This was published 9 years ago
The US-Mexico border barrier: meet the locals living on the edge
By Nick O'Malley
With thousands crossing unchecked into the US from Mexico and beyond every year, a soaring, multi-billion-dollar border fence has been built to try to keep them out. Locals say it's a solution full of holes.
One night last year Linda Vickers came home to find her dogs playing in her front yard with what looked like a ball, but turned out to be a human skull. This was a gruesome discovery, but not a surprising one. Linda, her husband, Mike, and the volunteer border patrol outfit he runs have found hundreds of bodies on and around their ranch in southern Texas in recent years, and there are undoubtedly hundreds more out there, lost to the scavengers.
Mind the gap: Nature sanctuary manager Max Pons at a 5.5-metre-high gate along the US-Mexico border fence. Further along, a gap allows unhindered road access. Credit: Christopher Trejo
Mike Vickers photographs the bodies and enlarges the best shots into big, glossy prints to display at Tea Party rallies, where he raises money for the volunteer patrols. Many of the bodies are of children.
After you die in the US south-west, the caracara birds eat your eyes first. "Look at the blood on this one," says Mike, pointing out details in a photo of a young man slumped against a tree with a viscous mess spilling from his eye sockets and running over gaunt cheeks onto his T-shirt. "He was still alive when the birds got to him."
Barrier method: Brownsville resident Pamela Taylor, who lives next to a gap in the fence. Credit: Christopher Trejo
He seems to be right. In other photos the eyes and lips look to have been plucked cleanly from the dead. Anyway, no one will know for sure - there are so many corpses turning up around here that there is no time for detailed investigations.
There have long been people willing to make the dangerous trek north into the United States from Mexico. However, to get an idea of why there are so many turning up dead around here, more than 100 kilometres north of the border, it helps to travel further south to the very tip of Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico at the border city of Brownsville.
Here you can see some of the strangest fruits of America's rush to fortify its southern border with a towering, multi-billion-dollar fence, a growing army of border guards and a high-tech surveillance arsenal of electronic sensors, cameras, drones and satellites. The fence stops, starts and weaves chaotically through Brownsville's suburbs, blocking out some Americans on the southern side and scything through ranches and farmland, dividing one golf course but leaving another open, looming over a university, and ceasing entirely at an industrial estate only to resume beyond it.
Here, many of the most fervent supporters of tough border control are baffled by what the federal government has done to their city.
Head count: Mike Vickers, leader of a volunteer border patrol unit, often finds corpses of illegal immigrants near his southern Texas ranch house.Credit: Nick O'Malley
From Pamela Taylor's front deck, you can see the fence - dun-coloured iron spars that rise up as wide as a fist and nearly as deep as a forearm to end in flat spikes about four metres from the ground - running along the side of a flood levy beyond a field of cabbages. Taylor, an 86-year-old widow, lives on a bend in the Rio Grande on American land that has been fenced onto the Mexican side.
Sitting under a twisted old mesquite tree, she points out the place in the corner of her yard where Mexican fieldworkers used to camp on their way north to work in the 1950s. They would cook tortillas on an open fire and leave a warm bundle of the flat rounds by her door when they moved on. Back then no one gave a second thought to legal crossing points or visas.
A map of the fence line – the Rio Grande provides a natural barrier along more than 2000 kilometres of the border.Credit: Newscom
She points further along a post-and-rail fence to where she once found a duffle bag packed with 40 kilograms of marijuana in the folds of a bougainvillea, apparently abandoned by drug mules spooked by Border Patrol officers. She called the local sheriff, Conrado Cantu, but not long after he was jailed for 24 years for working with the Gulf Cartel that had seized control of Matamoros, Brownsville's Mexican sister-city over the river, in one of the many battles of the drug war that has claimed 77,000 lives since 2006. "Really, I was just delivering their drugs for them," she says with a laugh.
As long as Taylor has lived here people have crossed the river at a weir behind the family home. Things turned ugly in about 1998, when a Fagin-style character started sending kids over the river from Mexico to steal from the border houses. US Border Patrol agents inspected the track marks left on the sandy banks of the Rio Grande where Taylor had once played with her daughters. They told her the ringleader had only one leg.
"They used to strip the garden and the cars, and would take everything that was not nailed down," she recalls. Once they even stole the donkey Taylor kept on a neighbouring vacant lot and tried to sell it before abandoning it up the road. The sheriff's department told Taylor she lived too close to the river and there was nothing they could do to help. But one day, Border Patrol agents caught a one-legged man and the thefts stopped.
Still, even after her husband died and the drug war started, Taylor never thought of leaving the home they had built by adding a room each time they adopted another of their four daughters.
The fortifications that have separated her from the rest of Brownsville were prompted not by drug wars, nor even by mass unregulated immigration, but by the 9/11 attacks of 2001. As America's response spread violently around the world, members of Congress - many of whom represented states far distant from the border - began to fret that terrorists could cross the Rio Grande to attack the homeland. Eventually the Secure Fence Act was introduced in 2006 by Peter King, a tough Republican from New York. It appropriated an initial $US1.2 billion for the building of 1100 kilometres of fence, though by 2009, $US2.4 billion had been spent in construction alone. The Congressional Research Office estimated the fence would cost $US49 billion to construct and maintain for 25 years.
What baffles Taylor, and everyone else I speak to in the area, is the way the fence incoherently stops and starts. It cuts Taylor off from the US side, but leaves a gap to pass through for the road on which she lives.
The effect is that it funnels border-crossers right past her front door. Full-moon nights are the worst, because the light makes it safer for the border-crossers to get over the river and avoid the Border Patrol agents. These days, Taylor leaves giant coolers of bottled water by her front gate so that border-crossers - either thirsty or wanting to wash the telling mud from their clothes - don't leave her taps on. She has grown used to drug couriers or terrified family groups pacing quietly through her garden. Once, she found a man sitting in an armchair in her living room beneath a portrait of her husband, hiding from the patrols. She came in from her little pottery studio and discovered he had already helped himself to a shower. Her dog chased him out.
Mexico and the US agreed under a treaty that while the river would remain the border, no structure would be built on the flood plains on either side. That means once the decision was made in Washington to build the fence through the Rio Grande Valley, a great deal of American land had to be left on its southern side.
Given that there are so many gaps in the fence, I ask another local what he thinks its purpose is. "I dunno. Makes people in Iowa feel safe, I suppose," he says, referring to the northern state that has become crucial in US federal elections. A night later, I put this theory to a social worker I meet in a bar. He agrees and adds, "If they don't feel safe, I just wish they'd build a fence around their own f...ing state."
The day after the Republican Party lost the 2012 US election, one of its most influential media supporters, Charles Krauthammer, confidently diagnosed the shattered party's chief failure. "The problem is hardly structural," he wrote reassuringly in his Washington Post column. "It requires but a single policy change: border fence plus amnesty."
Some 71 per cent of America's 45 million Latino voters had just supported the Democrats. This loss came after a campaign in which Republican candidates monstered the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented - and mainly Mexican - immigrants. The Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, had boasted he would make their lives so miserable, they would opt for "self-deportation" rather than stay in the US. Worse, as far as Republican strategists were concerned when thinking of future polls, the Latino population was rapidly growing and later this century could become the nation's dominant ethnic group.
Krauthammer was championing a policy long discussed but never fully embraced by the Republicans. The plan is to build a relationship with the 45 million by extending a conditional welcome to the 11 million. The party's white southern base, already skittish about the changing colour of the nation, would be mollified with a fortified border that would prevent further unregulated immigration.
The Democratic Party is more sympathetic to undocumented immigrants, but supports fence-and-amnesty policy for the same reason: it combats Republicans in the rust-belt states where the loss of manufacturing jobs infuriates once-solid Democratic constituencies. President Barack Obama backs reform, too, but he knows the only way to make it happen is to clear the way for Republicans to back it. Confoundingly, that has led to him increasing the number of deportations carried out, in the hope immigration does not become a hot-button issue and provoke a populist reaction.
None of this means much to Joe De La Garza, whom most days can be found sitting on the bench under the awning outside his Brownsville store and garage, glaring across the road at what he invariably calls "that f...ing fence". Before it was built, he used to have barbecues on the flood levy with his family, and fish and shoot on the far side. Now the fence rises up before him and, in the summer, the vertical bars radiate enough heat to drive him back indoors. When the wind blows hard, it howls in some sections.
His friend Max Pons joins us. He tells me about the time he caught a back full of buckshot from a shotgun blast when he fled into the scrub after stumbling across a drug transfer while doing a wildlife count for his master's degree. Pons, the manager of a sanctuary in the area owned by the non-profit Nature Conservancy, agrees to show me where the fence ends. We drive in his truck, the fence on our left as we head towards the Gulf coast, and come across another road, but rather than being unguarded, this one is defended by a huge gate with lights and cameras. Pons ambles up to a keypad and bangs in a PIN. With an electronic hum, the gate to the United States eases open.
"Why is this road gated and the next one not?" I ask, pointing along the bank to another dirt road that passes unhindered through the fence. He shrugs. "What's to stop someone from sticking a gun in your face and asking for the PIN?" I ask. He shrugs and chuckles.
We drive on through orchards owned by the Loops. The Loop family has farmed the area for generations and now it is divided by the fence, with some family homes on the north, others on the south. The previous day, I'd met the Loop patriarch, Leonard, selling apples in his roadside store. He told me that sometimes in the fields, one of his grandsons shows off by scaling the fence. It takes him about a minute. And he told me that after heavy rain you can see muddy marks high on the fence where others have done the same thing.
Pons and I drive on, looking through the fence into the backyards of people I'd doorknocked the day before. One of them had been at work in his garage. When I asked what he thought about the barrier that ran through his yard, he barely looked up. "They have trees over there," he said. "Plenty of wood to make a ladder."
A couple of kilometres further on, the fence ends right in the middle of a field of the Loop family's freshly planted sorghum. There is no apparent reason for this to be the spot where the US's physical protection from the south should cease. Over the seedlings to the northeast, I can see a Border Patrol checkpoint. Straight ahead there is more farmland, then national park and, after about 25 kilometres, the Gulf of Mexico.
In Washington DC, when they argue about the southern border fortifications, opponents like to say the solution to an 18-foot fence is a 19-foot ladder. Scott Nicol, who lives outside the border town of Hidalgo, 80 kilometres north-west of Brownsville, tells me this is not quite true. At the border fence by an old pump in Hidalgo, he shows me a pile of ladders gathered and dumped by the Border Patrol. A quick inspection reveals you only need a ladder of about 16 feet. From the top rung, you can haul yourself over.
We walk along the fence as Nicol, a local teacher, tells me about research he is doing for a book on the fence. He has spent years filing Freedom Of Information Act requests, and is the first person I meet who can explain the way it stops and starts.
As soon as the federal government began acquiring land for the fence, Texans, who don't take kindly to people trying to take their land, fought back hard. Local authorities bit back, too. As a result, in towns like Brownsville, the federal government was not allowed to build barriers across county roads, like the one into Pamela Taylor's home. It could, however, cross private roads, like those heading through the Loop farms. But on those it had to build those gigantic gates.
As the legal battles went on, the contractors started missing completion deadlines and bonuses. Since the contracts stipulated the amount of fence that was to be built, not where along the border it was to be built, contractors put it wherever they could most easily acquire the land, says Nicol. As a result, some of the fortifications appeared in the middle of nowhere, far from known smuggling routes. Nicol says Border Patrol guards he has spoken to are baffled and angry about the waste, desperate as they are for resources along the known routes.
Not far inland from Hidalgo is Alamo, where in a legal aid office I meet a Mexican woman I have agreed to name only as Maria S. Maria's daughter Laura had three children with a man called Sergio. With their oldest child, Laura and Sergio crossed the river from the Mexican town of Reynosa to the Texan border city of McAllen. Living in McAllen, Laura endured a violent relationship with Sergio, having two more children before eventually securing a restraining order against him. He finally left, but not before telling Laura he'd kill her if he ever saw her back in Mexico. Maria began living on both sides, relying on tourist visas into the US to help raise her three grandchildren.
On June 8, 2009, Laura and two friends went out dancing while Maria looked after the children. On the way home, their car was stopped for a traffic infringement. Without documents, Laura was turned over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who, according to Maria, coerced Laura into signing a voluntary departure form, waiving any right of appeal she might have had to stay in the US and allowing for her immediate deportation. Her friends say Laura wept and begged the agents not to deport her. She told them she would be killed, and about her children, but before dawn, she was heading back into Reynosa.
Speaking through an interpreter, Maria does not weep when she tells me about how they found Laura's body incinerated in a car, her wrists wired to the steering wheel, just three days later. The quiet tears come only when she speaks about the children. The oldest is 13 now and too scared to go outside. He knows the younger ones were lucky enough to be born on this side of the river and are citizens, safe from deportation. His fear is that if he is caught, he will be deported and separated from what is left of his family. Maria went back to Reynosa to testify against Sergio, who is in prison, but now she lives in McAllen, without documents, to look after the children. She is terrified she might be picked up one day while they are at school. Who would raise them if Sergio's friends caught her?
I was introduced to Maria by Jennifer Harbury, a lawyer who now works as an advocate for undocumented immigrants. We met in a Starbucks in a dusty strip mall where she told me terrible stories.
Violence has been growing along with the reinforcement of the Border Patrol, which has doubled in size over the past decade, and the recent surge in the number of immigrants from Central America travelling along dangerous smuggling lines through Mexico. Shortly before I arrived in Brownsville, a Border Patrol agent committed suicide after being accused of the rape, abduction and attempted murder of two women and a 14-year-old girl. In another case this year, four unarmed men were shot dead in the back of a pick-up truck by officers in a helicopter, while a 16-year old Mexican boy was shot 10 times through the fence by guards who say he threw stones at them.
A leaked internal Border Patrol report was scathing about the agency's use of lethal force, saying its agents had killed 19 people in 67 shootings over two years, most if not all of them unarmed. But Harbury was most worried about a recent surge of unaccompanied children fleeing cartel violence in Central America, who travel across Mexico to the US. The surge attracted much attention earlier this year, peaking in June, when 10,662 minors turned themselves in to US Border Patrol. The number dropped to 3141 in August, perhaps after rumours of an amnesty for children were dispelled.
Well before the surge of children gained national attention, Mike Vickers was used to dealing with the dead and dying, and he expects it will continue. His ranch lies 75 miles (120 kilometres) up a highway north of McAllen on the border. The distance is significant. Within the 70-mile limit, Border Patrol officers have greater licence to stop and search suspected border-crossers, and to quickly deport them. That's how Laura found herself back in Reynosa before sunrise that morning. Many immigrants pay smugglers not only to get them across the border, but past the 70-mile mark and the second line of Border Patrol checkpoints.
No far from the Vickers' home is the HQ of the Texas Border Volunteers. The group mounts regular patrols, spending long nights in hunting hides built along the smuggling paths and calling in Border Patrol agents when they spot immigrants. At his shed, Vickers gears up, carefully checking the three handguns he'll carry tonight, a .22 magnum, a little .380 Ruger "for in-close" and a .45. He debates taking his military-style semi-automatic rifle, then locks it away in his truck before we head out at dusk in a camouflage all-terrain vehicle, one of a fleet parked in the shed.
Coyotes in the distance howl at the sunset as we come to a gate which Vickers calls the "Welcome to America gate", because one day last year an armed smuggler unwittingly led a party of 33 Chinese nationals right up to a hide full of volunteers. They came out of the shadows with their weapons drawn and one growled, "Welcome to America, motherf...ers."
"They scattered but we had good air support that night, got 27 of them," says Vickers. We enter a field where a blue light flashes on a mast in a paddock. At its base, Border Patrol agents have placed a cooler full of water and an emergency radio with instructions on how to call for help in Mandarin, English and Spanish. Heading back towards Vickers' home, we pass a Border Patrol truck with a thermal imaging array deployed from its roof. It's tracking a group moving up a dry creek bed near Vickers' property.
Sitting at their dining table later that night under the stuffed head of a white-tailed deer, Mike and Linda go through their photos. Linda is particularly proud of one that shows a man bearing the tattoos of the notorious El Salvadorian gang MS-13, cowering in a tree to escape her dog Tinkerbell, a huge mastiff. She points out another of a girl with an anguished face who looks close to giving birth. "Look, a pregnant female," says Linda. "She's about to have her own little American citizen."
The Vickers want the border sealed and reinforced. They're not just sick of living with the danger posed by people smuggling, they fear the immigrants themselves. Mike says he worries that America's culture is being diluted and its health and education system strained. He fears terrorist groups might use the border, too. This concern is not unfounded. In 2010, a Somali member of a known terrorist group crossed into the US through Brownsville. Before he was convicted, he admitted he'd previously smuggled in seven other Somalis. Congress was told this was one of several credible reports of terrorists attempting to cross the southern border.
Later, I drive back past a spot where Vickers had once found a dead girl. She'd had one sock on, $US3 in her pocket and a small Spanish Bible. "She just kind of lay up against that tree and died," Vickers told me.