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Richardson wants Mexican town razed

Migrants use town as staging ground before crossing

Louie Gilot
Walter Rubel

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will use his meeting with his Chihuahua counterpart this week to press for the demolition of Las Chepas, the semi-abandoned hamlet used as a staging area for hundreds of undocumented immigrants who cross daily into the United States near Columbus, N.M.

Richardson is scheduled to meet with Jose Reyes Baeza, the governor of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, on Friday in Las Cruces. It will be their first meeting since the New Mexico governor declared a state of emergency earlier this month because of unchecked immigration on the state's border.

Richardson said that getting Mexican authorities to agree on Las Chepas would be "an important step forward, not critical, but an important step forward for the Mexican government, showing their commitment to work with us," on other projects.

The request is controversial in Mexico.

Javier Muñoz, who sells watermelons in downtown Palomas, across the border from Columbus, said bringing in the bulldozers would not make a difference.

"The people don't cross because of Las Chepas. They cross because they are offered jobs in the United States," he said.

Mexican officials could not be reached for comment and have not responded to Richardson's request, made Aug. 11, a day before the state of emergency announcement.

Border Patrol officials said Las Chepas -- the widely used nickname for the town called Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez -- was established in the 1940s when many Mexican men worked in Columbus fields under the bracero program and came home to Mexico at night. About 400 people lived in Las Chepas in its heyday.

In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal to hire undocumented immigrants and the town began emptying out.

Smugglers zeroed in on Las Chepas because of its location, right across the border from largely unpatrolled fields and accessible by a single, easily monitored dirt road. The Border Patrol has a camera trained on the town.

Nowadays, yellow school buses full of hopeful migrants travel the 15 miles from Palomas to Las Chepas all day long.

Farmer James Johnson in Columbus said the human and drug trafficking contributed to the depopulation of the town.

Residents "did not want their children playing outside when there are 500 transients hanging around waiting for nightfall," he said. The 60 to 100 residents who remain in Las Chepas make a living selling food to the migrants, officials said.

Another staging area, a ranching community called Los Lamentos, further south and west of Las Chepas, has not received similar attention.