Arizona border outpost one of the quietest in U.S.

by Daniel González - Nov. 27, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

The official border-crossing point in this southern Arizona town is one of the loneliest outposts on the entire 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

The Sasabe Port of Entry is so isolated U.S. officers once set up a barbecue grill on the front deck to fend off boredom. The grill has since been wheeled away. But the armed U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers assigned to the port still spend much of their time standing around in their crisp blue uniforms with little to do but wait for the next car or pickup to pull into the single entrance lane from Sonora into Arizona.

Sasabe border outpost | Tiny town full of stories | Video

On average, just 165 cars, trucks or pedestrians pass through the Sasabe port a day, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In comparison, the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego, the busiest land port on the southern border, sees 120,000 crossings a day. That is twice as much traffic in a single day than passes through the Sasabe port in an entire year.

Roughly halfway between Nogales and Lukeville, the Sasabe port connects two tiny towns, El Sasabe, population 2,500, on the Sonora side, and Sasabe, population 11, on the Arizona side.

For the residents of those communities, the port is a lifeline. It enables travelers to cross between Sonora and Arizona to visit relatives, shop or transport goods.

But at a time when Congress is trying to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal deficit, border ports are choked with traffic, and the government is trying to clamp down on cross-border human smugglers, drug traffickers and gun runners, the little-used Sasabe port can seem like an anachronism from the days of the Old West, when the port mainly served cattle ranchers.

To some border residents, the port also symbolizes broken promises and corruption in Mexico. In the 1990s, the U.S. spent several million dollars upgrading the port after Mexico promised to pave the road leading to El Sasabe. The planned highway was supposed to bring more traffic, commerce and tourism to both sides of the border.

Nearly 20 years later, the highway remains unbuilt, leaving the Sasabe border crossing, in short, a port to nowhere.

All vehicles searched

With its pitched white roof that reflects the Arizona sun like a giant mirror, the Sasabe border crossing appears like an oasis after driving 20 miles southwest from Tucson to Robles Junction and then 45 miles straight south on Arizona 286. On the way, travelers pass through vast expanses of barren desert scrubland, and the jagged Baboquivari Mountains rise in the distance to the west.

One recent morning, a red pickup truck heading north into Arizona pulled into the port's single lane. It was the only vehicle in sight. Six U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers gathered around for an inspection.

While one officer ran the driver's documents through a computer, the others searched the pickup, peering under the hood and sweeping the undercarriage with mirrors.

At busier ports, like the two in Nogales, which are open around the clock, officers have time to search only a fraction of the 38,000 vehicles and pedestrians that pass through each day.

But at the Sasabe port, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day, every vehicle is searched, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer Richard Gill, the port director.

The increased scrutiny means smugglers will think twice about trying to sneak drugs or other contraband through the Sasabe port into the United States, Gill said.

For security reasons, authorities do not release drug-seizure statistics for individual ports.

But Gill said drug smugglers still try to get through. One of the more unusual recent seizures, Gill said, involved a vehicle loaded with firewood, a common commodity at the port. Many residents of Sonora harvest mesquite and then transport it through the port for sale in Tucson. But when officers inspected the firewood, they discovered it had been hollowed out and packed with marijuana, Gill said.

"It's on a smaller scale" than other ports, Gill said, "but we definitely do seize narcotics here."

Road never paved

Standing on the front porch of the port's main building, Gill pointed to some dilapidated cattle yards nearby. The wooden yards are remnants from when the Sasabe port was primarily used to transport cattle from one side of the border to the other, Gill said. They haven't been used in years.

The port itself opened in 1916, according to records from the Federal Highway Administration, and is now one of 52 official crossing points on the southern border. Major ports include San Diego, El Paso and Nogales, with multiple lanes for cars, trucks, pedestrians and commercial tractor-trailers. Other ports are limited to trains, pedestrians or, as is the case in Los Ebanos in southeastern Texas, hand-pulled ferries.

The United States added a two-story headquarters in 1937. With its sprawling front porch and red-brick architecture, the building seems out of place in the desert. The United States spent $2.4 million for a major upgrade at the port in 1992 and 1993, according to the General Services Administration, the federal agency that oversees federal construction projects.

The improvements included a new truck dock, an area to conduct secondary inspections, and a primary inspection booth.

The improvements turned the Sasabe port from a small border crossing into a full-scale port capable of handling commercial and non-commercial traffic.

"These modifications were made in response to notification that Mexico was planing to pave the roadway on their side of the border," said Traci R. Madison, a spokeswoman for the agency. "My understanding is that the road was never paved."

Waiting for years

Drive through the port and the paved road on the Arizona side quickly deteriorates into a rutted dirt path on the Sonora side.

The residents of El Sasabe say they have been waiting years for the government to pave the dirt roads.

El Sasabe is a poor town of jumbled streets and run-down adobe buildings. The town depends mostly on an adobe-brick factory for its livelihood. It is also a major staging area for illegal immigrants and smugglers preparing to cross into the U.S.

Paving the roads was supposed to bring prosperity to the area, said Gloria Grijalva, who grew up in El Sasabe. She was shopping at El Coyote, a convenience store in El Sasabe.

A paved road would provide a direct route for tourists from Tucson to beaches in El Desemboque and other coastal towns on the Gulf of California, and an alternate route to Rocky Point, Grijalva said. It also would provide a direct route for shoppers and commercial trucks from the interior of Sonora headed for Tucson, she said.

"If you travel through that road now, it's very, very bad. Your car starts shaking," Grijalva said.

As Grijalva was talking, Alfonso Garcia, the store manager, pulled out his cellphone and pointed at a photo on the screen.

"This is what the road looks like after it rains," he said. Flooded under several feet of water, the road looked better suited for boats than cars.

Like other residents of the town, Grijalva chalked up the government's failure to pave the road to political corruption.

During a Nov. 18 meeting with reporters and editors at The Arizona Republic, Guillermo Padrés ElÃ*as, the governor of Sonora, said he doesn't know why previous governments did not follow through on promises to pave the roads to El Sasabe.

But he said that, with federal funds, the state is in the process of paving one road that leads to El Sasabe from Saric to the east. In 2012, the state also plans to begin building a 60-mile toll road leading to El Sasabe from Altar to the south. The projects mean that for the first time paved highways would lead to the port in Sasabe.

"We already have the design for the project," Padrés ElÃ*as said. "Hopefully (in) one to two years we are going to finish it."

Crucial link for communities

In 2010, the Sasabe port logged slightly more than 60,000 border crossings, the fewest of any full-scale port on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The Naco port, in southeastern Arizona, ranked second to last, with nearly 860,000 border crossings. The only ports with less traffic are those like the one in Antelope Wells, N.M., where only pedestrians are allowed to cross.

Still, for the people who use it, the Sasabe port is a vital part of life.

"They aren't thinking of closing this port, are they?" said Deborah Grider, when asked about the port, panic ringing in her voice.

Grider, who was born in Sasabe, runs a general store and gas station on the Arizona side of the border with her mother, Alice Knagge.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, whose district includes Sasabe, has introduced legislation calling for 500 more Customs and Border Protection officers at the ports in Nogales, Douglas and San Luis to help reduce wait times. He is a distant relative of Gloria Grijalva.

He concedes that "there is a valid cost-benefit argument against" continuing to spend money to keep the Sasabe port open when other ports are so choked with traffic that travelers sometimes wait hours to cross.

But closing the Sasabe port isn't the answer.

"I don't think given the need it would make a significant impact at other ports," he said.

Closing the port also would have other devastating consequences. The former cattle town now depends mostly on tourists and shoppers from Sonora to survive, Grider said.

The town's post office is already on the chopping block. Closing the port would sink the town, she said. El Sasabe on the other side would also dry up since residents use the port not only to shop in Arizona, but also to transport firewood and adobe from the brick factory through the port, she said.

Without the port, they would have to drive two hours out of their way on rough roads to the nearest ports in Nogales or Lukeville.

"If that port wasn't there, gosh, nothing would exist," she said.

Busy corridor for smuggling

Although the Sasabe port has hardly any traffic, ironically, it sits in the middle of one of the busiest illegal-immigrant and drug-smuggling corridors on the border.

As a result, the border officers at the Sasabe port are on high alert for illegal immigrants and drugs headed north and illegal guns and undeclared cash headed south, Gill said.

In addition to all northbound traffic, officers also inspect every vehicle headed south into Mexico, he said.

The increased southbound inspections are part of stepped-up security that began in 2009 along the entire border. The inspections are aimed at helping Mexico's war on drug-smuggling organizations.

The southbound inspections led to a tense moment on a recent morning.

As Gill provided a tour of the port, some of his officers walked over for a routine inspection of a black Volkswagen Jetta headed into Mexico.

A moment later, one of the officers began yelling, "Gun! Gun!"

Two officers handcuffed the driver and escorted him into the building after they spotted a black handgun strapped to his basketball shorts in full view.

The incident, however, turned out to be nothing. The driver told border officers he was not trying to drive across the border with the gun, a loaded 9mm Glock pistol. He said he was dropping off a friend who was headed into Mexico to participate in a Native American walk. At the last minute, the driver said, he realized it was too late to turn around and had ended up in the inspection station. As for the weapon, the driver said he had recently gotten out of the Army and had served in Iraq. Now, he said, "being without a weapon feels funny to me."

After a computer background check turned up no criminal record or outstanding warrants, the border officers let the driver go.

But Gill said the incident showed how, despite the port's lack of traffic, it remains an integral part of national security.

"It's not a vacation spot," he said.

www.azcentral.com