Animas, N.M. – Delivering mail to ranchers in his gray truck, Garland Johnson reckoned rattlesnakes soon may be the least of his worries here amid mesquite and cactus-covered mountains near the U.S.-Mexico border a remote stretch where illegal immigrants, including drug smugglers, cross at will.
President Bush’s decision to deploy National Guard soldiers to support Border Patrol agents, Johnson feared, will bring increased violence and suffering.
While he and others who live along the border are fed up with illegal immigration, many questioned the effectiveness of military methods for a problem they see as rooted in Mexican poverty.
The solution lies more “in your backyard” cities such as Denver and Chicago “where the illegal immigrants find jobs, not here,” said Johnson, 44, whose family runs cattle on 9,600 acres his grandfather settled.
“Lining up the National Guard and Minutemen along the border isn’t going to solve the problem,” he said. “It’s going to make people mad.”
That sort of skepticism and concern spread across the southwestern New Mexico borderlands Tuesday, even as officials emphasized that under Bush’s plan, 6,000 Guard members would perform only support tasks, such as building fences and roads and conducting surveillance not making arrests.
For Mexican shuttle driver Arturo Hernandez, on his daily and legal run from Chihuahua to Phoenix, the news about the soldiers sounded about as appealing as two black F-16 fighter jets in training that whooshed across the sky in front of him.
The great nation he was entering with border authority approval suddenly seemed less welcoming than ever. “Not like friends,” he said.
Some interpreted the Bush move primarily as posturing. Yet “there are struggling people who are dying behind this political game,” said Lima McMillan, 55, an emergency medical technician at Columbus, N.M.
Here, increased illegal immigration has led to violence. Shots fired at the police chief outside a Family Dollar store last fall prompted New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to declare a state of emergency.
But if soldiers are sent in to free up more border agents for patrols, McMillan said, the intensified enforcement will drive immigrants into dangerous desert and mountain areas to make risky crossings.
One man she treated recently had collapsed in a sun-baked field after stepping on a mesquite stump that pierced his foot. He needed surgery. Another was distraught because his young wife had lost consciousness after they collapsed, dehydrated after days of trekking from Mexico. The woman suffered brain damage that left her unable to recognize her husband’s face, McMillan said.
“If I could, I’d give President Bush a few pictures of people who become dehydrated showing him what happens when their tongues are swollen, their skin cracks and vessels break in their heads,” she said. “There has to be a whole new approach to this.”
Along the border near Del Rio, Texas, a Border Patrol pilot program that involves prosecuting every caught migrant has led to a 50 percent reduction in border apprehensions since December, said Hilario Leal, the Border Patrol spokesman at Del Rio. “It seems to be working. It is being looked at by other sectors. It all depends on the courts.”
Monday night, minutes after Bush announced he would call out the National Guard, sirens flashed and an ambulance rushed to the border gate between Columbus and Palomas, Mexico, where a pregnant Mexican woman had walked up to guards begging for help delivering her baby. The ambulance carried her north to a U.S. medical center and the birth there gave the baby automatic U.S. citizenship.
Meanwhile, an illegal immigrant slipped across the border into the Family Dollar store just north of the gate the scene of last fall’s shooting. A Border Patrol agent, who asked not to be identified, followed the immigrant into the store. He arrested him, verified he had no proper papers and zip-tied his wrists.
The agent carried that man and two other illegal immigrants in the back of his white-and-green patrol wagon to a substation for processing and deportation.
Family Dollar clerks chafe when the Border Patrol agents enter their aisles, assistant manager José Saenz said at the cash register. “Sometimes customers are scared,” he said.
Smugglers use the store as a pickup point where they can rendezvous with clients and carry them north, he said.
Calling out the National Guard to beef up enforcement seems inappropriate, Saenz said, pointing at a Border Patrol surveillance camera already trained on the front of his store.
“It’s not a war” between the United States and Mexico, he said. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. People will just keep coming.”
At Lordsburg, N.M. along Interstate 10, the fast route into the rest of the United States Holiday Inn Express manager Joyce Jonas knows too well the complexities of illegal immigration.
She also knows what military forces can do. She’s an Army veteran who served in the Persian Gulf War, she said Tuesday, hauling dirty linens between rooms.
“Even over there.” dealing with Iraq, she said, “we can’t do much. So what makes Bush think it will do much here? People are going to come and go. It’s going to have to be lawmakers who work out what to do about this problem.”
