Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and Sheriff Joe Arpaio lead what some believe is the whackiest state in the union. (illustration: DonkeyHotey)
06 February 13
From Governor Jan Brewer to Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a Tea Party–dominated state legislature, no state deserves the tag “Kookocracy” as much as Arizona, and in Arizona there’s no bigger issue than immigration and border security. As immigration reform takes center stage in Washington, one man in Arizona is caught in the middle.
very
few weeks Bob Heilig, a 67-year-old Arizona rancher, rounds up the
Mexican cattle that have strayed over the border onto his land and herds
them back to their rightful owners through the fence he calls "the taco
curtain." We are about 50 feet north of the Mexican border at the edge
of Heilig's Double Bar R Ranch, 70 miles south of Tucson. We are also at
the point where the border fence, 18 feet of concrete-reinforced steel,
simply stops for a while. "It's a real hilarity, isn't it?" Heilig says
as he parks his Nissan Frontier atop a low, sandy knoll in the Sonoran
Desert. To the west, looking like the Great Wall of China and about as
successful at repelling invaders, the wall undulates over rolling hills
at a cost of $5.4 million per mile toward the border town of Nogales. To
the east, it becomes a single chest-high railroad rail and an Old
West–style barbed-wire fence - not much of a change since John Wayne
rode through these parts making Red River in the late 1940s.
Bob and his wife, Eileen Whalen, bought their ranch in
2004, near the height of the huge northward migration. The seller
warned them, but couldn't hand it over fast enough. For Eileen and Bob, a
fourth-generation Arizona rancher who joined the Army at 17 and was
gone for 41 years, coming home was the fulfillment of a long-held wish.
They built their dream house in 2008, a promise from Bob to Eileen, who
commutes from Seattle, where she is the executive director of Harborview
Medical Center.
Heilig shows us where he pries the barbed wire back to
shoo the Mexican cattle through. "The fence is the biggest joke in the
world," he says. "This huge, immense thing that cost millions, and then
four-strand barbed-wire fence. You look at it and go, Huh?"
When you try to understand Arizona's dysfunction - and
maybe, God forbid, America's - you have to start at The Fence and the
grand self-delusion that the border could be fortified enough to keep
out the invading brown horde. An ugly symbol of a frightened nation, it
has fooled no one, except perhaps the politicians in far-off Washington
who built it and made it their proxy for immigration reform. But it has
barely slowed the Mexicans who've climbed over it, dug under it, cut
through it, or, as on Heilig's ranch and elsewhere, simply walked around
it. To be sure, the numbers of undocumented border crossers are down,
from more than a million a year to a few hundred thousand.
It took the
Great Recession to stifle the northward migration. The flow of drugs, on
the other hand, continues unabated; America's demand is insatiable and
the fence has barely slowed the smugglers.
Now as Washington finally turns to immigration reform,
Heilig has no illusion that President Obama's plan to overhaul the
immigration system - or the slate of congressional alternatives - is
going to make much difference for the ranchers who live along the
border. The key component of the various proposals includes offering a
way for some 11 million illegal immigrants to become citizens, which has
been the sticking point that stalled reform for decades.
"The big debate will be about what to do with the
people living in the United States today," he says. "But it doesn't
really address the issue of people coming across. I don't understand why
they don't deal with that."
Arizona accounts for 380 miles of the 2,000-mile
Mexican border, and through three presidential administrations, it has
been the primary route through which the lion's share of undocumented
migrants and illegal drugs flow. As President Bill Clinton sought to
cool the more politically vocal California in the early 1990s, it was a
border crackdown there that inadvertently funneled migrants into the
inhospitable deserts and mountains of Arizona. As the numbers of border
crossers multiplied in the American economic boom, fencing out the
Mexicans became the only politically palpable "solution." Border
fortification snowballed in the wake of 9/11, when President George W.
Bush doubled the size of the Border Patrol and signed on to erect 670
miles of fence in strategic stretches along the border. More than a
billion dollars were spent on high-tech gadgetry and a "virtual" fence
that was supposed to "see" border crossers in the desert. Among its many
malfunctions, the virtual fence confused raindrops and cows with
migrants and was eventually scrapped.
Meanwhile, in Phoenix, the obsession with border
fortification fueled Arizona's drift to the distant right. The Tea Party
parlayed the anti-immigrant mood into super-majorities in the 2010
election, then spent two years passing a far-right agenda that made
Arizona a national laughingstock. Stephen Colbert took aim at the new
anti-abortion law that starts the clock running two weeks before
intercourse. Arizona is not only "pro-life," he cracked, "it's become
"pre-life."
It didn't help Arizona's slide into "Kookocracy" that
the most recognizable photo of Governor Jan Brewer has her waggling her
finger under Obama's nose on his airport arrival in her parboiled state
or that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio took it on himself to send an
Arizona posse to Hawaii and declare Obama's birth certificate to be a
fake.
Still a youngster, Arizona became the 48th and the
last continental state only 101 years ago, fulfilling that era's dream
of Manifest Destiny. Arizona appealed, like all frontier turf, to
dreamers, schemers, scalawags, and adventurers, not necessarily in that
order. But it also cleaves to its roots. Settled largely by Southerners,
Arizona Territory had joined the Confederacy. Later came the
transplants - Northerners seeking the sun and overflow Californians
looking to re-create life as it once was before the huge wave of
immigrants.
To be sure, Arizona-as-Kookocracy evolved out of a
stew of its Wild West heritage and pure solipsism vis-à-vis Mexico. As
Arizona, like neighboring California, moves inevitably toward a
demographic tipping point - almost half of the children enrolled in
public schools are Latino - the struggle to hold on to a vanishing way
of life underlies much of the turmoil.
In his 1,000-square-foot cottage once used by date
harvesters in old Phoenix, Barry Goldwater Jr., son of the conservative
icon of a different era, told us his late father would have been
appalled by the anti-immigration binge.
"They came across to work. That's the only reason,"
Goldwater, now 74 and a former seven-term Republican congressman, said.
"And it worked pretty well until some politicians seized on the issue
and blew it up. You can credit Joe Arpaio as one."
Another was former state senator Russell Pearce, since
recalled, who rose to national prominence as the author of Arizona's
harsh "show-me-your-papers" law that the Supreme Court mostly dismantled
last June.
"Pearce rode the issue as hard as he could with
vitriolic and vindictive speeches," Goldwater continued. "He castigated
Mexicans as being evil people and demagogued them to no end. Arpaio
fanned the flames into a fire, heaping more and more wood on it, and it
became a bonfire. It became a Republican litmus test, and then it spread
nationwide from here."
Arpaio feasted on immigration for years. First elected
in 1992, he rose to international fame, or infamy, by rounding up
undocumented workers like cattle, them humiliating them by dressing them
in pink underwear, shackling them in Old South chain gangs, and housing
them in tent-city jails in the blistering Phoenix heat. More than once,
he has been called a throwback to Bull Connor's fire hoses and attack
dogs in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether he is a racist or a malevolent
opportunist, his critics contend, is open only to minor debate.
The Democrats regained some strength in the fall
elections, but the G.O.P. retained majorities in both houses of the
legislature. Arpaio, under siege for his antics, survived. He squeaked
through with 50.7 percent of the vote, his poorest showing in six
elections. Now 80, he says he'll run again in 2016. And, ever the deft
pol, the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre prompted him to swiftly
move his citizens' posse around almost 60 Phoenix-area schools. The
posse has grown to 3,000 volunteers and includes Hollywood's Steven
Seagal, the B-movie adventure star. That makes it equal in size to the
Phoenix Police Department.
Washington's renewed effort on immigration will likely
be tied to border security, although some influential voices on the
subject are raising doubts about the value added by further investment
after more than two decades of buildup. Obama set a new mark for border
enforcement: last year, his administration spent nearly $18 billion on -
more than the F.B.I. and all other major federal law-enforcement
agencies combined, according to a new study released in January by the
Migration Policy Institute. Doris Meissner, Clinton's chief of the old
Immigration and Naturalization Service and one of the report's authors,
told us: "These are huge numbers, enormous numbers, and I think they do
raise the question: how much is enough?"
Meissner said there was never any evidence that the
U.S. was vulnerable to a terrorist threat across the Mexican border. "It
was all justified in the name of national security when, in fact, what
was going on was a more heightened concern about illegal immigration,"
she said. "We really went into high octane. When you go back and look at
the creation of Homeland Security and the budgets that the Bush
administration took to the Hill, Washington often gave them more than
they asked for. More for employer enforcement, more for electronic
systems. They would get 100 more border-patrol agents than the 800 they
asked for. Take the Secure Fence Act, which in retrospect you really
have to scratch your head at."
Former Arizona State Attorney General Terry Goddard
decries the false promise of border security in Arizona as an effective
barrier against a drug-trafficking enterprise that runs 24/7. In two
terms as Arizona's top law-enforcement official, he targeted smugglers
by following the money. He dismisses the entire "secure border" concept
as "nonsense," and urges Washington to face reality.
"The wall is about symbolism; it's not about
protecting the border," he said. "If you really cared about shutting
down the cartels, you would start with the money. You would keep them
from having the resources to beat us every time. I expect the cartels to
use drones next. They have unlimited funds."
For now, the transit system set up by the cartels to
move their product north is primitive but nimble and efficient. We made a
foray into the desert, riding along with Eric Balliet, a rugged,
36-year-old special agent in charge of Homeland Security's
investigations in Nogales. On our tour, he was supervising a
multi-agency task force working one of the main drug corridors. Most
seizures occur within 26 miles of the border, Balliet told us. We were
80 miles north of it, in a stretch of desert that includes several choke
points where trafficking routes merge onto main roads running into
Phoenix, 40 miles away, where couriers' minivans and S.U.V.'s more
easily blend in on congested city streets.
Our first stop was a thicket of mesquite next to an
east-west interstate that serves as a transfer point for loads of dope.
It was littered with discarded water bottles, food wrappers, and
remnants of burlap bags heavily scented with marijuana. Any lingering
drug mules had long since cleared out.
Farther north, we climbed to a scout camp atop a
rocky, treeless hill that rises 800 feet and provides a clear view of
traffic on the desert floor below. Drug smuggling runs in six- to
eight-week cycles, Balliet said. Pairs of scouts arrive a week ahead and
take up positions all along the route, guiding their merchandise from
the border on into Phoenix.
This camp was typically low-tech. Hidden in the rocks
were caches of food, plates, a worn deck of playing cards, and black
plastic garbage bags - used as cover during aerial searches. The front
seat of a car had been hauled up, the only camp comfort. As Balliet
busted up the caches looking for the car battery every scout camp has to
recharge cell phones, we were keenly aware that we were being watched
from the surrounding hills.
"The fact that we're standing here is causing a
traffic jam farther down the route south of us," he said. "Everything is
backed up now until we leave. They don't want loads untended."
Every week or so, new headlines are written about
busts and seizures, offered up in all the usual statistical measures of
success. But the drugs keep moving through.
"This is one of the frustrating things for us," said
Ed Rheinheimer, the Republican Cochise County attorney in Arizona's
southeast corner. "The federal government counts people and pounds. If
we got 50,000 pounds of marijuana last year and 75,000 pounds of
marijuana this year, everybody looks at that as increased enforcement.
But you can't tell if you don't know how much came in that you didn't
get."
In downtown Nogales, Bruce Bracker, who runs his
family-owned department store, Bracker's, strolls with us along
International Street, reminiscing about old Nogales. Time was when you
could walk in the front door of a bar on the Arizona side and out the
back door into Mexico - and his grandfather sold U.S. Army surplus to
Mexican generals. He remembers the two border towns, Nogales, Arizona,
and Nogales, Sonora, used to celebrate Cinco de Mayo together, starting
the parade in Mexico and ending in Arizona.
Bracker doesn't expect to see anything like that
again. Nor does he expect to see a return of the 34 percent in lost
business when border fortification made travel between the two cities
more difficult. He stops near an old parking meter where a rectangular
piece of pavement has been carved out and now re-sealed. Mexican
smugglers dug a tunnel under the wall, came up here, lifted up the
rectangle inside a hollowed-out car, and moved marijuana to their
heart's content. In the Fall of 2011 the Border Patrol found 16 tunnels
leading to the parking-meter hub.
That was the most audacious but hardly the last of the
infamous Nogales tunnels, which have become so prolific. President
Obama signed the Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012 last June. They
number in the scores and have come up in churches, garages, empty
buildings, and just about every conceivable hiding place.
Bracker and
his buddies joke that Armageddon in Nogales will arrive with the two
towns disappearing into a giant sinkhole created by the crisscross void
beneath.
The sun had just set and a huge full moon rose quickly
out of the crags of the Patagonia Mountains on Bob Heilig's ranch,
sending the first slings of silver across the high desert. In the first
years after Heilig and his wife bought the ranch the migrants trekked
across their land by the thousands, banging on their windows for the
water and granola bars they kept for them. Some had wandered in circles
for days only a mile into the U.S. At least three died on their land
near the corrals. Heilig and his 27-year-old son, Alex, found two
dehydrated women too weak to walk, eating prickly pear cactus and
drinking their own urine, and they once rescued a seven-month-pregnant
woman who was air-lifted to a Tucson hospital. The migrants arrived
thin, dirty, and woebegone, often ready to turn back; the smugglers
peered in their doorway with crude, black teardrop tattoos beneath their
eyes, each tattoo representing a murder, like notches on a gun handle
in the Old West.
One day, out riding, Bob and Eileen stumbled into a
drug exchange. The smugglers rose silently out of their mesquite cover
with AK-47s trained on them. Bob had been in tough spots before, "but
you don't take a knife to a machine-gun fight," he says. The pair backed
their horses away slowly. Very slowly. Eileen has yet to spend a night
alone in their home. Regrets? "Depends on what day you ask me," Heilig
says.
"Suddenly, you've got one hand and both feet in a tar baby." But
he's not leaving. "It's livable."
Because of the gap the fence has created, Heilig's
ranch has become a target not only for smugglers, but also for the many
federal agencies with conflicting agendas.
In the past year, he has had "covert" visits by at
least three federal agencies, "trying to recruit me to snitch for them,"
Heilig says. "It became a joke." The Border Patrol, U.S. Marshals
Service, and Drug Enforcement Agency showed up in big black S.U.V.'s,
disgorging agents in black suits. For an old soldier who feels a
thousand eyes on him every time he steps outside, the "secret" visits
were ludicrous. "You'd look obvious in Washington, D.C.," he says. "What
do you think you look like in Nogales, Arizona?"
"There has been payback from the visits," says Heilig.
Someone rode onto his ranch and pulled down an electrical power pole
that fed his water pumps. Then someone poured water into his truck's gas
tank. Repair bill: $6,000. "This clearly was retribution," says Heilig.
"No other reason why an electric pole would be pulled down. It took me
over a month to get the permits to rebuild it."
Heilig still was willing to help, especially to block
the drugs. But the more he talked with the federal officials, the more
he felt he was playing with the Katzenjammer Kids. The Border Patrol
wanted to stop them at the border. The D.E.A. wanted to let them through
and follow them to the big distributors in Phoenix - or Chicago.
"It's absolutely dysfunctional. The staffs can't even
reveal information to each other. I finally said no [to the D.E.A.],"
Heilig says. "Not only no, but hell, no. My purpose is to keep it off my
ranch. I'm not going to snitch on someone who will come back and haunt
us."
After 10 days in Arizona, the Double Bar R seems the
sanest place to end our trip. All we have to put up with here are armed
smugglers. And the food is good. Heilig once trained as a professional
chef and the result tonight is rack of lamb. It is served in a modern
dining room just off a beautiful kitchen. Eileen is in Seattle, their
son is away, and Bob is on the ranch alone except for his hired hand.
A shotgun is propped out of view behind the door, the granola bars are stashed in a cupboard - both available if needed.
Fixing a broken immigration system, he says, has to
take into account Economics 101 - supply and demand. Laborers have to
have a legal way to travel to jobs in the U.S. instead of hiking through
the desert and his ranch. Would a modernized variation of the old
Bracero farmworkers program that operated from the 1940s to the
mid-1960s work today? It might help.
"Fight it as you may and say they're taking jobs from
Americans, but apples still get plowed under in Yakima, Washington,
every year because they can't get people to come pick them," he says.
"Until you solve that very basic problem, you'll not solve any of the
problems."
As for the drug smugglers? That's more complicated. Heilig looks off in the distance and shrugs.
After dinner, the Gigondas, a red from the Rhone
Valley, accompanies the three us to the moonlight on the patio. Heilig
turns up the stereo, playing the soundtrack of the 2000 Matt Damon movie
All the Pretty Horses, about a 1950s cowboy who crosses south
into Mexico to look for work in simpler times than these. The soundtrack
is one of Heilig's favorites.
Even with the full moon, higher in the sky now, the
desert is dark. Only one other light shines, where miners are core
drilling in an old copper holding two-and-a-half miles away on Mount
Washington. For the past several nights Heilig has been spotting drug
trains on the trail. They reveal themselves as a brief flashlight
flicker checking their footing where a landslide has littered the path.
Last night Heilig saw three flickers minutes apart.
Flicker. A million dollars in marijuana. Flicker. Another million. Flicker. Another.
Tonight we are blanked - just the moon, southwestern melodies, Gigondas, and good conversation.
Ranchers get up early. It's time to leave - time to
leave the ranch, the taco curtain, and sheriffs who imprison men in pink
underwear. Time to leave Arizona.
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