No Man’s Land

ou don't mind if I carry this, do you?" Larry Vance asks before he straps a .44 Magnum handgun into a holster at his waist. It's not really a question. Vance rarely leaves home unarmed. His home, a modest white frame house with blue trim, sits on a lonely patch of dirt just north of the Mexican border in the rolling, parched landscape of southeastern Arizona. Like many of the rural homes in this part of the country, it is enclosed by a high, chain-link fence, behind which a couple of agitated dogs run about, circling the narrow perimeter between the house and the fence, vigorously protesting a visitor's arrival.

On a warm Friday evening in May, Vance has agreed to show me this stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border a few miles west of Douglas, Ariz., in the southeastern corner of the state, a hardscrabble world overshadowed by narcotics smuggling and illegal immigration. After a short drive down a dirt service road that hugs the border, Vance pulls his diesel pickup truck into some brush, pulls out a pair of binoculars and gets out of the truck. He doesn't have to wait too long. Soon, he picks up the movements of a small group-a dozen or maybe 15 people-picking their way north toward the border. Some nights-this is not one of them-he watches as Mexican buses drive to within a mile or so of the border, then drop off dozens of people who head north carrying the plastic water jugs and other necessities of an immigrant journey that now litter the landscape. This isn't a place you'll find described in many guidebooks. It's a world where hundreds of would-be immigrants die every year of exhaustion and dehydration crossing inhospitable territory, where drug traffickers brazenly brandish automatic weapons, where rural residents live uneasily with intruders who appear daily, where ranchers frequently find their fences cut and reservoirs emptied of precious water, where trash left behind by the northbound tide accumulates so quickly that volunteers from a local church wage a war on litter to keep the place from becoming a garbage dump. It's a world where longtime residents, many of whose families have lived here for generations, no longer feel comfortable, or even safe, on their own land, in their own homes.

"I've been burglarized three times," says Vance, who has lived most of his 46 years here. Two summers ago, his dogs were poisoned. His fences have been cut so many times he gave up trying to keep horses some time ago. "A lot of people might wonder why I stay here," says Vance. "Well, who do you think would buy my place?"

Troubling Questions

Throughout the 1990s, the federal government spent billions of dollars to hire more Border Patrol agents and deploy more sophisticated technology-remote sensors and cameras, for example. In some ways, those investments have paid off-federal data show that illegal border-crossings are down, and drug traffickers are being driven to take ever-greater risks. But the fact remains that thousands of people enter the United States illegally every day, and the drug trade continues to overwhelm federal agents. In the wake of Sept. 11, that raises troubling questions: If the feds can't keep drug smugglers and illegal immigrants from walking across the border, how can we expect them to keep out terrorists? Aren't terrorists at least as committed as narcotics traffickers?

It's no surprise that across the Southwest, rumors abound about Middle Eastern operatives working out of Mexico. Nearly everyone I spoke with during a week's visit to southern Arizona in mid-May had heard stories that Iraqis or Saudis or others of unknown origin had either been detained in Mexico or spotted trying to cross the border. Such fears were no doubt fueled by reports of a truck loaded with sodium cyanide-a deadly chemical that terrorists are known to covet-missing from Mexico City this spring. (The truck, which was apparently hijacked, and its load of cyanide were later recovered). There is even a new lexicon springing up among ordinary citizens in which the new foreigners, real or imagined, are referred to as OTMs-other than Mexicans.

"It's not lost on us that if you can bring drugs and illegal [immigrants] through, you can certainly bring terrorists in," says Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. In an interview in May, Ridge said federal agencies would have to take a new approach on the border, particularly the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is responsible for screening people entering the country, and the Customs Service, which is charged with keeping out contraband-everything from child pornography to drugs to nuclear weapons. "You can check people and cargo if they go through traditional checkpoints or traditional infrastructure, but in both the Great Lakes on the Canadian border and [along] the Mexican border, INS' and Customs' task is much, much greater," Ridge said.

"We know we're going to have to expend resources to put additional people and deploy technology there that we probably haven't used before," Ridge said. That acknowledgement came just days before the White House announced its plan to consolidate and reorganize federal agencies into a new Homeland Security Department, and it offers some encouragement to those who believe that substantially improving border security will require a much greater investment of resources, despite the Bush administration's claims that the new department won't require any additional funding.

Watching The Detectives

Donna De La Torre, the Customs Service director of field operations for the Arizona Customs Management Center, has a view her peers elsewhere in the country would envy: From a command center in her Tucson office, she can watch operations as they unfold hundreds of miles away at each of the seven border crossing stations in the state, known in government-speak as ports of entry. A sophisticated, remotely controlled camera system digitally records activities 24 hours a day. It's a system whose virtues seemed especially obvious after Sept. 11. "Having visual contact with all of your operations all of the time has moved us miles ahead in terms of intelligent border management," De La Torre says.

The benefits of the camera system have accrued well beyond Customs. Digital records have been used to detect smuggling patterns, to review and improve inspection procedures, to spot sloppy or even corrupt Customs and INS agents, to refute travelers' claims of abuse, to help local law enforcement officials solve crimes and even to spot the spotters-those people paid by smugglers to spy on port operations. "The ports are under constant surveillance [by smugglers]," says Rudy Cole, director of Customs' anti-smuggling operations in Arizona. "In the past, [smugglers] knew more about our ports of entry than we knew ourselves. The cameras are helping us change that."

The camera system, which has been in use for a couple of years now, has proved far more useful than anyone initially predicted. Cameras originally were placed at border crossings several years ago to provide facility security, but then Customs began to develop a plan to link all 205 of the cameras and use them more effectively, says John O'Reilly, Customs' deputy director of field operations in Arizona. Given the remoteness of most of the ports of entry here and the absence of reliable telecommunications in some areas, getting the infrastructure in place for the network was complicated. Ultimately, one of the ports had to be connected using satellite communications.

"It's a great advantage to have the cameras," says Joe Lafata, the port director in Nogales, the busiest border-crossing station in Arizona and a 90-minute drive south of Tucson. Nogales, which sits across the border from the Mexican city of the same name, is the second largest point of entry for produce entering the country. "The cameras provide daily security for our officers and backup in the case of a passenger complaint-we can pull the video up right away and put that complaint to rest and protect the inspectors as well. It's really a top-notch system. Many of the cameras have tilt-zoom capability. We can actually shoot into some of the hills here and watch the spotters as they're watching us. They're there all the time and every once in a while you get a really nice portrait of them."

Seizing Dope

Inspectors from Customs and INS together staff the primary inspection booths where all vehicles and passengers are scrutinized upon entering the port. Inspectors from both agencies work the booths interchangeably and are periodically and randomly rotated during their shifts to prevent smugglers from trying to game the system by getting in line for a particular inspector. Electronic license plate readers can alert inspectors to stolen cars moving south, and wanted drivers moving north. Customs, INS and Agriculture Department employees do more thorough inspections of selected traffic in a secondary inspection area. At the pedestrian entrance to the port, officials are testing cameras that use facial-recognition technology to scan the inbound crowd for criminals whose photos have been entered into a database. Every two seconds the camera records four faces, each of which is compared with the photos in the database at more than 60 points on the face. If there is a potential match, the camera sends an alert to a cellular phone worn by an inspector. The facial-recognition technology is particularly attractive to Lafata because it adds significantly to an inspector's capabilities without placing a lot of additional demands on the inspector's time or attention. "All of our nonintrusive technologies [X-ray systems, for example] are great, but very labor-intensive. You put in one unit that costs $4- or $5 million dollars to examine trucks and then you also have to expend another six to eight people a day to run that operation," Lafata says.

For a couple of days after Sept. 11, the drugs stopped flowing at Nogales, Lafata says. "It seemed that the smugglers just dropped off the map. But it couldn't have been three days to where they started moving again." Despite the increased scrutiny of people and vehicles at all the ports of entry, smuggling hasn't slackened. "We are overwhelmed with narcotics trafficking," says Customs' Richard Cramer, the Office of Investigation's resident agent in charge at the port. "They're hitting us underground, over ground, with every imaginable method." In December, Customs agents discovered an 85-foot tunnel from a home in Nogales, Ariz., to a flood-control channel that parallels the border in Mexico. In April, they found another tunnel under the port itself. The flood control channel presents a particularly vexing problem, Cramer says. The channel must be kept open; otherwise, the city will flood during heavy rain. But the possibilities for transporting drugs or other contraband through the channel are practically endless.

Cramer's staff of 40, including administrative personnel, is too small for the job. "My agency is very good about providing the other resources we need, such as equipment and facilities, but I could certainly use more agents. But justifying them is not as simple as saying 'Look at all the drugs.' It's difficult to quantify success. We also do long-term investigations. We can seize dope all day, and we can arrest the mules, but if we don't arrest those that are actually involved in the high-level trafficking, then we're spinning our wheels."

The Wild West

The paved road ends in Sasabe, at the small white Customs house, built in 1932 and restored in 1991. Across the border, the road turns to gravel in El Sasabe and continues south into Mexico for 65 miles before it hits pavement again. Seventy-five to 100 cars pass through here a day, along with the occasional truck hauling adobe blocks or mesquite wood north. Because the Agriculture Department doesn't send inspectors to this remote outpost, Customs officers are trained and certified to inspect the wood for pests and levy fines for violations. In addition, they also monitor the National Weather Service equipment housed in the basement of the port building.

Michael Kring, the port director, is an influential figure here. As the only law enforcement agency other than the Border Patrol for miles around-the local sheriff's office is more than 70 miles away-Customs sometimes is tapped for unlikely duties. When medical emergencies occur, people on both sides of the border turn to Customs for medical evacuations. When someone becomes stranded during the summer monsoons, Customs will stage a rescue. In negotiations with Mexican officials in Sasabe over a burning dump that was affecting air quality at the port, Kring exerted economic leverage: "There's only two gas stations in this whole area-and they're on my side. So they'll cooperate with me. You want to cross the border, you put the dump out," Kring laughs.

"We do a little bit of everything out here," he says. Mostly though, port officials seize drugs. There were so many high-speed chases through Sasabe that a few months ago, Kring had concrete barriers installed on the border. "I got tired of people trying to run me over and going through the gate. Once, the gate ended up about 20 feet into Mexico." About a year and a half ago, Kring was struck and seriously injured by a southbound car he attempted to stop. "He had some kind of load," Kring says. Southbound contraband tends to be firearms-Mexico doesn't manufacture them, so they're a pretty popular import among the smuggling set-and cash from drug sales.

Inspectors here have seized 13 drug shipments since Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year, already more than the port saw last year or the year before. There are no X-ray machines in Sasabe, just a handful of inspectors who know what a proper engine or automobile frame looks like and are trained to recognize alterations. "You look around and you see something that's been tampered with or messed with and you know something's going on," Kring says. "Tanks inside of tanks are always good-propane tanks with water tanks inside them, gas tanks that have other tanks inside them. We see wheels that have compartments inside them. There's different ways of beating us. If you can think of it, they've already thought of it." The inspectors can be creative too. Kring usually has a canine unit for at least part of the day now, which has helped the inspectors enormously. Sometimes an inspector would bring in a pet dog just to throw people off, and, confronting the pooch, some smugglers would give themselves away with fear. Once, an inspector taped some wires to a radio and walked around vehicles as if he had some newfangled drug detector. But these days, even Sasabe is getting sophisticated technology. An X-ray machine for vehicles is slated to arrive soon, as will a tower for another camera.

The five Customs inspectors, including Kring, and four INS inspectors who work at the Sasabe border station know most of the locals so well they've memorized their license plates. They know their routines and they're pretty quick to recognize when something's amiss. But it's not the locals who present the biggest challenge at the port, Kring says; if they wanted to transport contraband, they'd know how to bypass the official border crossing.

Across the border, El Sasabe has become something of a staging area for illegal immigrants and drugs. "They're staging 1,000 people a day there," Kring says. Much of Kring's information comes from his Mexican counterpart, with whom he has an unusually good relationship. "He grew up over here and I've known his father for many years. You'd be surprised how supportive [the Mexicans] are here," Kring says, especially if they think they have information about non-Mexicans crossing the border. "We've had rumors of certain folks being on the other side. The ones we did catch were from Brazil. You're in a high smuggling area of both illegals and drugs. We've caught Chinese coming across. We've caught Brazilians. In Douglas, they caught some Germans."

Says Rudy Cole, Custom's anti-smuggling director in Tucson, "We get reports. Border Patrol found some documents out in the desert that looked like they came from the Middle East but that was never confirmed. Then the Mexicans apprehended some people they first reported as Middle Easterners, Saudis they thought, and then they said they were Brazilian. Of course we didn't have our mitts on the people so all we could get was secondhand information. But we relayed it to the FBI."

Armed And Dangerous

In a particularly troubling incident here in May, a Border Patrol agent reported being fired upon by Mexican soldiers, just hours after federal agents seized a ton of marijuana nearby. (Mexican officials denied any troops were in the area and have suggested that criminals dressed as soldiers may have been responsible.) It's not the first time Mexican soldiers, or people who appear to be Mexican soldiers, have been found in southwest Arizona. Corruption among Mexican military and law enforcement officials and their collusion with drug traffickers have long vexed the relationship between the two countries, a number of U.S. federal agents here say.

On the reservation, issues of sovereignty are even more complex. The Tohono O'odham Nation covers nearly 3 million acres of the Sonoran Desert in southcentral Arizona and shares 75 miles of border with Mexico. Tribal lands extend into Mexico, making immigration a sensitive issue for the tribe. The tribe's 24,000 members, many of whom have no proof of citizenship because they never were issued birth certificates, live on both sides of the border. Tribal members historically have been sympathetic toward the few immigrants who made it through this remote corner of the desert, and traditionally have helped them with food and shelter as they made their way north. But in recent years, the sheer number of immigrants and the growing influx of drug smugglers have overwhelmed the tribe.

"We never complained before, but we just got to a point where we can't do it any more," Ramon says. The burden on already-limited tribal resources has been enormous. Increasingly, young people are using drugs and tribal members are succumbing to the big money offered by traffickers in exchange for cooperation, says Ramon. And the illegal immigrants are overwhelming the tribe's already precarious health care system. In April alone, the tribe rescued more than 350 people, most of whom were so dehydrated they had to be treated in the tribe's only hospital (in Sells, Ariz.), forcing some tribal members to seek medical care hours away in Tucson.

The Tohono O'odham Nation is one of 25 tribes whose reservations cover hundreds of miles of border with Mexico and Canada. Because remote tribal lands are particularly inviting to anyone wishing to enter the United States unnoticed, and because federal law enforcement agencies may not enter tribal lands without permission from the tribe, the situation is causing some alarm in Washington. In January, Attorney General John Ashcroft met with tribal leaders, including Ramon, and asked them to allow federal agents onto their land. "The meeting was very productive," says Ramon. "We're willing to help, but we need help in return." The Tohono O'odham have long had a unique relationship with federal law enforcement officials-the tribe has the only Native American anti-smuggling unit in the Customs Service, and the Border Patrol works cooperatively with the tribal police department on the reservation. But the tribe needs to boost the capabilities of its own police force, says Ramon, not just invite more federal agents onto tribal land.

Retired Border Patrol agent Stoddard believes the entire Southwest is dealing with issues of sovereignty. "I would venture to say that from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, there is a corridor, and this corridor is right on the border, in some areas it is a few hundred yards thick, in other areas it's as much as maybe 20 miles, but this entire area is literally a no-man's land. United States citizens living in this area are not being protected by the United States government. People from Mexico are being given special privileges to vandalize, steal vehicles, burglarize, and do whatever they want. That's why so many homeowners here are living in a fortress. That's why many of them run around armed all the time," he says.

Vance, the son of a Mexican immigrant, agrees. "My father didn't speak a word of English when he came here. He became a naturalized citizen, and he was a loyal American." Vance, who resents outsiders who suggest that angry landowners are anti-Mexican, believes that Mexico is trying to recapture lands lost in the Mexican-American War-a theory not uncommon here.

Gaining Control

But two factors will be key, he says: an immigration policy that acknowledges the U.S. reliance on foreign, especially Mexican, labor, and a more sophisticated border law enforcement organization with a mission akin to that of the French national police. The agencies responsible for border management, primarily Customs and the INS, which includes the Border Patrol, are not large enough and don't coordinate their operations effectively, he says. He supports the Bush administration's proposal for consolidating those agencies into a new Department of Homeland Security, but with an important caveat: Agencies need many more people and significantly better funding to be effective in the war against terrorism.

"You want a Border Patrol, in my view, that's 40,000 people and has its own aviation, maintenance, logistics, and training system," he says. "You want to tell them you're not just chasing migrants, you're saving lives, you're enforcing any relevant federal law, and you're working in cooperation with the international community.

Just as important, he says, will be immigration reform. "We've got [an immigration policy] right now that I think is unbelievably unfair," says McCaffrey. "My underlying conviction is that too many people in the country don't want to pay minimum wage and minimum housing standards and health care to these workers who grow our food and run our tourism industry."

"Our agriculture system won't work without Mexican workers. Our meatpacking industry won't work. The construction industry won't work. You have to get those workers on a bus, pay them minimum wage, make sure they've got running water and lights, allow them legally to send their money back to families," McCaffrey says. Reducing the flood of illegal immigrants may not stop terrorists from crossing the border. But it would make it a lot easier for federal agencies to focus on homeland security.

And it would reduce the flow of people through Larry Vance's backyard.