Illegals Trample Sensitive Border Regions and Deface Our Monuments
Environment Takes Pounding With Big Numbers Of Crossings
September 9, 2002
By Mitch Tobin, ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Rock walls in Organ Pipe National Monument are marred by graffiti spelling "Caborca," a town in northern Sonora. Empty water bottles and food cans often litter the area.
Arizona's 372-mile border with Mexico ranges from sandy deserts and lava flows in the west, where 4 inches of rain fall in a wet year, to oak-dotted grasslands and mountaintop forests in the east, where snowfall may be measured in feet.
Few areas in North America boast such natural diversity, yet cutting across this varied landscape is a unifying problem: Ecologically, the entire border region is getting hammered by wave after wave of illegal border crossers.
By foot, horseback, bicycle, motorcycle, all-terrain vehicle, car, truck, even ultralight glider, they stream across the border every day and night. They dump tons of trash and human feces on places set aside for their scenic beauty. They blaze hundreds of new roads and trails through fragile desert soils. They ruin habitat for endangered species.
Critics complain that the Border Patrol also does its fair share of damage while chasing people. Yet nearly all public-land managers say the damage would be far greater without the Border Patrol guarding their property.
Increasing stress
Scientists have yet to do a systematic study of the biological impact of border crossers. But many suspect the soaring number of humans and vehicles in previously quiet back-country areas is doing harm, especially to creatures already stressed by the drought or habitat loss.
Based on 2001 figures, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument estimated the number of illegal visitors passing through its wilderness was 100 times the number of people who legally obtained back-country permits - fewer than 3,000 in recent years.
To gauge the effects of cross-border traffic, scientists surveyed the 516-square-mile monument and noted all signs of illegal use. They concluded if a visitor were to pick a point at random in the wilderness, then walk three miles in any direction, he would likely see four vehicle tracks, seven pieces of trash, nine water bottles and four incidents of "major damage," such as saguaros carved with names or rocks stained with graffiti.
"We have a very porous border - it's like a sieve," said Peter Rowlands, the monument's chief of natural and cultural resources.
Off-road driving
At Organ Pipe, a Border Patrol checkpoint on Arizona 85 has led many border crossers to leave the highway a few miles south of the roadblock and drive cross-country. To the east of the highway, vehicles have passed right through nesting habitat for an endangered pygmy owl, a fist-size bird that has curbed development around Tucson.
"That owl has not returned - it's gone," Rowlands said. "There's a good chance it is the result of these incursions."
Pygmy-owl habitat also has been disturbed by heavy traffic across the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, where migrants repeatedly cut fences meant to keep cattle out of the recovering grassland. On a recent visit, three dozen cows were seen just north of the border, along with a crippled horse thought to have been abandoned by drug smugglers.
Cactus at risk
Another endangered species affecting growth in Tucson - the Pima pineapple cactus - is also in the way of cross-border traffic. Just northeast of Nogales, fences meant to protect a patch of the cacti keep getting knocked down, allowing cattle to enter and possibly trample the plants. Crossers, their horses and their vehicles also have gone right through the plot.
The tiny cacti "don't have legs; they can't get up and move," Coronado National Forest spokeswoman Gail Aschenbrenner said.
At Leslie Canyon National Wildlife Refuge near Douglas, areas thick with the Huachuca water umbel, an endangered plant, have been "trampled to death" by illegal entrants waiting to be picked up, according to a congressional study.
"That plant is adapted to flood, drought and water fluctuations," said refuge manager Bill Radke, "but it's not adapted to people squashing it."
The wetland, which also provides a home for the threatened Chiricahua leopard frog and endangered Yaqui chub, is so sensitive that the public is barred from visiting. But despite fences, sensors and patrols, an estimated 1,000 border crossers enter the area every month, then drink and bathe in the water and urinate and defecate in the rare riparian area, Radke said.
Fence is no obstacle
Many Americans may think there's a Berlin Wall separating Arizona and Mexico, but locals know most of the border is just a short barbed-wire fence that poses no obstacle to people who want to drive right through and onto protected federal lands.
At Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, smugglers have made a 26-mile road up the Growler Valley, slicing through federally protected wilderness.
"Once that road is there, it'll be there for 50, 60 or 70 years," said Vergial Harp, the refuge's outdoor recreation planner.
Seventeen abandoned vehicles now sit in the Growler Valley. They'll probably have to be removed by helicopter to minimize further damage to the cryptobiotic soil that serves as the living "skin of the desert."
Legal visitors must sign form
In a place so quiet your ears ring, so hot the sun seems to sear exposed flesh, legal visitors to Cabeza Prieta must sign a "hold harmless" form that warns of the hazards of "one of the most extreme environments in North America." Around 2,000 legal visitors sign that permit annually - about how many illegal border crossers passed through the refuge in one week last year. A dozen of those people died on the refuge last May in 115-degree heat after a smuggler abandoned them.
Along the refuge's fabled Camino del Diablo - where crosses mark places where 19th-century travelers paid for their ignorance of the area with their lives - the dirt road now features big pits of nearly impassable "moon dust." Smugglers just drive around those areas, widening the pits a quarter-mile into wilderness. Estimates to fix the dirt road top $30 million.
"The problems are escalating faster than we can come up with solutions," Harp said. "Is this just going to become a sacrifice area?"
More good than harm
Across the region, land managers say the Border Patrol has cut some new roads on their property, often to access hilltops to gain better vantage points. And they say some agents brought in from elsewhere don't grasp how fragile the desert is. But nearly all credit the Border Patrol with doing far more good than harm by deterring even more people from illegally entering the country.
"If it wasn't for the Border Patrol, we'd be completely overrun," said Wayne Shifflett, manager of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.
Vergial Harp of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stands in the doorway of an abandoned home that once was part of a Tohono O'odham village.
Others think there's plenty of room for improvement.
"Just driving out to look over the country does not, in my opinion, go anywhere toward meeting their major objectives," said Keith Graves, Nogales District ranger for the Coronado National Forest. "Every time they build a road, they build another access for illegal activity."
The Border Patrol says it doesn't make new roads or drive cross-country unless it's an emergency. It also makes new hires watch a 12-minute video on environmental sensitivity.
"Are our guys sometimes driving in places they shouldn't? Yeah. Are we creating new roads? No," said Nate Lagasse, field operations supervisor for the Border Patrol's Ajo station. "We're an easy target because we're always out here."
Border Patrol's Catch-22
The Border Patrol sees itself caught in a Catch-22. Critics say it allows too much environmental damage by not stopping people right at the border. But the agency says in many places it can't get anywhere near the border because environmental regulations forbid new roads in parks and wildlife refuges.
"We can't do what we've done in other places that's been so successful," said Border Patrol spokesman Ryan Scudder.
Lagasse says he has zero access to 18 miles of border in Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta. But on the Mexican side, Highway 2 is a stone's throw from the border for much of the way.
"That's just killing me," he said. "You're playing catch-up. You're not playing deter."
Smugglers, of course, know the constraints on their pursuers and use them to their advantage. On protected lands, smugglers being chased simply drive off into the desert, knowing the Border Patrol can only follow on foot or head them off at the next road.
Insufficient staffing
The Border Patrol says it has nowhere near enough staffing to monitor every mile of the border in person. And by all accounts it would be astronomically expensive to build a more secure barrier along the 1,952 miles the United States and Mexico share. But Lagasse said remote sensors and cameras could do much of the work to help stop environmental damage.
"If the government really wanted to stop what was going on at the border, they could," he said. "Would it cost an enormous amount of money? Sure."
As it stands now, the world's most powerful nation apparently is outmatched at its front door by smugglers with a huge profit motive and poor people with little to lose.
* Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or mtobin@azstarnet.com; contact photographer Max Becherer at maxb@azstarnet.com.
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