Homeowners Lose Yard to Migrant Encampment : Intruders: Couple fights losing battle against brazen trespassers who use property near Vista as a stopover, and leave garbage and litter in their wake.

Sometimes it’s all they can do, admitting defeat to the migrants with a touch of panache.

Annelise and Chuck McCarty plant themselves in the patio chairs alongside their shimmering pool. She sips champagne, he toys with his vodka cocktail. And they pass binoculars back and forth, spying on the migrant workers at the bottom of the hillside who have claimed a piece of the McCartys’ property as their own.

It’s down there, on the inside edge of the McCartys’ 15 acres--in the stand of old oak trees alongside a little creek--that these men sleep, cook, party and hide out, either waiting for work or to move on in their journey to who knows where.

This, for the McCartys, is the surrealism of country living, something their friends back in Palos Verdes couldn’t hope to grasp: losing your own back yard to trespassers who seem to show up for a few days, leave for a few days and return again--with impunity.

“When we lived in Palos Verdes and complained of a trespasser, the police were there in 10 minutes and took people to jail,” said Chuck McCarty, now retired as an aerospace executive. “But not down here.”

“Here” is just north of the Vista city limits, an area known as Strawberry Hills, its rolling hills populated by what the U.S. Border Patrols estimates to be 400 to 500 migrant workers. They live under boulders, inside carefully crafted caves, in hooches and blatantly in the open, beneath the canopy of 100-year-old oak trees alongside seasonal streams.

Most of these men, authorities say, work in the agricultural fields of this rural neighborhood. And the vast majority of them, at least 75%, are documented workers living in the United States legally.

For their part, these migrant workers say they look for places to live that are inconspicuous--even if it means on someone else’s private property. “We look for places were we don’t think we’ll bother anybody,” said one worker. “We don’t want to be a problem. But we have to live where we’re near our work, otherwise we suffer.”

So it goes in North County, the McCartys have now come to understand: Whether you own a large strawberry field near Del Mar, or a tomato field in Oceanside, or just a several-acre home-site in Poway or Valley Center, or here in Vista, your property may be homesteaded by migrants, leaving you feeling powerless to do much about it.

Their property can be free of migrants for days at a time, the McCartys say. Then one day 10 or more will show up and maybe just spend the night--or a week--before they’re gone again.

Along the hillside just beyond the McCarty’s property is a more permanent encampment, known as The Castle because of the spider-hole network of living quarters planted in the sides of the conical-shaped knoll.

When the McCartys first complained to the San Diego County Sheriff’s department about migrants camping out on their property, they said they were met with a “so-what-else-is-new?” shrug and warned to simply stay out of the area.

“But that’s our own property!” Chuck McCarty protested incredulously.

“But it’s dangerous down there,” the deputy responded. “Stay clear.”

The Sheriff’s Department concedes to frustration in dealing with trespassing migrant workers.

“Writing them a citation for the misdemeanor violation is pretty worthless because we’re citing someone to appear in court who has no address. It’s a waste of time,” said sheriff’s Lt. Scott McClintock.

“The best we can do is to shoo them off verbally. But either the same ones or new ones will move right back onto the property the same day,” he said. And because so many of the workers are documented, there’s no point calling in Border Patrol agents.

“For the most part, agricultural people are gentle people,” McClintock said. “We are very understanding of their social plight. We’re not mean to them. We understand. But we have to protect the rights of the property owner.”

The McCartys say they’ve found it hard to protect their rights.

When they put up wooden “No Trespassing” signs, they were absconded for use as fuel for campfires. When the McCartys smiled and planted steel “No Trespassing” signs, the migrants simply smiled back and used those signs as campfire griddles for tortillas.

Now the McCartys are investigating the price of chain-link fencing--expecting, though, that they will probably just be cut open like so many finger holes through sandwich bread. That’s what happened to neighbors’ fences.

So now the McCartys are trying to grin and bear it, their retirement plans warped by the intrusion of this shadow culture that, for them, is in screaming boldface.

When the McCartys found their home-site property on Ormsby Street, they relished panoramic views sweeping northeasterly to snow-topped mountains, framed in the foreground by green rolling hills and sumptuous estate homes. Their white-stucco, ranch-style home is valued at about $400,000.

If this was their paradise gained, it soon was paradise lost.

For the past 1 1/2 years, the McCartys have alternately tolerated and complained to various authorities about the intrusion of illegal immigrants on their land.

The first inkling of trouble was a bureaucratic slap, when San Diego County health officials mailed them a notice even while they were still living in Palos Verdes and their new house was under construction: Clean your property of the migrants’ trash.

A neighbor had complained to authorities about the garbage, and it was up to the McCartys to clean it up, county health officials said.

So the McCartys brought in a trash Dumpster and got to work, worried both about further citations and wanting to keep the neighbors happy. And maybe, just maybe, if the trappings of the encampment were cleaned up, the migrants wouldn’t be lured back.

The couple decided also to clear the brush at the bottom of the property for use as a soccer field for their two grade-school age boys. “As soon as we did that, the migrants came back and started playing football on it,” Chuck McCarty said.

The family wanted to use the stand of oak trees as a kind of picnic area. But the migrants kept returning, even after the couple moved in, and claimed the area for their picnics.

The couple would walk down and try to shoo them off verbally, only to be met with blank stares of resistance. “Hey, you’re living on our property,” they complained to the group. “Yeah, we know,” they responded.

Several times Chuck McCarty walked into the encampment with a shotgun for effect. They just looked back at him, he said. A couple of times he shot the gun into the air, he said. The migrants scattered--and returned after they saw him trudging back up to his house.

When you try to clear the migrants out, the McCartys learned, they return like the next high tide.

“This was completely foreign to us,” he said, “the fact that migrants live on your land, and you can’t seem to do anything about it.”

A deputy sheriff came out once at the McCartys’ request and toured the encampment. Campfires were still burning as the migrants fled into the nearby hills. “He kicked their stuff--their clothes, the trash--into the fire, and left. A little later, the migrants came right back,” she said.

At one point--apparently prompted again by the neighbor who first complained about the garbage--20 or so Border Patrol agents and sheriff’s deputies swept through the encampment, scaring everyone off. The site was again cleaned up. They thought the quasi-military operation had finally paid off. There was peace and quiet, and talk of family picnics down in the trees.

“Two months later, the migrants were back,” Chuck McCarty said.

A lunch truck would come by daily to feed the group. The McCartys asked him to quit, and instead he turned up the volume of his Mexican radio station--and threw his trash onto their property.

On Wednesdays, a pimp would deliver girls in short shorts to the McCarty’s land as the McCartys watched from above, shaking their heads incredulously.

“On Saturday nights there would be loud partying and you would watch as they got into fights, chasing each other around,” Annelise McCarty said.

When the camp was empty during the day, the McCarty family would trudge back down the hillside, plastic garbage bags in hand, to clean up everything but the excrement, which they just tried to ignore.

“I will never drink a Budweiser,” Annelise McCarty said. “I’ve picked up too many Bud bottles.”

Once the couple watched when a van stopped on the shoulder of Ormsby Street and picked up a knot of migrants who ran single file from the trees to the street. The van headed east toward Interstate 15. They notified the Border Patrol to be on the lookout, but aren’t sure what came of their tip.

The McCartys figure they’ve spent $3,000 so far in trash clean-up, Dumpsters and tow trucks to remove abandoned vehicles. “One time after we filled a Dumpster and walked back up to the house, the men came back and opened the doors of the Dumpster, to pull things back out,” she said.

The migrants don’t approach the house, thanks probably to three aggressive German shepherds who patrol within a fenced area closer to the house.

But they’re still down there, any given day, and it’s driving the McCartys to wit’s end. Even during an interview for this story, a white van stopped along Ormsby Street and 13 men jumped out and ran for the cover of the trees, single file.

By last Thursday that group had left and another van, this time a dark-colored one--stopped alongside of the road Thursday morning. More than 20 men jumped out.

This time the McCartys called the Border Patrol, which already had been contacted by a reporter to discuss the McCarty’s frustrations, and agents showed up within the hour, rounding up 22 men.

On Friday, the McCartys counted another 17 men jumping out of a white van. When they called the Border Patrol this time, they were told that the agents had been assigned riot duty in Los Angeles.

If and when the latest group leaves, the McCartys figure, still more will come to live on their property down below their shimmering swimming pool.

The authorities are resigned to that reality, too. “The property owner is responsible for the trash but we’re fully aware that after they clean it up, it’s inevitable that with the passing of time the problem will return,” said Michael Devine, chief of the county’s office of environmental health services.

Given the absence of other housing alternatives, migrant workers have little choice but to resort to encroaching on private property, says Claudia Smith, regional director for California Rural Legal Assistance, a statewide legal services program for migrants.

“These people are being criminalized for their poverty,” she said. “They have no alternatives except to live in apartments in such overcrowded numbers that it would be totally unacceptable to the landlord.”

“Migrants need to live where they’re close to their work, where there is water, where there are markets nearby, where there is some protection from (thugs),” Smith said. “I don’t think they’re conscious that they’re trespassing. They see it as open land.

“And many have lived in these specific areas for decades, without any problem, before the homes were built,” she noted. “Of course there are legitimate concerns on the part of homeowners, but they have to temper that concern with compassion, and that’s what I usually find lacking.”

The McCartys try to rationalize the migrants’ plight. “I guess we don’t mind the men that much,” Annelise McCarty said. “It’s the trash, the constant cleanup. I wish they would just leave and give someone else this headache. I’m tired of it.”