New Mexico: The New Doorstep of Migrants’ American Dream

There’s no amber in these waves of grain. A carpet of wheat, rippling in the spring breeze 30 feet from the U.S.-Mexico border, is a lush green welcome mat on the doorstep of the American dream.

To the south, the same distance from the barbed wire that intermittently defines the border, the tumbledown adobe villages of Las Palmas and Las Chepas, Mexico, are staging areas for record-setting illegal immigration.

Men, women and children gather with rucksacks and water bottles, waiting for dark. Then they cross, hoping for better jobs, better schools, better chances.

About 30%--nearly 20,000 a year--are captured. That means nearly 50,000 aren’t caught, the Border Patrol estimates. Ramona Garcia Loza, 32, of Chihuahua City, was one of the unlucky ones. She tried to cross near this border village with her 10-year-old daughter, Annette, and friend Paula Estrada, 35.

“I really didn’t want to come,” Garcia Loza said in Spanish. “I wanted my daughter to go to school in Deming--to learn English.”

She hoped for housekeeping work, like the job she left behind.

It was her first crossing--”first and last,” she said. It ended after a two-hour hide-and-seek with Border Patrol agents who tracked the trio’s footprints through zigzag miles of thorny brush to an abandoned house in Columbus, 30 miles short of Deming. The trio was released back in Mexico. The paperwork took less than 15 minutes.

Ten to 15 miles west, in rougher terrain, immigrants in groups as large as 50 follow guides with flashlights through deadly, unmarked, cactus-studded desert for up to 70 miles--disregarding warnings posted in Spanish about rattlesnakes, mountain lions, coyotes, lethal heat and poisonous insects, including killer bees.

But first they see the shimmering fields and bubbling waterways of the farms on the U.S. side growing chiles, onions and wheat.

“You can tell when they’ve been across a wet field at night,” farmer Allen Akers said. “Sometimes it’s like a herd of cattle came through.”

Neighboring farmer Bill Johnson said there has been a noticeable increase in fence cuttings and foot traffic. “We sit here every day and watch pickup truck after pickup truck come out of Palomas,” he said.

Trucks along Mexico’s well-maintained 15-mile gravel highway between Palomas, Las Palmas and Chepas send the migrants across the desert. A man and woman suffering from heat exhaustion died while making separate attempts last year. The guides don’t hang around when that happens, emergency medical technician Alexis Spriggs said.

In the case of the convulsive, dying woman, “the group she was with took off in a hundred different directions,” Spriggs said.

Palomas, across from Columbus, is the hub of illegal immigration into New Mexico. March established an all-time single-month mark of 3,258 catches for the Border Patrol’s Deming office, which oversees 14,000 square miles around Columbus. In 1988, there were just 3,587 Deming-area apprehensions for the whole year.

And while illegal-immigrant captures dropped off slightly across the entire border last year, from 1.5 million in 1996 to 1.37 million in 1997, a record high of 1.51 million is projected this year.

Border crackdowns in California, Texas and Arizona have squeezed immigrants into New Mexico’s desert, agents said. They also blame the influx on poor job opportunities in Mexico and on New Mexico schools’ rejection of children once accepted from Mexico border areas.

In Palomas, immigrants come on buses and trucks to meet their guides at the plaza, a tree-shaded park with benches, crisscrossing pathways and a central gazebo. Some pay $1,000 to be smuggled to Albuquerque, 268 miles north.

Three friends who rode together from Puebla said they want work.

“Any job,” shrugged the oldest, 65, speaking Spanish. A leathery, gray-haired man in a cowboy hat, he said he had no special destination. A 22-year-old man, another first-timer, had eyes that shone with excitement over the impending adventure.

Their 32-year-old pal said he had made it across four times before and found construction work in San Jose, Calif. None would give their names.

Sergio Romero, owner of Palomas’ best-known restaurant, the Pink Store, has watched the numbers grow after inflation and the 1994 peso devaluation brought economic hardship to many Mexicans. “They come to find jobs, any kind of work,” Romero said.

He sympathized with people trying to leave their homeland. So did the Border Patrol’s Richard Moody, agent-in-charge at Deming.

“I think you and I might do the same thing if we were in their situation,” said Moody, 38, during a 15-hour border ride-along. “I insist on compassion.”

But organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union contend Border Patrol agents too often violate human rights. Some migrants allege mistreatment. Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier said all formal complaints are investigated.

Near the border, the patrol challenges people suspected of illegal immigration. Sometimes citizenship isn’t easily resolved, such as in the case of a 16-year-old boy who claimed to have been born at Thomason General Hospital in El Paso, 100 miles east.

The boy said he needed a birth certificate to get work as a field hand in the United States, but the hospital could find no record of his birth. Denied U.S. entry, he and his 16-year-old wife, residents of Palomas, were caught attempting to cross west of town.

If the boy’s citizenship claim cannot be disproved, the boy will be treated as a citizen, but “he’d be in a kind of limbo,” Moody said.

Ranchers and other border dwellers say most illegal migrants are nonviolent and generally noncriminal--they just want in. In the 53 miles of barbed-wire fence patrolled by Moody’s agents, there are 20 miles of gaps.

Moody worries less about the fence than the lack of road. His agents patrol on two rocky ruts that parallel the Chepas highway, crawling along as trucks roar past across the border. The ruts dead-end in the Carizalia Mountains. From there, agents patrol by air.

The U.S. Army plans to build a new road this year. The Border Patrol will erect 10 60-foot towers with video surveillance cameras adapted for night vision. The Deming office also will get an infrared-equipped helicopter to find people by detecting body heat.

In two years at Deming, Moody has instituted horse and bike patrols. With a new road, towers and infrared helicopter, he predicts a turnaround from the 30% capture ratio.

“I think we could get up to the high 70s or 80% apprehension ratio,” he said. “We would have control of this part of the border.”