes in it.
In Los Algodones a few nights before, a migrant boat had returned to Mexico with a single man paddling with one arm.
The federal agents searched for passengers for an hour. Finally, the bobbing flashlights scouring the mountainside disappeared. The helicopter's churning blades grew distant, and the trucks rolled away.
Lopez, who had been watching from the Mexican hill, remained a few moments. He said he might try again. Then, he faded among the trees.
bbarrett@mcclatchydc.com. |
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News from Around the Americas | July 2006 
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