Following in Their Desperate Footsteps

I took a swig of cold water, adjusted my straw hat and set out through the desert on the U.S.-Mexico border west of Calexico, tracking the last footprints of a man and woman who were found dead from the heat only a day earlier.

You can get into trouble surprisingly fast out here, U.S. Border Patrol agent Miguel Hernandez told me. He and agent David Kim said I was lucky to have hit a brief cooling spell. Because of a thin cloud cover, the temperature was about 100 degrees. It was 10:30 a.m.

The heat doesn’t just blast you from overhead. It comes up under you and closes in on all sides, and there is nothing but baked dust as far as you can see. Red ants scamper under foot, and lizard tracks are everywhere.

“We see quite a few snakes,” Hernandez said, “so just beware.”

I had gone to this deadly border crossing after reading about the latest folly from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. We are now flying captured illegal immigrants to Mexico City and Guadalajara.

As the argument goes, immigrants will be less likely to risk another illegal crossing if they are flown deeper into Mexico instead of dumping them just over the border. And so we’re paying $28,000 for each planeload, with $13 million budgeted through the summer.

Before the first plane landed, I could have told you it wouldn’t work. My colleague, Chris Kraul, interviewed eight of those deportees in Mexico City, and seven said they’d soon be headed right back to the United States.

You could fly them to the South Pole and they’d come back. It’s a simple matter of economic survival, as I saw firsthand last month in Mexico. The $13 million would be better spent going after U.S. employers who hire illegals.

But as I’ve explained before, immigration policy isn’t designed to make sense. If people are willing to risk their lives crossing the desert in July, does anyone believe a plane ride to Guadalajara will be a deterrent?

Twenty-four people have died in the Border Patrol’s El Centro sector since October, including four last week who were killed by the heat. They die in the All-American canal, the New River, the mountains and, especially this time of year, they die in the desert.

Thirty minutes into my trek, I was dripping wet and a bit lightheaded. In some places, your feet sink 6 inches into the sand with each step, and you just hope you don’t get your leg chomped by a rattler.

There’s no fence on this portion of the border, just little white monuments telling you Mexico is on one side and the United States on the other. I couldn’t quite see all the way to Mexico’s Highway 2, about three miles to the south.

“They come up from there,” Hernandez said, pointing toward the road.

From where we stood, it’s roughly two more miles north to U.S. Highway 98. If all goes according to plan, and the coyote hasn’t swindled the immigrants -- who are paying $1,500 to $2,000 for crossings here -- a car will be waiting to spirit them away.

In all, it’s a journey of roughly five miles by foot. But a million things can go wrong.

The Border Patrol blankets the area from air and land, and immigrants often hide for hours until the coast is clear. Sometimes they camp overnight, but the summer temperature often hovers in the 90s after midnight, and they can run out of water just as the heat begins rising in the morning.

Sometimes the coyotes leave immigrants to die if they begin to lag behind the group. Hernandez said agents frequently end up rescuing immigrants who plead for help rather than run.

“Down in here,” agent Hernandez said as we dropped into a little valley, “I’d say it’s about 102.”

I was still feeling OK, but I could imagine panicking if I were out here for hours, no idea when or how the trek would end.

“You’re walking the route they probably walked when they died,” Hernandez said of the man and woman whose bodies were carried from here the day before. “This is a very popular crossing.”

He found several sets of footprints and we followed them a few hundred yards to where one set, smaller than the rest, appeared to stop. The other prints continued on and then circled back.

“Someone might have been in trouble here,” Hernandez said, “and the others came back to see if she was OK.”

The Imperial County Sheriff’s Department handled the bodies, so we couldn’t be sure whose prints we were looking at. The desert is full of prints, some of which make it all the way across, some of which do not.

Henry Proo, a coroner’s investigator, later told me he was called to this area late Tuesday afternoon, when Border Patrol agents apprehended three illegal immigrants who said they had just passed a body. Proo was picking up the corpse of a man about 40 years old when a woman, a boy and a girl appeared from behind the bushes, asking for help.

“The mother was getting close to being distressed,” said Proo, “and the 14-year-old girl was already in distress.”

Then a man came walking up, saying his aunt was in trouble a ways back. When Proo got to her, she was dead.

“She was 51 years old, she was from Michoacan, and she died about 15 yards into the U.S.,” Proo said of the woman, who was traveling with a small group.

“She was probably already too far gone just crossing Mexico’s desert. They were apparently dropped off on the Tijuana-Mexicali Highway and that’s probably a three-mile walk. They had to go up over a mountain range, camped out, and walked during the heat of day when they could see.”

Proo loaded up both bodies and took them to the morgue.

The following day, Proo would collect his fourth body in three days. As he did, he says, Border Patrol agents arrested six more illegal immigrants who were turning back toward Mexico because they were out of water. Proo says the six immigrants told agents they had earlier passed five corpses in the Mexican desert on their way north.

As for 51-year-old Tomasa Ochoa Zamora, who left her last footprints in a California desert, she too will be returning home to Mexico by plane.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes

.com.