a review of the record, Ranger Sergeant David Duncan said, “The federal government came in and stifled the investigation. It’s really depressing.”
Esequiel Hernandez Jr. dreamed of a career in law enforcement. On his bedroom wall hung a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting poster.
Months before Hernandez was killed, the JTF-6 troops reported their first Mexican casualty. A Green Beret on duty east of Brownsville, Texas, took aim at a figure climbing out of the Rio Grande. Eleven shots later Cesario Vásquez, en route to Houston to look for a job, was dying.
Despite these tragedies, during the 2003 debate in Congress prior to the Iraq war, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, a longtime proponent of militarizing the border, told his colleagues the United States was already fighting a home-front war. “Our borders are war zones,” he told them.15 “There is a war going on on our borders. People are being killed on our borders. Troops are needed on our borders. Our homeland needs to be defended.”
President Trump temporarily deployed the U.S. military to the border in 2018. Photo-ops included soldiers stringing razor wire along the existing barrier. Trump, with typical hyperbole, threatened a massive troop presence if Congress refused to spend the billions he was demanding for construction of his wall. “We will build a Human Wall if necessary,” he typed on Twitter.16
One of those Marines Trump sent to the Arizona border was Adam Woodward, who described his tour of borderlands duty as an exercise in boredom: just observing the desert, punctuated by rare police work. “One day we spotted these two individuals probably seven, eight miles out,” Woodward and his partner watched for an hour while “these guys are getting closer and closer.” The Border Patrol unit the Marines called had not arrived by the time the two hikers reached the Marine post. “They finally got up close enough where I could yell at them.” He ordered them to lie down. “They laid down where they were at.” The Marines and their detainees waited until the Border Patrol arrived to take over the case. And that was the climax of Woodward’s tedious role in Trump’s publicity campaign.17
Chaos Reigns
As Mexicans continued to die along the border from attacks by the U.S. military and the Border Patrol, at the hands of bandits and cheating coyotes, and from the extreme heat and cold of the desert, the United States continued its efforts at slowing the flow of migrants. In 1998, the Arizona border became the path into the United States with the greatest number of illegal crossings, according to the Border Patrol, outstripping Tijuana where the extensive patrols and the expanding wall convinced migrants that the Arizona desert was a better risk. The next year the Border Patrol caught nearly half a million undocumented migrants in Arizona, a doubling of their caseload in just five years.18 By the year 2000, the radical wall along the Tijuana-San Diego line was replicated in the Arizona desert at Douglas, across from Agua Prieta. But five miles of floodlights and cameras, sheet metal and iron were unable to do anything but complicate the crossing and make it more expensive and dangerous for illicit travelers, pushing them away from the urbanized Douglas–Agua Prieta twin cities and into the unforgiving wilds of the desert.
Agua Prieta presidente municipal Daniel Fierros could see from the changes in his city how futile the Southwest Border Strategy and its new strip of wall in the desert north of his town were to U.S. goals of securing the border. “People who didn’t have income rent [rooms in] their houses,” he said about the economic boom new migrants brought to his part of the border. “People sell fast food and things to cook with. Taxis get more business. And the coyotes do very well. We don’t condone it, but it’s a business as lucrative as drug trafficking, without the risks.”19 By 2000, hundreds of guest houses—just homes with rooms to rent—were operating in Agua Prieta, catering to border crossers waiting for the right moment to head north.20
In 1994, there were 58 Border Patrol agents working out of the Douglas station. By 2000, their ranks soared toward six hundred, by 2020 close to four thousand agents were on patrol just along the Arizona line. And still the trail north filled with migrants on the move.
The people-smuggling business thrived as the border became harder to cross. Coyotes upped the prices for a guided crossing; they fought with each other for the lucrative human cargo. Warfare between smuggling syndicates spread from Mexico and the border further north into U.S. cities. More expensive and sophisticated smugglers promised to get migrants far from the border into safe houses where they could rest and make onward plans before disappearing into American crowds. Again, the U.S. government responded with force, doubling the number of immigration agents in Phoenix, for example, to one hundred. “We’re dealing with ruthless individuals who view human life as nothing more than cargo for profit,” said Michael Garcia, acting assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.21 “Smuggling-related violence in the Phoenix area has reached epidemic proportions,” Garcia said about the need for more officers.
Phoenix police reported instances of rival traffickers kidnapping migrants from each other and holding them for ransom. Day laborer Anna Roblero said she was one of those kidnap victims when she arrived in Phoenix after paying a coyote four hundred dollars for passage across the border. “We walked for three days and three nights through the desert,” she told National Public Radio during an interview on a Phoenix street. “When we got across the desert, the smugglers told us to wait for some men to pick us up, but they never came. We didn’t know where we were.” Different smugglers then took custody of the group and demanded more money. Roblero said she called a cousin, who was able to raise the money, but it took over a week, a week she spent confined in a house. “I just cried and cried. I thought I was never going to see my kids again. They had guns and I thought they were going to kill us. Thank God my cousin came and gave them the money.”22
Since a conviction for people smuggling usually results in a much less severe jail sentence than a conviction for drug smuggling, experienced criminals from the drug trade saw a business opportunity with human cargo and moved into trafficking in human beings.
Texas summers bake. I know; when we lived in a stuffy Dallas bungalow, my wife and I periodically treated ourselves to relief from the heat and humidity with the company car. We’d just sit in the driveway, air conditioner cranked up high, listen to the radio and cool off. WFAA Radio bought the gasoline and somehow we rationalized the exhaust.
On a hot May 13, 2003, well before summer, down by the Mexico border near Harlingen, smugglers guided as many as a hundred immigrants into a freight trailer. They had just crossed the border illegally, wading across the Rio Grande as so many millions of Mexicans and others had done before that hot night. The doors to the long van swung shut, and the truck headed north through the night toward its destination, Houston.
Not three hours later, just outside Victoria at a Harris County gas station, the driver stopped his rig, opened the back doors of the trailer and abandoned it and its devastated cargo.1 Nineteen of his hundred or so passengers were dead or dying, killed by heat stroke and dehydration, greed and incompetence, desperation for a better life and unenforceable U.S. immigration laws. One of the dead was a 5-year-old Mexican boy.
“No Sheriff likes to be called at two o’clock in the morning to be told he has multiple deceased people in his community,” Sheriff Mike Ratcliff says when he recalls that miserable night.
“Upon arrival at the location we discovered there were multiple victims on the ground. Then, of
