Story and photos by J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

I RONWOOD FOREST NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. — By the time you get this far, you have left almost everything behind. Kin and country. Tuna tins and empty backpacks. Spent water bottles, cans of Red Bull energy drink, ripped jeans, socks full of thorns, all strewn across the red desert floor.

If you’re an illegal migrant, the Mexican border is 60 miles behind you. The next highway is 15 miles ahead, over hills and buttes where every footstep is a rockslide, down into a maze of brush thickets that hide the horizon.

This is no empty space on the map, no cartoon desert of clean, white sand. It’s full of prickly living things locked in a death struggle for 12 inches of annual rainfall.

MULTIMEDIA

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• Downtown Tehuacán, Mexico
• Maquiladoras bring prosperity
• With growth, poverty in Tehuacán
• One family's journey across the Arizona desert
• Parents grieve for their children

Audio slide show

• Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

Nature here is the scorpion’s tail, the rattlesnake’s fang, the javelina’s leathery hide. It is the fishhook barbs of the cholla, the toxic sap of the gnarled ironwood. The giant saguaro lifts its thorny arms as if in victory for a century of survival.

After the thunderstorms of fall or spring, it’s a dazzling sight: The cactus and yellow poppies bloom, the ocotillo bush leafs out, the palo verde tree turns a glowing green.

But each summer, the desert becomes a furnace that kills scores of Latin Americans trying to cross it. Between May and September, the crisis becomes so great that the Tucson-sector Border Patrol shifts its priority to search and rescue rather than law enforcement.

BROKEN PROMISE LAND

Part 2 of 4

Running through Wednesday, this series will explore the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

SUNDAY: Part 1 Hoping to find employment in the United States, two cousins and a father from Tehuacán, Mexico, cross the Arizona desert, where their dream threatens to turn deadly.

TODAY: Part 2 In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s pursuit of illegal immigrants is a cat-and-mouse game where the cat often saves the mouse. As border enforcement increases elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, so do migrant deaths in southern Arizona. Critics say the effort to curb border crossings isn’t working.

TUESDAY: Part 3 As Arizona morgues fill up with unidentified bodies found in the desert, a Baylor University scientist uses DNA to help crack some of the toughest cases.

MORE: Two among hundreds: Teenagers' dreams die in Arizona desert

WEDNESDAY: Part 4 A family in Tehuacán, Mexico, deals with the emotional aftermath of a disastrous border crossing, all while offering a south-of-the-border perspective on the personal and economic motives that cause Mexicans to risk their lives in the Arizona deserts.

About this series

• Audio slide show → Reporter J.B. Smith discusses the series

This project examining the perilous crossings of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border was made possible by a World Affairs Journalism Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C.

For three weeks last summer, Tribune-Herald staff writer J.B. Smith traveled to three towns in Mexico to interview families of dead illegal immigrants identified in Waco by Baylor University forensic DNA scientist Lori Baker.

He also spent five days in September visiting southern Arizona, where all of those immigrants died. He traveled into the desert with Border Patrol agents and volunteers from a locally based humanitarian group and visited the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Smith continued his research well into December, conducting interviews with anti-illegal immigration activists and policy-makers, including the head of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Beginning today and running through Wednesday, this series explores the causes and effects of illegal immigration through the stories of real people on both sides of the border.

The desert was in drought that sweltering morning of May 22, 2006, as game warden Bob Lemons bounced along a rocky Jeep trail in his pickup. He was delivering water to wildlife catchments. The water is intended for animals but also draws thirsty migrants who are already miles past the West Ajo Highway, where most border-crossers find their pre-arranged rides.

The game warden’s truck dipped through a dry sandy wash, turned right at the base of a small hill, then stopped.

On the side of the track was the body of a young man, lying on his back as if asleep. His hands were folded across his chest, and his bare feet were crossed at the ankles.

Lemons radioed for backup, then got out and inspected the body. A teenager, 5 feet 2 inches, about 170 pounds.

“He hadn’t been there long,” Lemons recalls. “He was very dehydrated and in rigor mortis.”

Lemons was disturbed by the sight but not shocked: This was the beginning of the deadly season.

He called in the information. John Doe 70 would be placed in a plastic bag in the cold storage room of the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, alongside dozens of unclaimed corpses. Soon would come the autopsy, the Mexican Consulate’s calls to an anxious family back in Mexico. In this case, a bone sample would be sent to a forensic anthropologist in Waco, Texas, to confirm John Doe 70’s identity through DNA profiling.

But all in all, it was just another immigrant who died crossing a desert at the wrong time of year, a story not even worth the local news.

In southern Arizona in the early 21st century, this is business as usual.

* * *

Business as usual requires a cast of millions.

Legions of Border Patrol agents — about 3,000 in the Tucson sector alone — sift through the haystack of thousands of crossers each day, hoping to find a terrorist needle. Cost of nationwide border security measures: about $6 billion a year. Netted terrorists: none reported so far.

The migrants keep coming. Some estimates place the number crossing into the United States each year in the millions. The Border Patrol in Tucson refuses to even guess the total number braving the hostile southern Arizona desert.

But all sources agree more cross here than anywhere else along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Hundreds of “coyotes” promise to guide migrants into the United States for $1,500 to $2,000 apiece. In the Arizona desert, humanitarians leave water for the migrants; heavily armed men in camo and lawn chairs call the law on them; and ranchers fume over cut fences and trash.

Business as usual also involves lawmakers in Washington, D.C., who call for “sealing the border” as if it were as simple as weatherstripping a door, while failing to pass nationwide reforms that might crimp the flow of illegal immigrants. And it involves hundreds of thousands of employers across America who hire the migrants without fear of penalty.

There’s a cost of doing business this way, and border areas pay more than their share. In Pima County, Tucson hospitals pay to treat the migrants when they’re rescued near death. Pima County estimates it spends $12.3 million a year for services related to immigration, including law enforcement and public health services.

Dead people are another cost of doing business. For coyotes and U.S. employers who profit from illegal immigration, it’s a small price to pay. Even in a bad year, at least 99 percent of migrants crossing the vast Arizona desert survive their journeys, based on academic estimates.

But the cost is incalculable for families and burdensome for local government.

Pima County Medical Examiner Bruce Parks conservatively estimates his office spends an extra $100,000 to $200,000 a year caring for and identifying the bodies of border-crossers, a job that keeps about 10 employees occupied. So many bodies flooded the morgue in the hot summer of 2005 that the county bought a refrigerated 18-wheeler to store 40 or 50. Since then, it has built a refrigerated body storage room.

Forensic anthropologist Bruce Anderson with the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office examines bones of an unidentified woman found in the Arizona desert. U.S. border policies have funneled border-crossers into the Arizona desert, resulting in a huge increase in deaths.

“In the summertime, it consumes this office,” says Dr. Bruce Anderson, the office’s chief forensic anthropologist.

Sensing a “humanitarian crisis,” Anderson in 2006 set aside his job as a professor to identify bodies full time.

To Anderson, the equation is simple enough: Subtract illegal crossings elsewhere along the border and you add more migration through the Arizona desert; more desert migration equals more death.

“Pima County is sitting in the middle of the biggest opening in the metaphorical fence between Mexico and the U.S.,” he says. “The Border Patrol gambled that if you can close off California and Texas, people wouldn’t risk their lives crossing in the most inhospitable areas of our borders with Mexico. That’s just flat-out wrong.”

A study last February from the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona bears him out. From 1990 to 1999, Pima County had an average of 14 border-crossing deaths a year, the institute found. From 2000 to 2005 — a period of expanded enforcement along other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border — the county averaged 160 deaths a year.

In the last fiscal year, another 205 deaths were reported.

The study cites a U.S. General Accounting Office finding that between 1998 and 2004 the estimates of illegal entries nationwide decreased 16 percent but border deaths rose by 29 percent, mostly because of desert-crossing attempts.

“Years worth of research now makes it perfectly clear,” the Binational Migration Institute study concludes, “that the underlying logic of this ongoing enforcement system is to eventually scare off would-be unauthorized border-crossers via seemingly predictable, if not acceptable, levels of injury, suffering and death to those who dare try.”

* * *

When John Doe 70 hit the autopsy table on May 26, 2006, medical examiners were glad to learn the body had a birth certificate with it.

Rosario Hernandez, age 16. Born in Nopala, state of Puebla, Mexico.

The examiners continued with the autopsy. Result: Boy, recently deceased, face slightly mummified, age about 16.

Seemingly a match, but not definitive. Cards are sometimes forged or swapped, and lots of teenage boys cross the desert.

The medical examiner would pass the ball to the Mexican Consulate, which would contact the family back in Mexico to confirm the boy’s identity.

THE STORY SO FAR

May 13, 2006: A group leaves Tehuacán, Mexico, on a journey to the U.S. Among them: Faustino Francisco Galvan; his 13-year-old son, Eloy; his 16-year-old nephew, Rosario; Faustino’s sister, Clara; and Clara’s friend, Elisa.

May 16: The group crosses the border illegally into southern Arizona, bound for Marana, Ariz.

May 18: Group members begin running out of water. Faustino is overcome by the fierce heat.

May 19: Faustino, Clara and Elisa are abandoned. In the evening they’re rescued by the U.S. Border Patrol.

May 20: Faustino is admitted in early morning to St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson. He is questioned by the Mexican Consulate but doesn’t mention others on the journey.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

• Eloy Francisco: 13-year-old border-crosser from Tehuacán, Puebla; last seen in Arizona desert on May 19, 2006.
• Rosario Hernandez: 16-year-old cousin of Eloy, went missing on the same journey.
• Faustino Francisco: Father of Eloy, barely survived desert crossing he took with son and nephew.
• 

  Robin Hoover
  Rev. Robin Hoover: Disciples of Christ pastor in Tucson; founder of Humane Borders, which leaves water in the desert for illegal migrants.
• Bruce Anderson: Forensic anthropologist for Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.
• Sean King: U.S. Border Patrol agent, Tucson sector.
• Al Garza: Head of the Minuteman Civil Patrol, which monitors illegal border crossings in southern Arizona.
• Bob Lemons: Game warden, Ironwood Forest National Monument, discovered body of a teenager on May 22, 2006.
• Lori Baker: Baylor University DNA scientist in Waco; received sample from body tentatively identified as Rosario Hernandez.
   

* * *

When Agent Sean King sees footprints in a sandy wash, he parks his green and white Border Patrol SUV. He shuts off the gale-force air-conditioner, puts down his gallon-size insulated mug and gets out into the dry desert heat.

He examines the prints: How many pairs? Have they been crossed by tires or animal feet?

Then, with his shades, backpack canteen, pistol and pair of handcuffs, he sets out alone into the desert wilderness in search of illegal migrants.

King once worked an air-conditioned job at America Online in Tucson, scheduling tech support guys and staying wired on Mountain Dew. Then, in 2001, he turned 30 and some terrorists flew planes into New York City skyscrapers. That October, he applied to work for the Border Patrol.

“I felt like I needed to do something more with my life,” he says. “The military wasn’t an option at that point. But I knew this was one area that terrorists could use to cross. This was a way to do something for my country.”

King worked a rotation late last year as a public information officer, but this month he’s back walking the washes, aiming to catch about 200 illegal immigrants a year.

“Most apprehensions are done the old-fashioned way,” he says on a tour at Ironwood Forest National Monument, where the boy’s body was found, 25 miles west of Tucson. “You find footprints and start walking. Nine miles later, we might find the group.”

Sometimes the group will scatter at the instructions of the coyote. More often, the hikers are too exhausted by this point to outrun him, King says.

“The first thing I do is to tell people to sit on your butt,” he says. “From that position, it’s a lot harder to attack me than kneeling or on the balls of your feet. I’m trying to get every advantage in case all 10 of them decide to turn on me.”

Anyone who won’t follow instructions gets handcuffed.

“You might handcuff him to an old man or someone who would slow him down,” King says. “Usually the older people will convince the younger ones that it’s stupid to run.”

He then gives the group water and marches them back to the road where a Border Patrol van will meet them. They will be taken to headquarters, where their fingerprints will be analyzed against a national fingerprint database to see if they have prior records.

In theory, they could all be prosecuted for the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry, detained and sent through the deportation process. But in practice, the Border Patrol tries to keep the big fish and release the little ones.

King says about 10 percent of what agents catch are “keepers” or “scumbags.” That includes human smugglers, drug runners and other assorted criminals. They’re a prosecution priority. Also, non-Mexican immigrants typically go through deportation.

Most of the rest choose the Border Patrol’s offer of “voluntary return” and take a bus back to Mexico, no charges filed. If they’re caught again, they could face charges — but only if the Border Patrol has the time to process them.

For the thirsty, sore-footed travelers he tracks down, King represents the arm of rescue as well as the arm of the law. He’s part of a cat-and-mouse game where the cat often saves the mouse’s life.

“You’ve got everything from being thirsty to not being able to move,” King says. “We’ve found guys in huaraches, women dressed in dresses and pumps because they thought Phoenix was just across the border. Sometimes the incoherent ones try to take off their clothes and bury themselves. We’ve found dead people with sand in their mouths, thinking they’re drinking water.”

Often, the migrants are cooperative.

Once he was transporting several border-crossers in his truck when he got bogged down to its axle in a dune of “moondust,” or powdered sand. As he struggled to get the truck free, the men offered to help dig him out. He relented and watched over them as they pushed the truck out of the dust.

Afterward he took them out for hamburgers, then to headquarters to be fingerprinted and sent home.

* * *

As the Rev. Robin Hoover sees it, Border Patrol agents like Sean King are straining to do an impossible job.

“They don’t know who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing,” says Hoover, a Tucson immigrant advocate. “They can give you the party line, what Congress wants them to do. You say, ‘Your job is national security. What do you do?’ ‘Well, I apprehend migrants. I chase grannies and nannies and gardeners, but I’m looking for terrorists all the time.’ ”

A Disciples of Christ pastor, Hoover is founder of Humane Borders, which maintains 87 water stations in the sprawling desert west of Tucson. Founded in 2000, the group also distributes desert maps south of the border, showing where the water is but urging would-be migrants in Spanish: Don’t go! You will die! It’s not worth it!

Humane Borders volunteer Mike Humphrey finds a pair of ripped blue jeans while picking up trash at a popular migrant pickup point. The faith-based humanitarian group maintains 87 water stations in the desert.

A 54-year-old with a political science doctorate, a salty wit and a drawl born in Big Spring, Texas, Hoover has testified before Congress about immigration reform. He has won the Human Rights Award from Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Anti-illegal immigration activists have called him a traitor to his country and a “useful idiot” for the Mexican government.

But in recent years, Pima County has come around to his point of view, declaring a humanitarian crisis and paying his group to fill up the water barrels.

Hoover doesn’t vilify the Border Patrol. His volunteers report about 100 stranded migrants to the agency each year.

But he says the U.S. border strategy is failing in southern Arizona, despite increases in the Tucson sector’s budget and staffing.

“If your goal is national security and you’ve got 600,000 people coming through here, guess what?” he says. “You get an F. It’s not working. It’s like betting on a tape-delayed football game and hoping for a different outcome.

“The alternative is to turn around and tell Congress, ‘We can’t do this. We can secure your border if you get these migrants out of the desert.’ And the way to do that is politics.”

Many of Hoover’s ideological opposites are with him on that point. The Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank that wants to send illegal immigrants packing and restrict legal immigration, sees little hope in a border-based solution.

“Focusing solely on the border is not going to stem the flow,” group spokesman Bryan Griffith says. “Once they make it through that buffer, they know they have a very unlikely chance of getting caught.”

He says militarizing the border might be possible but not cost-effective. Border security must be coupled with enforcement of immigration laws in the workplace because jobs are the magnet that draw migrants here, Griffith says.

A dry wash in Arizona's Ironwood Forest National Monument near the site where a game warden found the body of a teenage boy on May 22, 2006. Because of increased enforcement elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, including Texas and New Mexico, the hostile desert country of southern Arizona is today the busiest corridor for illegal immigration — and the deadliest. Last year the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson received the bodies of 205 unidentified immigrants.

Illegal immigration is a mess created by U.S. policy, not by the migrants, he says.

“The American government is sending a mixed message,” he says. “If there were proper levels of enforcement, maybe you could put the onus on illegal immigrants themselves. But they’re not really to blame for the issue.”

But Al Garza, head of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, says the border can and should be secured now.

And it would be secured, he says, if not for a federal government that secretly wants illegal immigration to continue.

“If we can go to another country and spread democracy, we can secure our own borders,” says Garza, of Tombstone, Ariz. “If you took 25,000 National Guard troops, or half of that, plus fencing and the virtual fence, you could secure the border.”

His group leads pseudo-military brigades of volunteers to watch for illegal immigrants in the desert, with a prominent sentry point near Three Points, a tiny community about 10 miles southeast of where the 16-year-old’s body was found. Garza says the group reports border-crossers but doesn’t harass them. Sometimes volunteers even aid in their rescue.

But he disapproves of Humane Borders’ water barrels.

“I don’t say I enjoy what’s going on,” he says of migrant deaths. “They’re not animals. . . . (But) if you reward illegal behavior, you’re going to get more of it. If you put milk out for a stray cat, he’ll be back in the morning.”

Garza, a fifth-generation Mexican-American and former private investigator, was unconcerned about illegal immigration until he moved to Arizona five years ago and experienced vandalism on his rural property. Now the native Texan and former Californian shares the Minutemen’s rhetoric of a Mexican “invasion” of the U.S.

“We’re being terrorized by illegal aliens,” he says. “They tore the hell out of my fence and stole stuff out of my truck and let my dogs out, and there’s nothing I can do about it. They’re terrorizing you because they know they are immune from our laws.”

Border Patrol Agent Sean King surveys the prickly horizon in southern Arizona's Ironwood Forest National Monument, whose rugged terrain tests the endurance of migrants crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States. On May 22, 2006, a teenage boy's body was found at the bottom of this hill.

* * *

Here’s a phrase Agent Sean King wishes would disappear from the country’s political vocabulary: “Seal the border.”

The border is too long and difficult to patrol, and the immigrants are too determined, to hope for a complete shutdown of illegal crossings, he says.

“We can do our best to deter people . . . but we’re not going to stop the flow of people coming from Oaxaca who know they can make five dollars an hour instead of five dollars a week,” says King, whose wife's family is from Zacatecas, Mexico. “Until the laws are enforced on the books that you can’t hire illegal aliens, you’re not going to be able to stop people coming across.”

King says border fences in certain areas are effective in slowing down groups of migrants so the Border Patrol can catch them, but their usefulness is limited: Determined crossers can go through, over, around or under the fence.

At one fence on the Arizona border, Border Patrol officers go through every day and seal up holes made by a man on the other side who has a backpack blowtorch.

“If you’re from North Carolina and you think the drunk driver who killed a little girl in your town could have been stopped by a wall, I can take you out here and show you why I don’t think he could have been stopped by a wall,” King says. “But a combination of technology and infrastructure and more agents could help.”

King says high-tech surveillance systems will work better than fences in many places, but they still require forces on the ground to make the arrests. Some areas are difficult to patrol: Far southern Arizona is a patchwork of ecologically sensitive wildlife refuges, mountainous terrain and tribal lands where fences aren’t allowed.

Some border areas are experimenting with “zero-tolerance” policies that require all border-crossers to be prosecuted and deported, but King says it’s logistically impossible to do that across the whole Tucson sector, where agents take in 500 to 2,500 people a day.

Still, King is optimistic the Border Patrol is getting the Arizona border under control through high-tech surveillance, improved highway checkpoints, vehicle barriers and more agents. The agency increased the sector’s staffing from 1,800 agents in 2001 to 3,000. Apprehensions fell from 392,000 in 2006 to 378,000 in 2007, continuing a modest decline over the last few years that suggests fewer immigrants are coming through, he says.

King attributes some of the increase in death reports to better reporting methods and the fact that the beefed-up Border Patrol is finding more skeletons that once would have gone undiscovered.

Arizona has been the border’s weak point, King says, but with new measures in place, it will resume its reputation as the last place an immigrant would want to cross.

* * *

Humane Borders volunteers Barbara Marshall and Mike Humphrey fill up water barrels in the desert. They learned that someone had sabotaged the barrels with a drill.

About 5 miles north of where the teenager’s body was found, a blue flag waves high over a pair of blue plastic Pepsi barrels. A Humane Borders water truck parks at the station. Volunteers Mike Humphrey and Barbara Marshall get out.

The volunteers uncoil hoses and crank up the pump motor, its roar breaking the desert silence. On this morning in late September 2007, the desert is green from recent rains. A warm wind whistles through the ironwood brush.

Humphrey finds the spigots on the water barrels have been broken, so he takes a screwdriver and tries to fix them. He figures some anti-immigrant groups or local ranchers have sabotaged the barrels. It wouldn’t be the first time: Sometimes they have slapped signs on the barrels in Spanish saying, “Danger! Poison.”

As the barrel fills, water shoots out the sides and front like little fountains.

Humphrey takes a closer look. The barrels are ruined. Someone has taken a drill and punched holes all over them.

“I can’t fathom that someone would do something like this,” he says. “This is not a game out here. People might need water to stay alive. If you’re punching holes, you’re saying, ‘I don’t care if you live or die.’ ”

Even so, Humphrey and others don’t expect such deadly acts of vandalism in the desert to deter waves of illegal immigrants, especially when so much beyond the desert — fertile fields, big-city construction sites, carefully manicured lawns — promises a better life.

“You’re not going to stop somebody by denying them water,” he says. “You’re just going to make their lives miserable.”

* * *

In May 2006, Americans were angry over immigration. Across the nation people rallied to protest a congressional bill that would have criminalized illegal aliens and those who shelter them; other groups protested the protesters.

President George W. Bush pleaded in vain for a comprehensive immigration bill that would be “a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant and a program of mass deportation.” Radio talk shows denounced him for seeking “amnesty” for “illegal invaders.”

In Tucson, a young man at the Mexican Consulate was trying to track down a family in the state of Puebla for information on one of those “invaders”: A barefoot boy found lying dead on his back in a remote section of Ironwood Forest National Monument.

Meanwhile, a Minuteman named Charles Miller on afternoon patrol in that same area came upon a grisly sight. At 2:05 p.m. May 27, he got on his cell phone and reported it to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department: Another body, decomposed, torn by animals. The body of another teenage boy.

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

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