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Border threat real

Immigrant influx stirs problems

Louie Gilot
El Paso Times

COLUMBUS, N.M. and PALOMAS, Mexico -- Earlier this year, Dolores Sanchez's son locked his house in Columbus and went to work in the fields of Arizona for the summer. Four months later, he received a phone call from the police in Columbus.

"They had found 14 illegals in a trailer he had near his house. They had forced the lock, but the police thought he gave them permission. So he had to quit his job and come explain himself. They (migrants) had destroyed that trailer," Sanchez said. "Nobody can leave their houses around here."

The sinister picture of a terrorized community that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson painted a week ago when he declared a state of emergency on his border is no exaggeration, locals said.

"It is as bad as the governor said and then some," said Martha Skinner, the village's mayor and owner of Martha's Place, a cozy bed-and-breakfast on N.M. Highway 9.

In the past year or so, the village of 2,000 field workers and retirees has become a major smuggling corridor.

After the success of the Arizona enforcement operation that increased the number of Border Patrol agents in the Tucson area to 2,000, smugglers went east looking for quieter routes to sneak in drugs and undocumented immigrants. They settled on Columbus, just west of the highly patrolled El Paso area.

About 100 Border Patrol agents now roam the 54-mile-long, mostly unfenced border in Luna County, agency officials reported.

Meanwhile, apprehensions are already 46 percent higher this year than in the same period last year.

In town

The sight of droves of men, women and children with backpacks running through fields, hiding in back yards and drinking from water tanks and garden hoses is routine in Columbus. But residents still talk about it in awed disbelief, and many still forget to lock their doors.

"There were four in my back yard the other day. I was in my room, and they were sitting right there in front of the window," Mayor Skinner said.

"It's been like this for years," said Charles McPherson, the retiree who volunteers to run the Columbus Historical Museum in the 1902 train depot. "I didn't used to call the Border Patrol, but I lost a power saw and other things. I'm just getting to where I'm not putting up with it anymore."

Columbus' claim to fame is the 1916 raid by Pancho Villa's men, the last armed invasion of the continental United States. McPherson's museum displays a death mask of the famed revolutionary.

These days, it's thieves who raid Columbus houses and flee back to Mexico, locals said.

Linda Gambel, who lives near the airpark two miles outside of Columbus, was robbed twice in four years, she said. The last time, two men stole jewelry, knives and guns from her neighbors and drove away in her water truck.

Gambel said the governor's state of emergency, which unlocks an immediate $750,000 to add law enforcement officers in border counties, won't change much.

"That's a quick fix," she said. "We need the troops on the border."

Two volunteer border watch groups are operating sporadically in Columbus. One of them, a branch of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps from Arizona, drew 100 people to a recruiting meeting in Columbus a month ago.

The front lines

On the ranches and farms that frame the village, insecurity has reached "ridiculous levels," said James Johnson, vice president of Carzalia Valley Produce.

"Take the Wal-Mart on Mesa Street in El Paso. If people came in at night, defecated in the aisles, broke the faucets in the bathrooms, flooding the store, and stole items, something would be done about it," Johnson said.

And that is exactly what is happening to his fields half a mile from Mexico.

Migrants plow through his onions and chiles, tramping the produce and leaving human waste behind. The produce then has to be destroyed for sanitary and security reasons. The constant passage stresses out his father's cattle, making the free-range animals as sick as some feedlot cows. Cattle won't drink when migrants congregate around their water tanks. And in one instance, migrants destroyed a valve on a water tank and wasted tens of thousands of gallons of water.

Johnson said he has had a gun pulled on him twice in the past three years after he asked strange vehicles to leave his property.

"There is no respect or morality," he said. "In the 1980s, ... we kept a hoe by the door. An illegal would come and sit under a tree, away from the house and start whistling. The dogs would bark and we would come to the door. He would approach in a nonaggressive way and ask for water. Then he would pick up the hoe and weed while we made him a sandwich. This was the respect we, landowners, were shown back then."

Johnson, who has 3,000 acres in Columbus and 400 in Deming, said he won't open his land to Minuteman-type groups because of liability. He favors a guest-worker program.

He said he feels sorry for migrants such as the couple he found three weeks ago. They had been abandoned by smugglers because they were too slow. They had paid $1,800 to cross, they told him.

The law

When Johnson called for help recently, after a group of scared migrants said they were chased by masked bandits who had grabbed three of their companions, it took the Border Patrol 15 minutes to respond. It was 55 minutes before the Luna County Sheriff's Department got there, and an hour and 20 minutes had gone by when the State Police arrived, Johnson said.

Law enforcement officials, who are also dealing with an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse and related crimes, readily admit they are overwhelmed.

The police chief in Columbus, Clare May, said his workload has gone from 17 to 25 calls a month five years ago, to 75 to 80 calls a month these days. May had two officers under him, and one has quit, he reported last week.

At night, when the flow of migrants is the thickest, the Columbus police station is closed.

It isn't clear where the new law enforcement money or the additional $1 million promised for homeland security projects will go, but May figured he would need four more patrol officers, an investigator and a code enforcement officer to condemn abandoned structures that are used as safe houses.

Border Patrol officials in Deming said help is on the way. They were promised 75 new agents by September, and new graduates from the Border Patrol academy in Artesia, N.M., have already started to arrive, they said.

Chief May said he doesn't solve many theft cases in Columbus, but he finds satisfaction in recovering stolen vehicles. He recovers five to seven a month, he said.

"Finding these vehicles can prevent crime because they are often used to transport drugs or people out of town," he said.

In March, such a vehicle, a Hummer stolen from El Paso, crashed and killed four undocumented immigrants north of Columbus.

Deadly trade

Across the border, in the small town of Palomas, human smuggling is big business.

Each day, yellow school buses take hundreds of migrants from the plaza in downtown Palomas 15 miles west to the hamlet of Las Chepas.

A week ago, Gov. Richardson asked Mexican officials to bulldoze the town, which serves as a staging area for migrants. So far, Mexico has given no official response.

In Las Chepas, most houses, the school and the church have been gutted. The ground is littered with bottles, wrappers and garlic cloves the migrants rub on their bodies to repel insects. There, they wait for nightfall to walk into the United States.

Violence occurs there, too. Earlier this year, a smuggler was shot to death under mysterious circumstances in that area.

But locals on both sides of the border said destroying the town would do more harm than good.

"There are still some good people that live there, elderly people who have nothing else," said Johnson, the Columbus farmer.