NEWSLETTER

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY JAMES MARTIN

One morning back in September, a cowboy in southern Arizona found a human skull in the desert near the Mexican border. Over the years, our cowboy, a man named Scott, had seen two complete bodies as well as a number of loose rib cages and arm bones in the brush. Running across human remains out on the range wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary for him. The land where he grazes his cattle, the eastern edge of the Sonoran Desert outside Nogales, is both one of the harshest physical environments in the continental US and one of the most heavily trafficked points of entry for illegal immigrants from Mexico. Last year, officials there recovered the bodies of at least 230 migrants who had died trying to make it into the state, many of them through this treacherous stretch of border.

I gave Scott a call and asked him if I could join him in a cattle roundup to see what it’s like out there, and he said sure.

All of the black cattle are Brangus breed. The white cow and her calf crossed the US-Mexico barbed-wire border in search of greener grass

A few days later at dawn we set out on horseback. There were seven cowboys and myself. As we rode up a narrow valley a few minutes south of his ranch, a Border Patrol agent in a pressed green uniform stepped out from under a mesquite tree.

“Our sensors detected some heavy traffic ahead and we’re waiting in ambush,” he told us as another agent with a walkie-talkie stomped over through the grass. It was obvious that our presence would disrupt their ambush and since we had work to do anyway, we continued on down the valley.

The breed of cattle we were out to wrangle were Brangus—a hybrid of Indian Brahman and Scottish Angus. The cows are bred to combine the Angus’s stocky build with the Brahman’s genetic resistance to heat and disease, which helps them cope with the sweltering Arizona summers. The ranch we were working for rears only black-haired Brangus, so I was a little surprised when we finally came on our cattle and I noticed a white-haired cow and her calf casually grazing in the midst of the herd.

This group was apprehended and handcuffed by the US Border Patrol around 8 AM. A Border Patrol helicopter had spotted them in Potrero Canyon, near Meadow Hills Estates.

“That cow comes from our neighbor just on the other side of the border,” Scott explained to me. “The Mexican cattle come through holes that smugglers and coyotes [Mexican men who serve as border-crossing guides] cut in the barbed-wire fence. We kick them back over and repair the hole, but they just keep walking the fence until they find another opening. Their ranch’s land is overgrazed and the owner doesn’t have enough help to herd them in. They’ll be back again next week.”

Arizona has been one of the biggest flash points in the fight over illegal immigration. Despite the state taking up only about a fifth of the overall US-Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that more than half of all illegal entries come across its southern edge. The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (the creepier, more militant splinter of the Minuteman Project), headquartered in Scottsdale, built ten miles of border fencing on a nearby supporter’s ranch in early 2006. And when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act later that year, ordering the DHS to put up 700 miles of double-layered fence by the end of 2008, the majority of the barrier was set to run across the bottom of Arizona. So far they’ve finished 76 miles.

These cowboys are flanking a large calf. The calf will be castrated, branded, vaccinated, cut, and tagged before it stands again.

I asked one of the cowboys I was riding with what he thought of the fence. “If anything, it might help this section of pasture,” he told me. “But a lot of the land out here is just too steep and out-of-the-way to build anything on.”

The argument for the fence is pretty cut and dry: Put it up, no one comes in. But opponents contend that rather than curbing the flow of illegals into the US, the gap-ridden fence will simply redirect migrants into more remote and hazardous routes. In addition to the danger of trekking through the Sonoran on foot or in the back of a crowded truck, a series of recent US Border Patrol crackdowns on entries has driven up the cost of being smuggled into the States. This has led to increasing rivalry between smuggling gangs and to the emergence of bajadores, basically pirates who steal other smugglers’ cargo (i.e., people). And even if neither the desert nor the bajadores get you, there’s still the chance of running into the well-armed drug runners who often use the same smuggling trails.


TO BE CONTINUED
THE BRANDED AND THE STRANDED | 1 | 2 |

< PREV

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

NEXT >

POST A COMMENT [SIGN IN] Hi, in case you haven't heard, you can now sign up to become a "member" of Viceland.com, which entitles you to all sorts of amazing benefits like pictures and a nickname. Click here to make your own profile. You can still comment if you don't, but you gotta do it all 'nonymously.

Name:
Comment: