For border crossers, cellphones replacing live guides
For border crossers, cellphones replacing live guides
14 hours ago • By Perla Trevizo
AGUA PRIETA, Sonora — The business of smuggling people across the border is going high-tech.
Rather than paying a guide to lead them across the Southern Arizona desert, migrants are hiring smugglers who watch from nearby hilltops and tell them via cellphone when to run, when to stop, when to hide and when to crawl.
In places such as Naco, near Bisbee, and Agua Prieta, which abuts Douglas, the use of cellphones to guide migrants started about five years ago. Already, more than three-quarters of migrants who go through the local shelter or resource center are choosing that option, said Adalberto Ramos, who coordinates both places.
And now it’s spreading to Nogales.
This year, people who work with migrants said they are hearing stories about women taken to a bridge near the Mariposa Port of Entry and held there, sometimes for days, until their smugglers tell them it’s safe to cross.
The shift from live guide to cellphone is happening even though it’s more expensive — up to $7,000 versus roughly $3,500 to be led through the desert. That’s because it’s supposed to be a shorter and safer walk to the city from the border fence, which they jump with a ladder and rope. But it’s just one more way immigrants are misled, migrant aid workers said.
TRYING BOTH METHODS
Gerardo Ramirez, a small-framed 20-year-old from Veracruz, has tried to cross both ways — with a smuggler leading the way on foot and with a cellphone in hand.
Last month he tried to cross through the west desert on the other side of Altar, Sonora, one of the harshest terrains along the Southern Arizona border because of the distances and ruggedness. The group of migrants he traveled with had backpacks full of food to last the 11 days the smuggler said it would take and two big jugs of water, he said.
About 20 of them started the journey, Ramirez said, but that day seven or eight turned back when a couple of them hurt their ankles.
The next day Border Patrol agents caught them and the smuggler told them to drop their bags and run. Ramirez said they left four compañeros behind. He doesn’t know what happened to them.
He fled back to Altar and took a bus east to Agua Prieta to try again.
This time he decided to take the cellphone offer.
“They tell you that within 30 minutes to an hour you’ll be there,” he said.
The smugglers release people one by one from different points along the border fence — some during the day, others after dark.
They tell them to make sure the cellphones are charged and have plenty of call time available. The phones are their only lifeline when they are in the desert, where everything looks the same, especially at night.
Ramirez was sent off at night a couple of weeks after his failed attempt in the Altar-Sasabe area. A smuggler guided him from a nearby hill using binoculars.
“They already know the paths very well,” he said.
He started to walk but didn’t get very far. He estimates he trekked less than 30 minutes before Border Patrol agents spotted him.
He ran, he said, but fell. His hands crisscrossed with scratches, he waited for the bus to head back to his home state the day after he got deported back to Agua Prieta. It wasn’t worth it to keep trying, he said. Maybe later.
A QUICK TRIP
To some migrants, the idea of trying to cross the desert by themselves with only a voice guiding them over the phone sounds like a death sentence.
Ruben Fernández, 33, and his wife, Estela Morales, 32, had heard about crossing using a cellphone, but neither of them dared to try it.
“I’ve heard that they just toss them out there and start guiding them,” Fernández said.
Morales met a woman who crossed using a cellphone. She took a wrong turn and got lost. “When I met her, both of her knees were all scratched because they had told her to crawl for part of it,” Morales said.
The couple lived in Phoenix for 12 years but went back to Mexico in 2009, only to find it nearly impossible to support themselves.
“You can’t do anything,” Fernández said, “you only have enough to eat.”
When they first crossed the border in the late 1990s, there was no border fence and far fewer agents.
So this time, they decided to hire a guide. They initially were told their journey would take no more than six hours, but when they met the guides, who were about 15 years old, they were told the trip would entail two full days of walking. They each had only a 1.5-liter water bottle.
The young guides led them up a steep, slippery hill. When they got to the top they realized they were surrounded by the Border Patrol.
They were deported back to Mexico, and sat one recent day at the migrant resource center in Agua Prieta, waiting for a ride to the nearby shelter. They sat at the entrance, plucking tiny thorns from their palms with a nail clipper. Morales was still missing the shoelaces from her tennis shoes, which the Border Patrol says agents remove for the migrants’ safety.
A SHIFT IN STRATEGY
The shift from live guides to cellphones come along with the massive buildup of agents in the Tucson Sector — from 282 to more than 4,000 in the last 20 years.
The Border Patrol doesn’t specifically track the use of cellphones to guide border crossers, but it does acknowledge the tactic.
“Smuggling trends continually change throughout the Tucson Sector, and this style of cellphone guiding is no different,” the agency said in a written statement. “As Tucson Sector prosecution efforts continue to disrupt and dismantle smuggling organizations, smugglers will attempt to modify their tactics to elude apprehension and subsequently, prosecution.”
“The smugglers don’t want to risk getting caught, perhaps because they already have too many convictions or apprehensions,” said Ramos, the coordinator of the Agua Prieta migrant shelter.
Ramos said they first started to see this new strategy in 2010, when his group’s attorney would interview migrants accused of being smugglers.
The so-called coyotes would give one migrant a phone to lead a small group, so Border Patrol agents would assume that person was the smuggler, not a border crosser, Ramos said.
Now, smugglers also guide individuals on cellphones much closer to urban areas, where they can see them from nearby hilltops. Migrants are told it’s safer to be guided by cellphone, but in reality many of them are caught immediately after crossing, Ramos said.
By the time they show up at the center or at the shelter, he said, they’ve already lost about $1,000 and realize they’ve been ripped off.
http://tucson.com/news/local/border/...604ead4dd.html
