Migrants, Border Town Feel the Squeeze

Tightened border controls in California and Texas have funneled a tidal wave of undocumented immigrants into the mesquite-specked ranchlands here, abruptly turning this region into the nation’s busiest point for illegal crossings and the site of a wrenching debate over how far cattle ranchers and residents are willing to go to staunch the flow.

In recent months, the border rush around this city of 15,000 has set regional records for arrests of migrants crossing without papers and created bizarre tableaux in these scrubby plains 120 miles southeast of Tucson and an hour’s drive from the OK Corral. Some ranchers have taken to rounding up immigrants on their land, and it is no longer unusual to see lines of 60 or more border crossers, including small children, trooping among the shrubs and yucca.

Two weeks ago, about 600 people crossed en masse until U.S. Border Patrol agents arrived and rounded up nearly a third of the group. The rest fled back south across the border in a scene that one official said “looked like the beginning of a 10K run.”

On Saturday, 150 angry ranchers and other residents had a showdown of their own with U.S. officials at a tense town hall-style meeting in nearby Bisbee. “Do something!” shouted Tom Bohmfalk of neighboring McNeal, clutching his cowboy hat.

Rural residents of Cochise County say the steady parade of migrants has littered once-isolated grazing lands with plastic water jugs and soiled diapers, trampled feed grass and kept ranch dogs barking so insistently at night that it has been months since owners have had a decent night’s sleep. Many refuse to leave their properties unattended.

“We’re prisoners in our own homes,” said Larry Vance Jr., who lives on 20 acres so commonly traveled that border agents use it as a landmark for tracking immigrants.

Local officials and residents say they have been placed in the bull’s-eye by strategic border clampdowns that have made illegal crossings more difficult in once-porous zones such as San Diego and El Paso and, as with a balloon squeezed at both ends, forced immigration to the middle. Last year, illegal immigration surged in Imperial County as a result of the Operation Gatekeeper crackdown, but the harsh desert conditions resulted in a spate of deaths.

Now, with the recent addition of agents 85 miles to the west at Nogales, Ariz., the flow is zeroing in on Douglas, a more direct route than San Diego for many from the Mexican interior.

U.S. officials say help is on the way, but shortfalls in recruitment and training for new border agents have set back plans for reinforcements.

Douglas Mayor Ray Borane has labeled the situation “uncontrollable,” and the city is preparing to sue the U.S. government as a way of spotlighting the disruption to daily life.

“This thing is on a crescendo. It’s escalating every day,” said Borane, who has won local praise by suggesting that the U.S. government revive in some form a controversial guest-worker program to allow foreign migrants to enter legally for jobs often eschewed by Americans.

A group of county residents, led by ranchers, last week called on Arizona Gov. Jane Hull to dispatch National Guard troops to bolster the town’s overwhelmed Border Patrol contingent of 275 agents. Hull rejected the proposal, saying she opposed “militarization” of the border, but the idea has sparked lingering debate around town.

Ranchers say the flood of immigrants represents the type of emergency for which the National Guard is designed. But even beleaguered local government officials and many residents say such a step would be too drastic.

In the meantime, the arid landscape bristles with tension and frustration that some fear could spill over into violence. Nearly two dozen ranchers recently signed a proclamation warning that “if the government refuses to provide this security, then the only recourse is to provide it for ourselves.”

One ranch owner, Roger Barnett, made good on that warning and prompted cries of vigilantism earlier this month when, armed with a pistol and wearing a camouflage jacket and badge labeled “Ranch Patrol,” he and two brothers rounded up 27 immigrants on his sprawling property and held them until Border Patrol agents arrived. The immigrants were returned to Mexico but authorities reportedly are investigating Barnett’s actions.

Barnett, who calls the influx of undocumented immigrants an “invasion,” said he never drew his pistol and merely was protecting his 22,000-acre ranch against trespassers. “A vigilante goes a lot further than I did,” he said, showing a visitor around trash-strewn sites.

Cochise County sheriff’s officials are looking into a separate incident in the nearby town of Hereford last week in which an immigrant who says she became separated from her party claims a ranch owner fired shots after she showed up at his house for help. The rancher claimed there were six migrants and that he fired warning shots away from them after they refused to leave during the early morning darkness.

At Saturday’s forum in Bisbee, ranchers and other residents reiterated calls for a military presence and vented their fury at a panel of federal and local officials summoned by U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.).

Bohmfalk said he awoke two days earlier to find a group of intruders trying to break into his car. “If I am threatened anymore at my house,” he intoned, “I will defend myself.”

That kind of talk unnerves some who fear the onset of a form of frontier justice.

“My fear is vigilantism. We can’t tolerate that,” said Isabel Garcia, an attorney with the Tucson-based Arizona Border Rights Project. “We think it’s really a frightening--a dangerous--situation on the border.”

The crisis has brought fresh heartache--and unwelcome attention--to a sun-faded town still struggling to recuperate from the shutdown 12 years ago of a copper smelter that was its economic lifeblood. And some see in the current immigration debate a crucial trial for Douglas, a predominantly Latino town whose door has always been flung wide open to residents of its Mexican sister, Agua Prieta. Douglas stores such as Wal-Mart and Safeway, close to the border crossing, would go belly-up if not for the Mexican customers who cross legally to shop.

“It’s almost like a piece of your body’s cut off. There isn’t that freedom anymore. There’s a degree of suspicion. There’s some fear,” said Father Robert E. Carney Jr., a Catholic priest who has criticized recent attempts to tighten the border around Douglas through such measures as a new 12-foot-high international fence downtown where the cities meet.

The angst hasn’t been limited to Douglas.

Officials in Agua Prieta have watched the transient population there soar amid violence linked to feuding immigrant smugglers. A municipal police officer was killed recently after breaking up one such showdown. Mayor Vicente Teran Uribe estimates that the “floating population” of migrants arriving from southern Mexico or repatriated after their arrest by U.S. border agents totals up to 100,000 people per month--nearly equal to the city’s permanent population of 120,000. The city helps buy bus tickets for discouraged migrants heading home but funds are limited.

The impact of the recent flood of newcomers is visible in an economic boomlet that has occurred in the blocks nearest the border crossing in downtown Agua Prieta. More than a dozen new restaurants and four hotels have popped up to accommodate the busloads of arrivals, and some residents are cashing in by converting spare rooms and offices into guest quarters.

But, Teran notes somewhat sourly, it is a boom owing more to U.S. government border-enforcement strategy than city leaders’ wishes. “It’s the Americans who are making this such an industry,” said Teran, a rancher.

U.S. officials are not surprised that the flow of undocumented border crossers has hit the countryside. The strategy to tighten border enforcement by adding hundreds of new agents, plus new fences, border floodlights and other technology, was aimed first at urban areas, such as San Diego, where ready access to freeways, public transportation and motels make it much easier for smugglers to sneak their charges northward. The resulting drop in arrests in those centers has been accompanied by a rise of arrests in rural, traditionally sleepier areas, such as Imperial County and Arizona.

Last month saw a record number of arrests across much of Arizona’s southern border, led by Douglas with 27,225. The number of monthly arrests in the small community is now double that of a year ago. More startling, roughly the same number of monthly arrests are now being made in and around Douglas as are being made in and around San Diego.

Some 300 new agents were to be sent this year into the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, a 280-mile stretch that includes Douglas, but it is now unclear when reinforcements can be trained and assigned.

“It’s really an enforcement operation in progress,” said Johnny Williams, who oversees the Western region of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “It’s not instant pudding.”

Some of those arrested on a recent evening said they were encouraged to cross here because it was said to be easier to elude authorities, but they seemed unsure where they were exactly. Alfonso Osuna was with about a dozen others, lost and thirsty, who had walked all day and the previous night after being abandoned by their smuggler. The 34-year-old Osuna, from the state of Nayarit, had been nabbed once already trying to cross at Nogales. He said he might look for work in Agua Prieta--anything that would help support his wife and three children back home.

Tumult isn’t new to the Douglas area. Geronimo, the Apache warrior, surrendered not far away in 1886. U.S. troops in and around Douglas had front-row seats when Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary leader, launched his attack for control of Agua Prieta. Douglas flourished with copper but the smelter shutdown sparked an exodus that left many of the turn-of-the-century brick buildings downtown shuttered. The town is poor, but predictions of collapse proved wrong.

Boosters say resilience may be the best hope of the twin border cities in the face of an immigration wave far beyond their control. But even the most sanguine already see a dusty landscape of hurt, from migrants driven by desperation to ranchers driven to distraction.

Said Ginny Jordan, a former Chamber of Commerce director whose father is a member of the City Council’s Latino majority: “Everybody is a victim here--everybody is.”