Transience Is the Only Fixture in Las Chepas

Locals compare this near-ghost town to the Bermuda Triangle: Every day, buses haul dozens of people here along an isolated dirt road, but they all leave empty.

The abandoned houses here are fast becoming a favorite rest stop for thousands who come from all over the world to sneak across the porous Mexico-New Mexico border. From Las Chepas, the migrants circle into the mountains next to town and follow them north into Luna County, N.M.

The widening flood of arrivals is a main reason that Bill Richardson, New Mexico’s governor, has declared a state of emergency along the border and has called for the razing of Las Chepas.

“It’s a smuggler’s paradise,” said Luna County sheriff’s Lt. Allen Carter.

On Friday, Richardson and Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza of the bordering Mexican state, Chihuahua, announced joint steps to try to rein in illegal border traffic, including placement of a Mexican law enforcement detail in Las Chepas.

“It’s a public safety issue,” Baeza said at a news conference with Richardson in Las Cruces, N.M. “The problem is not from the residents but from people who come from elsewhere in the Mexico ... and from the whole world to enter the U.S.”

As one of the newest launching pads in Mexico for illegal immigrants, Las Chepas has changed from a bustling farm town to a smuggling hub -- for drugs as well as humans.

Many people -- including Luna County Undersheriff Raymond Cobos, who grew up in a small border community nearby -- say the communities that hug the border in New Mexico’s high desert are far rougher places than they once were.

It used to be, they say, that illegal border crossers were neighbors. The crossers lived in Las Chepas or Palomas, the larger town that sits on the Mexican side of the main border entry, and they came to the U.S. to work on the ranches and in the onion fields. When their shift was done, they’d walk home.

Now the migrants come from Central America, Poland and China, as well as deeply impoverished southern Mexico. They have few local ties and don’t plan to stay in southern New Mexico, where there are few jobs but many Border Patrol agents.

Instead, the migrants trek 40 miles through the desert to reach the interstate, where smugglers pick them up and take them to Phoenix, from which they’re sent all over the country.

“The whole system has changed,” Cobos said. “This is just the place they stop to rest.”

The lightly populated 150-mile New Mexico border is increasingly popular. As the U.S. has tightened border control in Southern California and Arizona, smugglers have shifted east.

Maria Valdez Maldonado is part of the shift.

The 21-year-old Honduran came through Las Chepas into the U.S. because her husband advised her to.

He took the same route four years ago when he crossed the border on his way to North Carolina. He found work in a bakery there and called his wife Aug. 5, telling her to come join him.

He knew where she should cross.

Maldonado hooked up with a smuggling ring in Guatemala that brought her to Las Chepas after a wearying 20-day journey. She dashed across the border with 17 other migrants Wednesday morning, but the Border Patrol swooped down on the group.

“We didn’t bother to run,” Maldonado said as she leaned against the bars of her cell in the Border Patrol detention center in Columbus, three miles north of the border.

Smugglers charge migrants like Maldonado $3,000 to $5,000, said Rick Moody, agent in charge of the Border Patrol station in Deming, 29 miles north of the border.

For illegal immigrants from farther away, the cost is higher, Moody said. Brazilians pay up to $8,000, and Chinese $60,000.

Twelve illegal immigrants have died this year on the arduous 40-mile trek across the desert to Interstate 10.

The same networks that make so much money trafficking humans also smuggle drugs, steal cars and rob the immigrants. As a result, Las Chepas is monitored by cameras, motion detectors and Border Patrol cars on the American side.

The Deming station is scheduled to double in size by next year and to receive new cameras and sensors from Washington.

Detentions of illegal crossers are up 36% this year, and 125,000 tons of marijuana were confiscated in New Mexico in the first three months of the year, largely in the Deming region.

“There’s more and more coming at us,” Moody said.

On Wednesday night, as Maldonado sat in the Border Patrol processing center, dozens of illegal immigrants poured into the New Mexico desert.

West of the heavily guarded official entry at Palomas, the border has only patches of short fences designed to stop vehicles. A dirt road runs along either side of the line. Border Patrol agents can count the buses, trucks and vans ferrying illegal immigrants to Las Chepas and other entry points.

As the sun set, agents spotted two sets of headlights moving west along the Mexican side.

A look through night-vision goggles revealed more than a dozen people standing in the bed of one of the trucks.

“We’re getting overrun out here, man,” Agent William Rodd told Lt. Jack Jeffreys. “This is the fourth or fifth one going out that way.”

“All this came out of Las Chepas,” Jeffreys muttered.

The next day, Agents Daniel Scobell and Carlos Sanchez of Grupo Beta, the Mexican agency that tries to ensure migrants do not die crossing, patrolled the Mexican side of the border.

They passed two young men carrying backpacks and water jugs, and pulled over.

“Where are you going?” Sanchez asked the youths.

“Columbus, if we can make it,” one replied, naming the hamlet three miles north.

After eyeballing the crossers’ water supply, Sanchez nodded and got back into the truck.

Sometimes Grupo Beta agents urge crossers who lack adequate supplies to turn back, but few listen.

“They’ve come from so far, and now they’re so close,” Sanchez said. “Generally, they’re going to go for it.”

Some days the agents spot hundreds packed into buses en route to Las Chepas to make the crossing.

Other days, they say, only a few dozen people go there.

As part of the accord between Richardson and Baeza, Grupo Beta’s patrols will be augmented, and Chihuahua and New Mexico law enforcement will launch a joint task force to investigate smuggling. The garrison Baeza plans to place in Las Chepas might demolish some of the abandoned buildings.

Mexican law enforcement has had difficulty controlling its side of the border with New Mexico. Last year, the police chief of the main border city of Palomas was run out of town by gunmen. Richardson said Friday that he hoped Baeza’s proposals would improve conditions in the far smaller Las Chepas area.

“It’s a step forward,” Richardson said of the agreement.

Las Chepas, whose formal name is Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez but is known almost exclusively by its nickname, sits on a gradual slope that rises from the border and eventually becomes the Carrizalillo Hills.

Most of the three dozen or so houses are roofless, doorless and abandoned, every piece of wood looted by passing migrants who burn it to keep themselves warm.

For centuries, there was nothing here but a few cattle ranches and alfalfa farms.

Then, in 1971, the Mexican government, battling urban economic and political unrest, seized the ranchers’ land and created Las Chepas, doling out 20 acres to anyone who would live there.

Ignacio and Herlinda Juarez and their four children were one of the first families to move in. They came with one suitcase from a town in southern Chihuahua and set about starting their cattle ranch and slowly building their dream house.

They recall a bustling town with a good school and friendly relations with the ranching family north of the border, the Johnsons, who brought the young town drinking water. Many residents walked to the Johnson ranch to work.

In 1986, it all changed.

The Reagan administration offered amnesty to illegal immigrants working in the U.S. Virtually the entire town of Las Chepas was eligible. With all of the U.S. open to them, they didn’t hang around the dusty border, but left to find their fortunes in the larger cities in the north.

“The young people, who had choices, left,” said Herlinda Juarez, 63.

Francisco Apodaca, her 76-year-old neighbor, bemoans the act. “Before the amnesty, people had good jobs here,” he said. “The amnesty didn’t serve anyone.”

The second blow came in 1990, when the financially struggling Mexican government cut off aid to Las Chepas’ farmers. The population dwindled further. The public school closed. Three Juarez children departed, one to the U.S., two to other cities in Mexico.

The remaining Juarezes, like most of the other inhabitants, became entrepreneurs, selling burritos and bottled water to the trickle of migrants.

Then, suddenly, they were deluged.

“They come like ants,” Apodaca said. “It’s very sad. I don’t think the government can stop it now.”

Ignacio Juarez says the migrants are not a problem. “They’re chasing the American dream,” he said, a USA baseball cap perched on his head. Still, the family avoids some of the strangers who pass through the town.

A few yards away, across the border, sits Bill Johnson’s house. The 56-year-old rancher has watched the evolution of Las Chepas. Now his ranch, which has been in the family for almost a century, has been trashed by illegal immigrants who break into his property, steal cars and take water from cattle tanks.

Once awash in workers from Las Chepas, he and other ranchers have endured a labor shortage since the 1986 amnesty, which made it a crime for them to hire illegal immigrants. Still, many of the Johnson family’s legal workers grew up in Las Chepas and have since moved to other hamlets on either side of the border.

“It used to be that I knew every family over there” in Las Chepas, he said, “because they worked for me or I just knew them.”

The last time Johnson was in Las Chepas was three years ago, when one of his dogs wandered into Mexico. Johnson strolled a few paces over the border looking for him and stumbled into a drug deal. He says he barely escaped with his life and will not return.

“I don’t know hardly anyone over there now,” he said.