As the number of people crossing the border into the Coronado National Forest increases, so does the amount of debris they leave behind, adding to the environmental degradation of the area. Photo © Rebecca Clarren
Scattered beneath the broad black arms of mesquite trees are the leavings of people on the run: empty plastic bottles, opened tuna fish cans, sweatshirts, jars of foot powder. Near a scattered pack of playing cards, some turquoise underwear lies in an undignified tangle. There are plastic bottles in the trees and Coke cans in the grass. A pair of small, pink Mary Janes, the heels squashed down, sprawl a few yards away. These are the remnants of the thousands of people who have crossed the ArizonaÐMexico border just three miles to the south to scramble through the Coronado National Forest’s harsh mountains and desert. On their way to cities like Tucson, more than sixty miles from the border, most carry hope of finding work and a better life in the United States. They leave behind a trail of domestic debris.
“It’s shocking. Every hundred yards you see this amount of stuff. It’s just a mess,” says Heiko Bornhoff, a special law enforcement agent with the U.S. Forest Service. “Even our bosses don’t have a sense of it until they actually come out and see what’s going on.”
Nearby, John “Pancho” Smith, another special agent with the agency’s law enforcement division, looks through binoculars into the surrounding ochre mountains and rolling hills. Bornhoff and Smith are dressed in cotton shirts and jeans, and were it not for the guns and handcuffs carried in holsters around their waists, they could be guys out for a picnic. Except this isn’t the kind of place most people would want to go to relax. Today it’s hot and dry and the wind is a terrible nag, persistently blowing the trash and the red dirt around to no obvious end.
Bornhoff picks up a scrap of burlap from a nearby bush. It’s a clue that drug runners—who haul bricks of marijuana wrapped in burlap and duct tape on their backs—have been through here. Smith points to one of the mountain ridges across the way, and with a quick laugh explains that drug trafficking scouts are probably up there watching us. At least three major Mexican drug cartels run marijuana through these hills and, as he points out, they’re far more organized than the Forest Service.
“They’re better equipped than we are. They have cell phone coverage and they can afford to put a scout on a hill for a week at a time,” he says. Smith, fifty-two, is a veteran agent with a thick neck, shiny head and dry humor—he constantly cracks jokes that poke fun at himself or the agency. “The Forest Service lands are for multiple use—or multiple abuse,” he says, laughing.
Jokes aside, it’s eerie out here. Part of this is due to the unnerving discussion about the banditos that have been working the area in recent weeks. Seven, maybe eight Mexican nationals have been traversing this stretch of borderland at night, accosting groups of immigrants, stealing their money and their shoes, and raping the women. So far they have eluded all law enforcement by just running back over to the other side of the Mexican border. Suddenly, the guns Smith and Bornhoff carry seem comforting.
The Mexican border meets the Coronado only four miles to the south. The seven strands of barbed wire and multiple cattle guards that line the border are hardly effective in keeping undocumented immigrants from crossing into the United States. Ironically, the increased traffic through here is largely the result of decade-old Border Patrol and Homeland Security initiatives aimed at reducing immigration in urban areas. They’ve worked to some extent: in cities like San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas, an increase in fences and roads, motion sensors and floodlights, and an army of new agents have succeeded in decreasing illegal immigration arrests by a few thousand per day. But the problem hasn’t disappeared; it’s just shifted elsewhere, including onto the vast acreage of public lands that compose the ArizonaÐMexico border. Officials assumed such rugged and isolated terrain would deter would-be migrants. They were wrong. In fiscal year 2005, a record 415 people died trying to cross the border into the United States—more than half perished in the Arizona desert. During that same time period, the Border Patrol’s Tucson office arrested more than 438,000 people attempting to illegally enter the United States. The agency is unwilling to speculate about how many people actually make it into this country, but the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that nationwide, 485,000 undocumented people successfully cross the border every year.
“Like squeezing a balloon, the policy has moved the illegal immigration from one sector to another without decreasing the overall volume of illegal crossings,” states a 2004 report on border security by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Homeland Security.
As this story goes to press Congress is debating what to include in a massive thousand-page immigration policy aimed at staving this steady flow of illegal human traffic. The Senate has been unable to reach any compromise legislation, and certain politicians have suggested that Congress is unlikely to pass legislation this year. For Forest Service employees who are watching the landscape deteriorate and become increasingly dangerous, such lack of action would be absurd.
“It’s a sacrifice area out here. It’s getting worse and worse. It feels like it just falls on deaf ears,” says Smith as he looks out on the desert, crisscrossed by hundreds of new trails. “At a meeting last year of all the [law enforcement officers] in the country this guy stood up and he said, ‘In a post-9/11 environment, how can the U.S. tolerate the occupation of federal lands by armed foreign nationals?’ Everyone in the room just cheered.”
Locals call the mountains that pucker the Coronado “Sky Islands.” It’s an apt name because, like atolls in the South Pacific, these high-elevation ecosystems are diverse and isolated from the flatlands below. When I think of the desert, I picture the stoic saguaro cacti with their many long arms, or prickly pear, or sand. But the Sky Islands support an incredible array of plants that include the spruce, fir, aspen and oak forests we tend to associate with the Rocky Mountains, as well as a host of rare species such as Mexican spotted owls and the Huachuca water umbel, a semi-aquatic plant. Some organisms have been isolated for so long at the top of these ranges that they’ve evolved into slightly different species.
“It’s a very special place,” says Jim Rorabaugh, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, based in Tucson. Thinking back on the first time he visited this area as a young biologist nearly thirty years ago, he recalls, “It was magical. It was during the summer monsoon season and there were these spectacular thunderstorms. It was green and lush and it had this tropical feeling.”
Today, parts of these “islands” are about as remote and untracked as a city park. A dirt path leading down a hillside into a dry riverbed is dense with overlapping footprints of tennis shoes. I try to count, but lose track. Bornhoff explains that these tracks were likely made last night or this morning.
Yet it’s not just footprints that are having an impact on the landscape. Not far from here is the husk of a blue-and-white Chevrolet Suburban. Shot up with bullet holes, its windows are blown out and the tires are deflated. Smith says it was likely left by someone who illegally drove it across the desert until the tires blew, and estimates there are three other such vehicles within a two-mile radius of here.
“The Chief [Dale Bosworth] flew over here a few weeks ago and he said, ‘Since when did the national forests become parking lots?’” Smith says, raising an eyebrow.
Removing the hulking frames in a way that doesn’t cause additional resource damage will entail a military helicopter, some heavy chain and a big hook.
Cars like this one and foot traffic by illegal aliens and smugglers have created hundreds of new trails and roads and, according to a 2003 Government Accountability Office report, “destroyed cactus and other sensitive vegetation, including habitat for endangered species.”
Still, the concern that everyone talks about the most is the last thing welcomed in an era plagued with extended drought: fire. As immigrants make their way across the land, many will light small fires under trees for warmth or to heat some food or as a call for help. These fires aren’t made the way the Boy Scouts make them, with a ring of rocks to prevent cinders from escaping. As that resolute wind blows through long after the immigrants have left, their smoldering fires too often spring to life.
“I swear you could map the fires and almost see a path of immigrants coming through,” says Smith, whose job includes investigating how and where fires originate. “These fires will tear across here at thirty miles an hour.”
Such fires at the wrong time of year, when humidity is low and moisture is on vacation in the north, are high-intensity blazes. It will take hundreds of years for the forest to regenerate, says Glenn Frederich, a Coronado biologist based in Sierra Vista. The fires have devastated habitat for the Mexican spotted owl, an endangered species that lives in the Douglas-fir and large oaks that survive in shaded canyons.
“I know of owl territory that hasn’t been occupied since we had one high-intensity fire eight years ago,” he says. “Plus, when you don’t have cover and the summer rains come down really hard, suddenly you get this massive erosion. The ash produced from the fire can get washed down into the stream and bury the vegetation along the stream bottoms.”
The gills of rare amphibians like Sonoran tiger salamanders and leopard frogs don’t work when there’s ash in the water. Other endangered species, like jaguars and the lesser long-nosed bat, are also imperiled by the general increase in people moving through their habitat, according to Angie McIntire at the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
Such border activity is also impacting basic science research. Biologists have had to change the ways they study populations of species because it’s too dangerous to be out in the field alone or at night.
“I think twice about going out,” says Frederich. He used to conduct spotted owl surveys at night, but now he goes out at dawn and relies on volunteers to accompany him. “I’m hesitant to go to certain places because there are more drug runners out there. It’s just more dangerous.”
By the time we leave the Coronado and head west across the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge to the state highway, it’s mid-afternoon and the sun’s fierce rays slice through the sky. Out on the paved road that connects Mexico with Tucson we pass swarms of green-and-white U.S. Border Patrol trucks. More than thirty people, mostly men of various ages, sit beside the road under the guard of Border Patrol agents. Caught crossing illegally, they’re waiting to be driven back to Mexico.
Clearly, the Border Patrol has an overwhelming job. Yet the agency has long been criticized by conservation groups and (behind closed doors) by public lands managers for their disregard for the environment. A report by Defenders of Wildlife, released this spring, finds that the border patrol is hurting the landscape just as much as, if not more than, the thousands of illegal border crossers.
In the past two years, the agency has launched an initiative that gives agents unrestricted off-road vehicle access across public lands and calls for road construction and backcountry “enforcement” camps in wilderness areas. Although border agents destroy endangered species habitat by driving in washes and through delicate sandy areas, the Border Patrol never completed the analysis required under the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act. Moreover, legislation passed last year allows the Department of Homeland Security to exempt the agency from all federal, state and local environmental laws when constructing walls, fences and roads along the border.
“The Border Patrol has impunity. It’s absolutely outside the law right now,” says Brian Segee, a staff attorney for Defenders of Wildlife and author of the report. “We can and we should be able to reconcile border security with environmental protection. Literally millions of dollars have been directed to the [Border Patrol] in the past ten years. If only a small fraction of that were directed at environment issues, the land and the species would be much better off.”
Defenders of Wildlife wants Congress to dedicate funding for an environmental program within the Border Patrol to educate agents and to mitigate and restore lands damaged by patrol activity. The group also wants the agency to use low-impact infrastructure like vehicle barriers, instead of a proposed ten-foot fence that would span much of the ArizonaÐMexico border.
An amendment to the immigration reform bill currently under debate in the Senate would go a long way toward these goals. Sponsored by Republican Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming, the legislation would increase the number of Border Patrol officers working border parks and other sensitive federal lands. It would also require training for agents to minimize the effects of security operations on the landscape and would create a new border strategy to protect natural resources.
“There’s a serious need for better cooperation between federal land officials and border patrol when it comes to security,” Thomas announced on the Senate floor in early April. “The efforts up until now seem to rob land managers of already scarce resources.”
There’s no denying that, says Susan Kozacek, the Coronado’s deputy forest supervisor. “The Border Patrol is not a land management agency. Border Patrol agents don’t fully understand the Forest Service’s mission and they don’t have the authority to carry it out. Our law enforcement officers understand we don’t want people driving off-road, and although the Border Patrol has a better understanding of that (than they used to), it’s not something that’s innate to them.”
Smith explains the differences in plain language:
“We’ll walk up a hill 300 yards to see over it. The Border Patrol will drive uphill and look out over the windshield,” he says.
Whether or not the amendment will make it into any final version of immigration reform offered by the Senate remains to be seen. Yet back on the border, Smith takes a broad view.
“Up to now, our problems of natural resource degradation, compared to all the other issues with illegal aliens, [haven’t been] as great as those issues. So if you look at the big picture, our priorities aren’t as high.
“We don’t weigh in on illegal immigration; our primary concern is the natural resources. But anything that can help alleviate [the impact on the land] is a good thing for us. Anything that cuts down on the damage, we’re happy.”
As we walk back toward the truck, we pass a crumpled black knapsack beneath a mesquite tree. Smith stops to peer inside. I ask if there’s anything in there.
“Nope,” he says. “Just dreams.”