Author: nmkatecunningham@gmail.com

Has governor’s emergency declaration discouraged immigrants? Depends on whom you ask

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

LAS CHEPAS, MEXICO — Migrants about to jump into the United States from Mexico still stop in at Ignacio Juarez’s homefront grocery store, a last chance before the U.S.-Mexico border for a frosty drink, toilet paper or a chance to reconsider the danger in the desert ahead.

Juarez and his wife, Erlinda, still take in the badly injured, the dehydrated and the tired.

With its rare electric and phone lines in this remote parcel of northern Chihuahua state, the Juarez’s casita is a place where Mexicans compare notes on getting past the Border Patrol and making it into the United States.

But Juarez and others who live and work in northern Mexico say Gov. Bill Richardson’s 6-week-old declaration of a state of emergency along the border has discouraged some immigrants from crossing over.

Ranchers on the U.S. side disagree.

This outpost, a migrant staging area abandoned but for 30 people, looks emptier today. Mexican police last week plowed down 32 buildings where immigrants hid as they prepared for their journeys.

It’s quieter than it was. More Border Patrol agents, Luna County sheriffs and New Mexico State Police are working to deflect wouldbe crossers from the border, a quarter-mile from the Juarezes’ home.

On a recent night, Carlos Sanchez, an agent with Grupos Beta, a division of the Mexican federal government charged with helping migrants along the border, says he has never seen so many Border Patrol vehicles.

The SUVs are perched on lookout points along the main road into Las Chepas from Palomas, Mexico.

Sanchez, a 12-year veteran of the agency, estimates the number of migrants trying to leave Mexico has been cut in half since mid-August.

U.S. Border Patrol statistics show a slight drop in the number of apprehensions, but not by 50 percent. In July, agents caught 11,569 immigrants in the El Paso sector, which includes two west Texas counties and all of New Mexico. In August, 12,104. As of Tuesday, with three days left in September, the number was 9,212.

Sanchez and colleague Marcos Armenta say the true number of migrants trying to leave Mexico doesn’t make a big difference to them.

Dressed in day-glo orange uniforms, the agents are busy, talking to the migrants who want to cross. Just five minutes into their shift on a recent evening, they pull over a nine-passenger van on a dirt road heading into Las Chepas. Nearly 20 migrants are jammed into the van.

“I’ll take a job in whatever there is,” says Puerto Vallarta resident Ernesto Garcia, who trims hedges and pulls weeds for a living.

As Garcia talks about his goal to earn more than $5 a day, Sanchez and Armenta stick their heads in the van and hand out fliers that explain immigrants’ rights if they are apprehended in the United States and outline perils of the landscape.

If you are going to go, keep drinking water, they say. Watch out for snakes. Don’t sleep in the arroyos. Don’t leave anyone behind.

The pair give the same advice an hour later, when they come across 15 men ducked behind a cement and stone wall, waiting for night to turn the sky black.

Guerrero state native Alfonso de Jesus Viviano says he can’t be afraid of what might happen in the next few days. He’s got to get to a place where he can earn enough to feed his wife and three kids — anything more than the $7 a day he makes as a butcher.

“Better fear for now than hunger later,” he says.

While the agents try to persuade immigrant countrymen to turn back, few do.

As he drives along the border, Armenta points to the landscape, New Mexico’s Luna County on his right, a blank chunk of Chihuahuan desert on his left. “Look at the Johnson ranch,” he says, his hand pointing north to a lush green field dotted with red stripes. “There’s money and water, and they are growing chile, onions, watermelon.”

“Over here,” he says, “We’re growing chamisa.”

Earlier this summer, Joe and Teresa Johnson estimated that 500 immigrants crossed their 102,000-acre ranch a day. This week, Joe Johnson said it’s hard to estimate how many are crossing. But he believes the number is increasing, perhaps as much as 40 percent, since Richardson declared the emergency Aug. 12.

The Johnsons have long struggled to keep immigrants from tearing apart their fence, eight miles of which runs along the border. They’ve fought to make sure cattle aren’t scared from their water troughs by bathing immigrants.

“We are seeing more Border Patrol, but they (immigrants) are still trampling over the top of us,” Joe Johnson says. “I just hope we keep getting more agents or military. We have a positive start, even though it’s getting worse.”

Old school buses that leave from the town center in Palomas and drop riders in Las Chepas, where they wait to enter the United States, now make a third stop at the southern edge of Johnson’s property.

“We do applaud the governor’s efforts,” Johnson says. “We just need more help.”

About 15 miles northeast of the Johnson place, rancher Steve Allen has a theory about what he says is an increase in immigrants coming through his ranch.

“It’s like they said, ‘If we’re going to cross, we better do it now,’ ” Allen says.

The immigrants he sees these days hustle faster through the mesquite and creosote that decorate the landscape. He thinks word got out about the state of emergency, and an expected influx of Border Patrol agents, and immigrants rushed to the border to avoid having to cross with increased patrols.

One hundred five new agents started work earlier this week in the Deming and Lordsburg areas, doubling the number of agents assigned to the Deming station this fiscal year.

The El Paso sector is slated to receive 305 new agents by the next fiscal year.

Officials say that staffing increase is unrelated to the emergency declaration and part of a long-term border security plan.

While the stepped-up law enforcement near Columbus and Deming includes more mobile checkpoints on local roads, some of what the $1.75 million in emergency declaration money will buy has yet to arrive.

Columbus Mayor Martha Skinner says her village of 2,000, three miles from Mexico, will hire three new police officers in as soon as six weeks.

That will more than double the local police force. Skinner is grateful for the help.

“Of course, (the money) just lasts a year,” she says. “We’re going to try and do it for a year and see what happens.”

Published Sept. 30, 2005.

Chasing a dream: For Mexicans who try to enter the States illegally in search of a better life, the stakes are high. So are U.S. government costs to stop the flow.

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

ALONG THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER – Elizabeth Sanchez Luna left Mexico City hungering for a job that would pay more than the $45 a week she earned in a bakery.

She fled, on wheels and then on foot, for a chance to support her two children and her parents. A chance for something better, through whatever job she could find in the United States.

But the 29-year-old – dressed in a black sweat shirt and Lycra running pants, lacking a backpack or even a bottle of water – made it just a mile into her dream before U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped her for illegally entering the United States.

“I came to look for a job,” Luna said in Spanish in late July after being fingerprinted in an office trailer in Columbus, just miles from the border. “Any kind of a job.”

In the United States, she predicted, as she pulled back her long hair to release heat from her neck, “I can make in a day what I made in a week.”

Just as Luna would, other immigrants take any job they can find, dashing across the desert for a chance to clean hotels or build homes in Albuquerque or Aspen. To be a sanitation worker in Chicago or a farmhand in North Carolina.

They might send money from those jobs home to relatives, but some people say their presence puts stress on social, educational and health care systems in the United States.

It’s an issue causing waves nationwide – especially in border states like New Mexico.

Gov. Bill Richardson last week declared a state of emergency in four southern New Mexico counties, citing an increase in human and drug smuggling in the 185-mile border between the state and Mexico. Much of the $1.75 million the declaration frees up will go to bolster local and state law enforcement.

Luna, a first-time offender who said she got separated from a friend after stepping into a desolate stretch of southern New Mexico, was the 97th immigrant caught by agents in the area that day. She later was sent back to Mexico.

Her effort – and those of more than 103,000 other immigrants who have been stopped this fiscal year in the El Paso Sector – are keeping Border Patrol agents and borderland residents up all night. They also have kept the federal government pouring out more than $1 billion a year nationwide.

In the sector, which includes two west Texas counties and all of New Mexico, more than 1,200 agents last fiscal year caught 104,430 immigrants. The federal fiscal year runs from October through September.

No one knows for sure how many others have slipped past, although agents estimate they catch anywhere from two-thirds to 95 percent of those who enter.

One way to measure the number they miss is by immigrants’ footprints, said Senior Patrol Agent Ramiro Cordero.

“If we have six (sets of) footprints and we catch four,” he says, “two went somewhere else.”

A flood of danger

Along a cement ditch that funnels water from the Rio Grande to farmers outside El Paso, Cordero spots a blanket rolled up on the Mexican side of the embankment, with a pair of shoes nearby.

“Looks like an encobijado,” he says, using a word that translates as “someone who is rolled up in a blanket” but that on the streets signifies someone killed by criminals.

“They kidnap and torture and roll you up in a blanket and throw you anywhere as a sign,” he said.

From the dirt road along the border he’s patrolling, Cordero looks into another country, watching.

The blanket is picked up by a man on the other side of the river. There’s nothing inside. He wraps it around himself and walks away.

The border is a dangerous, mysterious place: The risks of crossing can be intertwined with the hazard of getting caught in drug, gang or turf wars.

About 600 miles to the southeast of El Paso, in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, more than 100 people have been killed this year, including 18 police officers and a city councilor. The U.S. State Department last month extended a travel warning it had issued for American citizens along the border, and the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo shut its doors briefly. In Juarez, hundreds of women have been slain and left to rot in the desert since the early 1990s.

In and around El Paso, another kind of death lurks. Immigrants drown as they try to cross into the United States. Miles to the west, in southern New Mexico, they die of dehydration. This fiscal year, 25 people have died in the sector; 399 have been rescued. In the 2004 fiscal year, 18 people died and 87 were rescued, according to the Border Patrol.

Cordero said the increase in reported deaths this year over last could be because the patrol is keeping better records. But the desert swallows bodies nonetheless.

Cordero, a former El Paso police officer, is tasked with a mighty job: stopping the immigrants who risk it all for a chance at something better.

It’s a job others want to do as well. Civilian members of the Minuteman Project plan to patrol the New Mexico-Mexico border this fall, saying the Border Patrol has not done enough to secure it.

Some Minutemen volunteers say terrorists, specifically members of al-Qaida, could be entering the United States from Mexico.

And while Border Patrol officials hope that won’t happen, they say they’ve got to be on the lookout.

“We have to be vigilant,” Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier said.

With seemingly thousands of people desperately wanting in from a variety of countries, the United States has spent billions to keep them out.

A homeland security bill passed by the Senate in July contains funding for an additional 1,000 Border Patrol agents.

Already, 300 agents are scheduled to head to the El Paso Sector in the next 12 months, Mosier said.

For now, Cordero and other agents walk the line, searching out lawbreakers and taking them to a detention facility in downtown El Paso. Some agents – members of the Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue Team – also rescue those in danger of dying.

With his high-power binoculars, Cordero can see Mexico across from him. In some places, the country is just feet from where he works, but in so many senses, it is worlds away.

Scheming against the schemers

Farther west, in New Mexico’s Luna County, Field Operations Supervisor Jack Jeffreys has binoculars, too.

They allow him to see in the dark, giving him a green, grainy picture of the desert at night. Mammoth moths and jittery jack rabbits dart about. Lights from traffic along the Mexican side of what’s called Border Road sweep light trails over his eyes.

The night-vision goggles are among the high-tech devices the Border Patrol, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, uses.

Agents patrol the border area in SUVs and Hummers. On ATVs and horses. From the air and by bike. They’ve got dogs, mirrors, sensors, cameras.

Name any high-tech surveillance gadget, and the patrol probably has it.

But those who smuggle drugs and people have technology, too.

GPS instruments help them navigate remote and rugged terrain, Jeffreys said. Forget craggy landmarks or dusty meeting places stomped out in the sand. Smugglers use geographical coordinates to decide where to meet and load the cars that whisk immigrants off to new lives.

Apart from technology, criminals also have an arsenal of tricks to enter the United States, Border Patrol officials said.

Some strap carpet strips to the bottom of their shoes so agents can’t follow their footprints in the sand. Some clip cow hooves to their footwear, to leave animal prints in their wake. Some have dressed up as clergy or soldiers, while others have used fake government vehicles, including those of a New Mexico Department of Transportation truck and a Border Patrol unit.

Others have stuffed children into pi?atas or sewn people into car seats to get them through ports of entry.

Less-sophisticated standbys remain: a pair of bolt or wire cutters to take out fences; an immigrant sent to distract agents while others sneak across the cactus-dotted countryside.

Creeping along in his SUV with the lights off, Jeffreys tries to find a small group of immigrants, six or maybe eight, who were spotted by an agent manning the control tower for the cameras that line the border.

He drives through the creosote bush, tumbleweeds and mesquite, steering with one hand and leaning out the window, peering through his night-vision goggles.

The group he is after turned south toward Mexico, the voice on his radio says. Radio traffic, however, crackles with reports of other groups giving it a go in other parts of Jeffreys’ patrol area, which includes 53 miles border miles and 14,000 square miles.

The later it gets, the busier. Immigrant traffic picks up, on public land and on private ranches. Dogs guarding homes bark their owners awake. One rancher 22 miles down the road from the Columbus office estimates 500 immigrants cross his property every 24 hours, leaving a trail of garbage, broken water lines and freed cattle.

As Jeffreys drives, with the lights on now, he has time to reflect on the strange things he has seen, where even at night it’s almost unbearably warm and undeniably lonely.

Smugglers or guides once led a group of more than 150 immigrants through his patrol area, apparently to see if they could get away with it, something more common in busier border states like Arizona, he says.

He talks about the old school buses he says smugglers use to transport immigrants between staging spots on the other side of the fence.

The windows on the passenger portions of the buses are painted black or blocked by dark plastic. When the buses drive west from the town plaza in Palomas, Mexico, to drop people off in a tiny outpost called Las Chepas, mere feet from the United States, agents with binoculars can’t see in.

When the buses drive back east to Palomas, the driver’s side windows are unobscured. The buses are empty.

While Las Chepas looks like little more than an abandoned village, Border Patrol officials say it’s a major staging area for border crossers. Richardson last week called on the Mexican government to bulldoze the area.

In nine years as an agent, Jeffreys has seen many tricks. But he knows there likely will be more.

“I wouldn’t put anything past anybody,” he said.

All for a job

Walking along N.M. 9 the next day, Cruz Alberto stops to talk to the passengers in the first car he has seen since sunrise.

He asks a reporter and a photographer standing outside their SUV where he is and whether there is work nearby.

The stocky immigrant from Tabasco state says he left his town of Villa Hermosa seven days ago and hitchhiked to northern Mexico. The oldest man in his family, Alberto is in charge of his mother and seven sisters and brothers.

He is 29, lost, sunburned, dusty.

Dressed in black because legend has it that Border Patrol won’t be able to see him at night, he didn’t know he had crossed the border.

“It’s not like there was a sign or anything,” he says in Spanish.

He’s carrying an almost-empty bottle of water, as warm as the nearly 100-degree day. He hasn’t slept much and woke up on the desert floor the night before when a rattlesnake slid by his eye, he says.

His job as a delivery driver in Mexico pays $50 to $80 a week.

“It’s not enough to feed potatoes to my family. . . . I just need an opportunity to work.”

Crying for a minute under his black hat with a bent bill, Alberto says he’ll try his luck to get past the Border Patrol, if it means there’s even a possibility he’ll make it to a place with work.

Seven or eight miles from Columbus, 320 from Albuquerque, and likely hundreds more from creating a new life, Alberto keeps walking.

Published Aug.19, 2005.

Dreaming American: Having overstayed her tourist visa, Santa Fe resident Lupita Hernandez is seeking legal U.S. residency so she won’t be separated from her U.S.-born children.

Her first attempt under a law protecting abused women failed. Now her only hope lies in the halls of Congress.

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

Lupita Hernandez took a seat in her lawyer’s office, already half knowing what the letter with her name on it would say.

Hernandez’s lawyer had summoned her to Albuquerque to deliver the bad news in person: Her application to become a legal U.S. resident had been denied.

In an instant, with three pieces of paper, the life Hernandez had built in Santa Fe over 11 years began to wobble.

She no longer had the legal right to stay with the family she has created. She no longer felt free to take her two U.S.-born, American-citizen children to school or the doctor. She began to worry her family might be torn apart every time someone knocked on her door.

“The whole world fell on top of me,” the 42-year-old says of that day in February. “I’m in no man’s land.”

Hernandez’s immigration story isn’t typical. She came here legally on a 10-year tourist visa.

And she didn’t come for a better-paying job. By Mexican standards, she had a good one in her homeland – as a college-educated counselor in a Veracruz state prison.

Instead, she moved to Santa Fe to be with her then-boyfriend, who later would become her husband, then the man who abused her, then her ex-husband and her worst regret.

He was deported to Mexico, but Hernandez has no desire to return to San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz, where she might cross his path. She applied for legal residency under the Violence Against Women Act, one of more than 38,000 women who have sought protection since the law was passed in 1997.

But that door now appears closed, and her anxiety is rising.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents recently completed a sweep of Santa Fe, targeting criminal immigrants and unleashing a wave of fear even in law-abiders.

Hernandez, one of an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 immigrants in New Mexico without documents or who are in the process of getting legal status, says her biggest hope is that the immigration debate boiling in Congress will provide her with a path to legalization.

As she waits for lawmakers to act, she’s left wondering and worrying.

“I’m not sure what my future will be. The only thing I want is to stay here. Eleven years have gone by. What would I return to in Veracruz? What kind of life would I give my family there?”

For love, not money

In San Andres Tuxtla, Hernandez counseled mentally ill patients in one of Veracruz’s biggest prisons. For eight years, she washed their hair, bathed them, took them to therapy. She was surrounded by rapists, a mother who killed her two children, drug runners – 1,200 criminals total.

Unlike millions of other Mexicans who have left their country, Hernandez never seriously considered moving to the United States. But in 1995, she left those patients, that jail. She packed up and said farewell to her family, her favorite foods, her own bed.

All for the man she loved.

With a tourist visa in hand, she flew to the United States and settled in Santa Fe.

At first, Hernandez kept herself busy running her household. She became pregnant with her daughter, Ivanna, then married her boyfriend.

Slowly, she adjusted to the newness of Santa Fe, of the United States, of everything coming at her in rapid-fire English.

And she began to endure what she would never have expected: abuse at the hands of the man she thought loved her. Hernandez says he hit her often, even when she was more than six months pregnant with their daughter.

“He promised me heaven and all its stars, but I never imagined it would be like this,” she said.

“Those are the things you can’t forget.”

She was too scared to press charges, something that to this day gives her heartburn.

Her salvation came from the U.S. government, which deported her husband after a series of arrests for alcohol-related offenses, according to Hernandez’s lawyer.

After a divorce and a custody fight over Ivanna, which cost her thousands she didn’t have, Hernandez cobbled herself back together and attended a therapy group for abused women – something she still does.

For a while, she had pretty good luck finding American employers in the tony neighborhoods of Santa Fe – families who offered work mopping their floors or helping with their children.

But eventually, the most steady employers moved away. Others began asking her for a Social Security number. Jobs were just temporary. Hernandez looked for a reliable paycheck cleaning houses, a chore she still does when she can get the work.

Then she met a new boyfriend, a house painter who had come to the United States without papers. He asked not to be identified for this story due to his immigration status.

They grew as close as husband and wife, although they are not married. His work brought financial stability. Almost two years ago, they had a son, Ian.

The golden dream

The life Hernandez has built in the United States revolves around her two children and her effort to join them as a legal U.S. resident.

Ian, almost 2, is a giggly handful on his best days and a screaming bundle who can’t sit through an hourlong Mass on his worst.

He was recently diagnosed as developmentally disabled, something Hernandez says would be much harder to deal with in Mexico, because he can get speech therapy and other help more easily here.

Medicare helps pay for part of Ian’s treatments. So does the money Hernandez and her boyfriend earn, about $18,000 last year.

Ivanna, 10, attends public school in Santa Fe. Unlike in Mexico, her mother doesn’t have to pay tuition or buy books.

Hernandez has also enrolled Ivanna in dance classes – jazz, hip-hop, ballet, tap – and voice lessons.

While they paid for the dance classes – $2 for low-income students – Hernandez and her partner also saved to buy a trailer home, which they did in December. That is no small feat in Santa Fe.

“The golden dream is really a house, but this is a place to start,” Hernandez said.

The immaculate home isn’t large – three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, nothing fancy.

At the same time, Hernandez and her partner scrimped to pay the legal fees for her immigration case – $600, $800, $1,200 at a time.

Last June, just as they began to consider buying a home, the first wave of bad news hit. Her petition for residency had been denied because her ex-husband wasn’t a legal U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident when she applied for protection – a requirement under the law.

Hernandez and her attorney appealed. In February, the government again denied her plea to stay.

Since then, Hernandez has struggled with depression.

She tries to live as normally as possible, with her future, her heart and her extended family split between two countries.

The pull of family

Hernandez regularly wires money to her hometown of San Andr‚s Tuxtla – $125 some months; $200 in others, when work is good.

The cash is like gold dust in the lives of her Mexican family. Her brother got shoes that blunt the pain of standing for hours on a cigar-factory floor; a grandmother was given a decent burial; her father feasted on fried chicken for his birthday.

Leaving was hard for Hernandez, but going back presents a terrible dilemma. If she does, she risks never seeing her children again. If she doesn’t, she risks never seeing her parents.

Her mother is ailing. Her father is aging.

“My mother still doesn’t understand why I left,” she said. “And it is hard. They called me to say my grandmother had died, and I couldn’t go back. And my two uncles died, and I couldn’t go back.”

When her mother underwent surgery late last year for a tumor on her back, Hernandez was left to fret from afar, more than 1,000 miles and an international boundary away.

While she dreams of temporary permission to leave the United States, she knows her immigration status would make returning difficult. She follows the debate in Congress, looking for a glimmer of hope.

Hernandez wants Ivanna and Ian to meet their grandmother. She wants to see her mother herself for the first time in more than a decade and, maybe, for the last time.

“Do I stay or go?,” she said. “This is my mother.”

A world of what ifs

For now, with so much up in the air, Hernandez and her family have to live as if their lives weren’t on shaky ground, as if what they’ve built isn’t as wobbly as they feel, as if they couldn’t be uprooted at any moment.

In many ways, her emotions are similar to those of other immigrants who wonder what the future will bring.

She tries not to think of the what ifs, all the while planning for them.

Hernandez has a network of people in place, friends who could take care of her kids and her home if she received a deportation order. Others look out for “la migra” – immigration officers – and spread the word on their whereabouts.

Hernandez dreads the possibility of being separated from her children, but she also fears seeing her ex-husband if she had to return to San Andres Tuxtla.

More than anything, she wants an inner peace she knows deep down might never come.

“I want to work peacefully; I want to live peacefully,” she said, her eyes spilling tears.

“I don’t want to think that today everything is fine, and tomorrow they could come and arrest me – take me away – and I wouldn’t know what would happen with my children.”

Published May 25, 2007.