Ranchers on Border Raise Tensions Over Migrants

The detention of undocumented immigrants by Arizona ranchers is sparking new fears of violence and placing their arid grazing lands at the heart of a binational furor over a flood of illegal border crossings.

The Mexican government, unhappy that some armed U.S. ranchers have detained immigrants crossing private property near the border town of Douglas, Ariz., has assumed an increasingly critical stance in recent weeks and is expected to raise the matter during annual talks with the United States this week in Washington.

“The issue of the Mexicans and the Arizona ranchers is seen, without a doubt, as a red alert that could generate a relatively tense situation,” Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green told reporters in Mexico City last Friday.

Green will be in Washington on Thursday as part of a delegation of Mexican Cabinet ministers who will meet with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other U.S. officials on several issues confronting the two nations.

The immigration controversy escalated last month with the appearance of an anonymous leaflet inviting winter vacationers to park their recreational vehicles on border ranches to help property owners guard against immigrants crossing the border unlawfully.

The two-page leaflet, unsigned but bearing a pair of e-mail addresses, promotes a Neighborhood Ranch Watch program in which visitors are encouraged to act as lookouts and report suspicious people to local authorities or the U.S. Border Patrol.

“Come and stay at the ranches and help keep trespassers from destroying private property. Be a part of the American Way Team,” says the leaflet, which proposes that participants be deputized in order to make arrests legally.

It is not known whether the brochure is serious or satirical. Ranchers in the Douglas area, 120 miles southeast of Tucson, insist that they do not know who distributed them, and Border Patrol officials say they know of no one who has acted on it. Queries sent to both e-mail addresses listed on the brochure went unanswered.

But the leaflet has received widespread attention in Mexico, where news accounts have decried it as an invitation for vigilantes to hunt immigrants diverted to the area by tighter border controls elsewhere. The Mexican foreign ministry has called on U.S. authorities to halt detentions of illegal immigrants by U.S. civilians and to punish those who engage in acts of vigilantism.

The foreign ministry said it has tallied 24 instances during the past year in which armed ranchers in Cochise County have detained groups of illegal immigrants. Two of those incidents took place on highways outside private ranches, the foreign ministry said.

The president of Mexico’s government human rights commission has asked human rights officials from the United Nations to investigate possible abuses along the border in Arizona.

Officials in Arizona worry the escalating tensions will explode. “The situation is just boiling,” said Carol Capas, spokeswoman for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.

Cochise County’s Board of Supervisors on Monday urged Arizona Gov. Jane Dee Hull to send National Guard troops to bolster the work of federal agents by helping transport immigrants who have been arrested by the Border Patrol, maintaining patrol vehicles and handling some administrative duties.

“I don’t want to regress into a vigilante state like the 1880s and have human life taken over the protection of private property. It’s almost getting to that level,” board Chairman Mike Palmer said Tuesday. “It’s very volatile.”

Mexican media reported over the weekend that ranchers near the border town of Sasabe, Ariz., had fired upon and wounded an immigrant, but Mexican and U.S. officials said they have been unable to verify the story.

Ranchers say they will do what they must to safeguard ranches until the U.S. government can stem the growing flow. Border agents in the Tucson region have made more than 405,500 arrests for unlawful crossing since Oct. 1--a 42% increase over the same period last year.

On the ranches, groups of the immigrants have been held and turned over to sheriff’s deputies or border agents by property owners, some wearing sidearms.

“They’re sick and tired” of immigrants leaving empty water jugs and other trash behind, said rancher Roger Barnett, who says he and his brother have rounded up nearly 3,000 illegal crossers on their 22,000-acre property near the border over the last two years. “Hopefully the federal government will get something done. We’re American citizens down here.”

Barnett said that he does not know who published the brochure, but that he has received--and declined--offers from people willing to stand guard on his ranch.

The ranchers also have drawn the attention and support of anti-illegal immigration activists in California, including those who once championed Proposition 187. Several of those activists appeared at a rally in rural Arizona over the weekend to call for tightening border controls along the stretch of ranches that for more than a year has been the nation’s busiest spot for illegal crossings.

The sometimes tumultuous meeting in Sierra Vista also attracted two followers of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Event organizers, saying they did not want to be linked to racist groups, asked the two to leave, according to local news accounts.

Civil right activists reacted with outrage to an Arizona television station’s report Monday showing an armed ranch hand detaining a group of immigrants.

“We’re very scared for all of us. This is going to result in some tragedy and we could have stopped it,” said Isabel Garcia of the Tucson-based Arizona Border Rights Project. She said federal civil rights authorities have turned a blind eye to abuses by ranchers.

Douglas Mayor Ray Borane said he worries about the rising rhetoric level and “sideshows” taking place in the sparsely populated region. Borane said blame rests with a flawed U.S. immigration policy that favors adding agents at the border but ignores the magnet effect of jobs in the interior United States. He called for tighter enforcement at work sites and allowing more workers to enter the United States legally.

U.S. immigration officials, who in the last two years have drastically increased the number of agents in the 281-mile zone that includes Douglas, announced plans to add 110 agents to the current contingent of 1,380. An additional 180 are assigned temporarily. The Border Patrol last year named a team of 24 agents to respond to reports of immigrants on ranches. That number will soon rise to 34.

“We intend to follow through and do what’s necessary,” said Johnny Williams, western regional director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Justice Department officials plan to ask Mexican authorities at the bilateral talks for help in catching and prosecuting organized immigrant smugglers based in Mexico.

A senior State Department official said there is no evidence the Arizona ranchers are going after migrants. The official chided Green, the Mexican foreign minister, for “rhetoric that I’m not sure is so helpful.”

The official said, though, that the United States is “perfectly willing to talk about [the issue]. Our position is straightforward. There’s an immigration law and we have to enforce it in a humane way. We’re not going to permit any laws to be broken.”