Read more about the episode here.
Maria Hinojosa: It’s October 23rd, 2023. It’s a Monday and Dora Rodríguez is in the tiny town of Sasabe, Mexico. It’s just across the U.S. border with Arizona and today it’s sunny and a little bit dusty. (MUSIC)
Dora Rodríguez: We were building a beautiful library for the community because they never had a public library.
Maria Hinojosa: Dora is an advocate. She’s an activist for migrant rights and she’s based in Tucson.
Dora Rodríguez: Excited that this beautiful library is coming up, that murals are done. It is very welcoming.
Maria Hinojosa: The reason why Dora is in Sasabe, Mexico is because she’s been running a shelter for migrants there. And she’s also been getting involved in improving this town as a whole.
Dora might be petite, but she’s not small in terms of the impact that she has in this area of the border. And this morning at the library, something feels off.
Dora Rodríguez: But I could sense it was a different vibe. It really was a different vibe that the locals were telling me: something is happening. This is scary because there was so many trucks, different, brand new, wide, big trucks. You could not see who was inside because they were dark, but going fast and driving or slowing down. So it was different than what we’ve seen all this time.
Maria Hinojosa: At the end of the day, Dora drives back across the small port of entry, back into the U.S. and she drives home to Tucson. The next morning…
Dora Rodríguez: We load up our car again, back to Sasabe, with brooms, with things to clean up.
Maria Hinojosa: And during the hour-and-a-half drive south to the border, Dora gets a warning.
Dora Rodríguez: I get a phone call from one of the women that work at the center.
It says: “Dorita, don’t come. We are in a war. There is a fight. There is gunshots all over these mountains and town. Some houses are burning. We don’t know what’s happening. Please don’t come.” (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: At the time, Sasabe, Mexico, was a town of about a thousand residents. Families have been there for generations. There’s kind of not much here. There are no big stores, no chain restaurants, no banks. Everyone shops at the one outpost where the owner runs the register and knows most of her customers.
There is a small official U.S. port of entry, and for decades this has been a corridor for migrants crossing the border. The press has reported that for the last 12 years, the local boss of the Sinaloa cartel, managing Sasabe, Mexico, basically left the townspeople alone and allowed them to work. And everyone sort of knew that the cartel was smuggling people, but they all went about their business without getting involved.
Until now.
(MUSIC)
Now, you should know that there are two Sasabes split up by the international border boundary. There’s Sasabe Mexico and Sasabe U.S. And, in the area dividing the two, there’s about a 20-mile stretch of border wall. And over the years, that stretch of wall has had more than 20 gaps or openings, holes in the wall that can be huge enough to fit a herd of cows, for example, or small enough to fit a person sliding under the wall.
And those have been repaired multiple times, mostly because of erosion during and after the monsoon seasons, when torrential rains cause damage, and because people crossing cut holes into the fence.
News Anchor: “The wall certainly looks impressive, but in parts of Arizona’s border with Mexico, this new wall is proving to be little more than a temporary obstacle for smugglers.”
“Two young gentlemen cutting through the wall with an angle grinder that you can pick up at Walmart or Home Depot.”
Maria Hinojosa: See, that same week that Dora got that warning call, something happened at the border wall nearby that she says also contributed to the spark that set things off.
(MUSIC)
There was this one specific opening in the border wall, not too far from the Sasabe U.S. Port of Entry, about a 40-foot gap, where large groups of migrants, refugees, most of them families, had been crossing, where they’d wait on the other side of the border wall for the Border Patrol to turn themselves in and ask for asylum.
Dora Rodríguez: The gap was very easy for that group that was already in that town.
Maria Hinojosa: Now, the cartel group that ran that area, Dora says, had been using this opening because not only was it huge, it was easier to access than the more rugged mountainous terrain until the construction company doing repairs closed that huge opening in late October of 2023.
According to Dora and to other people we spoke to, including a Mexican security analyst, this caused the cartel smuggling operation to be pushed further east into another group’s smuggling territory. All of this under control of the Sinaloa cartel.
Dora Rodríguez: It’s pretty much the same organized crime group, they’re just different, uh, ramitas.
Maria Hinojosa: Wings.
Dora Rodríguez: Wings.
Maria Hinojosa: The infighting within the cartel and the closing of that gap in the wall collided, and Dora says the fighting escalated daily.
Within two weeks, at the beginning of November, locals woke up to find several homes set on fire in their town, so they ran to U.S. Border officials seeking help.
Dora Rodríguez: People were trapped. They could not go south to Mexico to another towns near Mexico, because it was already controlled by the new cartel group coming in, taking over. And then they could not come north to the port of entry because they denied protection to these people over and over. So I started getting these phone calls, what, what, what, what we do?
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: From Futuro Media and PRX, it’s Latino USA, I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today, Fernanda Echavarri, senior producer at Futuro Studios and I, are bringing you the story of what’s happening in this remote area of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Fernanda Echavarri: We’re going to see what the border wall is and isn’t doing and get past the rhetoric of an election cycle.
Maria Hinojosa: We’re going to hear from people on both sides of the wall, from humanitarian volunteers who are beacons of light, and we’re going to ask Border Patrol how they handle the every day.
Fernanda Echavarri: We’re going to bring you the realities of a remote border area that could easily be forgotten or overlooked. But from what we saw, it’s where politics are abstract and policies are real.
Maria Hinojosa: This story is part of our election coverage “The Latino Factor. How we vote.”
(MUSIC)
Immigration and the border are very much front of mind as we get closer to election day. Tensions and divisions on border policies are heightened as a new Gallup poll shows that significantly more Americans named immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S.
Fernanda Echavarri: As we enter this all too familiar deja vu moment with a second Joe Biden, Donald Trump face-off.
Joe Biden: “And I want to talk about another top issue, the border. I’m ready to solve the problem, I really am. Massive changes, and I mean it sincerely.”
Trump: “Democrats say: ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, no, they’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals.”
Fernanda Echavarri: Immigrants. The border. All the time. Here’s Speaker Johnson.
Johnson: “I’m going to tell the president, what I’m telling all of you, and we’ve told the American people: border, border, border.”
Maria Hinojosa: The border is likely to be all talk for a lot of people. Many who will say that the U.S. is battling an invasion to describe desperate families asking for refuge legally.
For Dora, the humanitarian powerhouse, it’s not.
Dora Rodríguez: I have not seen an invasion. There is no invasion in our wall, in our, in our borderlands. It is never been one in 40 years I’ve been around these borderlands.
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: What is new is the unprecedented cartel battle happening in Sasabe, Mexico. A conflict that has given birth to a new group of asylum seekers, the locals who had lived their whole lives in the shadow of the wall, without intentions to ever come north.
Fernanda Echavarri: And here’s the thing, and this is really important. Yes, there are millions and millions of dollars to be made in the drug smuggling business. There has been for decades. But there are now also millions and millions more to be made in the people smuggling business.
Maria Hinojosa: And the people being smuggled, they’re the ones living the consequences of shifts in this business and in U.S. policies.
Maria Hinojosa: It’s 5:51 in the morning. It’s still pretty much pitch black out there.
Fernanda Echavarri: 47 degrees only.
Maria Hinojosa: 47 degrees, but it’s raining.
Fernanda Echavarri: It’s a cold and rainy March morning in the desert. We’ve been driving for about an hour from Tucson, south to the border near the town of Sasabe, Arizona. Bob Key, soft-spoken retiree, is at the wheel.
Bob: My name is Bob Key. I live in Tucson, Arizona.
Fernanda Echavarri: What do you do?
Bob: I am a member of the Tucson Samaritans and Green Valley Samaritans.
Fernanda Echavarri: And back here we have?
Debbie: I’m Debbie McCullough I also am a member of the Green Valley and the Tucson Samaritans and I live in Green Valley. I live in Tucson.
Maria Hinojosa: We are on the U.S. side of the border, and we’re driving parallel to the wall. We’re heading east now, past that 40-foot opening that we mentioned at the top of this episode. The one that construction workers had closed up this past fall.
Fernanda Echavarri: We’re on our way to another opening, many, many miles away, where the wall just ends. We wanted to see where people have been pushed to cross.
Bob: So we know that people have been out here overnight. Children as well. There was a family with a baby one-month-old. They’re cold and the rain.
Fernanda Echavarri: Bob and Debbie have been volunteering with migrant rights groups for 20 years. They’ve seen migration trends, shift the demographics evolved, but the need is there and their role remain.
Bob: You know, once I made that connection with, with people, it just, it, it, it truly became my calling. I, I, it’s like I found what I was meant to be here for.
Fernanda Echavarri: It’s hard to describe just how intense this terrain we’re driving through right now is. It’s a four-wheel drive type of road with the border fence to our right. The hills go up and down so steep that when Bob approaches the top, we can’t even really see what’s below. Terrain that migrants have walked in the dark, and under extreme weather conditions.
Fernanda Echavarri: Uff! this is a steep drop. I don’t like it.
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: Talking about the wall, as in capital T, capital W, has become synonymous with border security, illegal immigration, and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Even though the wall itself, as Border Patrol agents have said, is just a tool in the larger picture, a slowdown mechanism. But not a stop to border crossings. And if you haven’t looked closely, the wall is really more of a fence.
There are six-inch steel bollards, four inches apart.
Maria Hinojosa: Before Trump’s build the wall chant became a center of his first presidential campaign in 2016, there were already more than 650 miles of border barriers along the southern border.
Trump supporters: Build that wall! Build that wall!
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: During his presidency, Trump did build almost 50 miles of new border wall, where there had never been barriers before. But the majority of his claim to fame was replacing more than 450 miles of smaller, dilapidated sections of the wall with this huge, menacing 30-foot fence.
Fernanda Echavarri: Now, fast forward to Biden’s first day in office.
News Anchor: CNN projects Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected the 46th president of the United States.
Fernanda Echavarri: He signed an executive order saying that his administration would not build one more inch of new border wall. But that didn’t stop the work to repair damaged sections of the old wall. Biden has said that his administration was forced to continue spending the money that Congress had allocated for these repairs.
Joe Biden: I tried to get them to re-appropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. I can’t stop that.
Fernanda Echavarri: So, in the last four years, the construction company has continued to close gaps and welded shut some of the open parts without building new sections of the wall.
Maria Hinojosa: How do you process what we’re seeing here, which is the wall is here and now isn’t. I’m confused.
Bob: Yeah.
Maria Hinojosa: There’s supposed to be a border wall, but you’re saying there’s 10 miles of no border wall?
Bob: Yeah.
Maria Hinojosa: Because…
Bob: Well, they just haven’t. They, they stopped. So here’s, here’s an indicator. They always date when they put the last ballard in for the day. This last, this ballard was 1/13/ 2020. One week before inauguration. And that was the last of the wall building.
Maria Hinojosa: After the stomach-turning drive up and down the rollercoaster of the muddy hills at the border, we arrive at a camp that volunteers have built on the U.S. side. It’s literally a stone’s throw from the wall.
Bob: This is the camp that was set up.
Fernanda Echavarri: We’re here?
Bob: Yeah, this is the camp off to the left that’s set up to accommodate people with tents and food and water.
Maria Hinojosa: This makeshift resting camp was set up in December of 2023, about a month after the cartel war took over Sasabe, Mexico, and when the 40-foot gap that was more easily accessible was closed. It was built in response to the grave need for humanitarian aid for asylum seekers who were pushed to cross further away into the mountainous desert area and therefore have to wait for the border patrol to come and get them.
Fernanda Echavarri: I got really cold.
Maria Hinojosa: It’s so cold. Oh my gosh, I can see my breath.
Fernanda Echavarri: Yeah.
Fernanda Echavarri: Now, if you haven’t lived in the desert, you may not realize just how extreme the weather is down here. The summers reach over 110 degrees, but in the early months of the year, the temperatures can drop in the low 30s at night. And yes, it has snowed down here.
Fernanda Echavarri: Next to the fire where we’re standing, we’re standing over the sort of leftover smoke from a, from a fire. There are about four milk crates and a little, like little mermaid towel on top of one of them.
Maria Hinojosa: Maybe some long underwear?
Fernanda Echavarri: Long underwear. Yeah, there’s also there, there’s a jacket hanging from a tree. I mean, I would, I would say this is probably one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, maybe about fifteen tents. And by tents, we mean tarp that’s been hung up on trees, not REI style tents.”
Fernanda Echavarri: In the middle of the camp, there’s a large canopy with supplies. Lots and lots of water.
Debbie: “Coffee, there is a camp stove so that people can come and make the hot coffee or ramen and, um, refried beans, lots of refried beans. So that’s kind of just our go-to meals.”
Maria Hinojosa: And as Debbie shows us around, suddenly, a tiny creature approaches.
Debbie: Oh, this is the camp cat.
Fernanda Echavarri: Oh yeah, who’s this? This is the camp cat?
Debbie: Yeah, yeah.
Fernanda Echavarri: Hi, Camp Kitty.
Debbie: This cat is…
Fernanda Echavarri: What’s the kitty’s name?
Debbie: We don’t know. Camp Cat, I guess. CK, right?
(LAUGHS)
Fernanda Echavarri: CK? Camp Cat?
Clearly, CK stands for Camp Kitty, not Camp Cat.
But fun fact, Camp Kitty used to live at the Border Patrol Station in Sasabe, Arizona, with the Border Patrol agents, until one day, it snuck into one of their vans headed for the camp and never went back.
Maria Hinojosa: As we move further into the camp, we see this decked-out sprinter van. And that’s where we meet Andy Winter.
Andy: We campground host.
Fernanda Echavarri: Andy and his little dog Rafa are usually the only ones who stay at the camp after sunset.
Andy: Tenemos agua caliente para café, sopa…
Maria Hinojosa: He’s often the first face that migrants see when they arrive at the camp, and he speaks to them in Spanish, talks about how the camp works, offers them hot coffee. And Andy is a retired educator from Vermont.
He’s a former tennis pro. He’s probably more than six feet tall. He is very all-American, and his van is next-level.
Andy: This is like the most popular, you know, like RV in America right now for folks. It’s a, it’s a Mercedes Sprinter and it’s just souped up a little bit. So it’s got…
Fernanda Echavarri: A little bit?
Andy: It’s got four-wheel drives, you know, solar panels across the roof, um, satellite
Maria Hinojosa: Can we get inside?
Andy: Uh, it’s super messy right now, but yeah, of course, I mean, yeah!
Fernanda Echavarri: Andy’s van is the wi-fi charging van, and indispensable tool in this remote camp where there is little to no phone signal, no Wi-Fi, no electricity.
Fernanda Echavarri: This is where people can charge their phones, and once they are connected to Wi-Fi, they can call their family members who haven’t heard from them in days, sometimes weeks, and tell them that they’ve made it to the U.S.
(MUSIC)
Andy: “There is a group last night, right before Border Patrol picked them up, we were waiting, it was like 9:30, and it’s dark, dark, dark, you know, we got a fire going, and the stars are out here in the desert. It looks like they drop down as the night, you know, as it gets darker and darker. And, and we were just talking about how this is, this moment is such a… completely unique, like everything’s changing for them in this moment, like this night, waiting for Border Patrol to pick them up for this whole new experience that they have no idea what’s, what’s going to happen.
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: And the future looks different for folks. Some people could go from the camp to a detention center. Or they could be deported quickly. Many will petition asylum and get released into the United States with a court date years from now. And others might not even get the chance to ask for asylum anymore.
Fernanda Echavarri: After President Biden’s recent crackdown at the border, critics like the ACLU just sued, challenging Biden’s new order to turn asylum seekers back once they reach a certain number.
Maria Hinojosa: Last fiscal year, there was a sky-high number of what Border Patrol calls “encounters,” with 3.2 million, and 2024 is on track to hit an all-time high.
Maria Hinojosa: We’re talking families, little kids, elderly folks from all over the world, Central and South America, Africa, India, families from Afghanistan.
Fernanda Echavarri: And that’s largely because of something that significantly changed at the border a year ago.
Maria Hinojosa: And that’s coming up after the break. No te vayas.
(MUSIC AND AD BREAK)
Maria Hinojosa: Welcome back to Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa.
Fernanda Echavarri: And I’m Fernanda Echavarri.
Maria Hinojosa: To understand the rise in large groups of people crossing the border to turn themselves over to the Border Patrol to petition asylum, we have to look at something that happened a year ago.
Fernanda Echavarri: The end of a Trump-era border closure policy known as Title 42.
News Anchor: The countdown is over and the next phase has begun. Title 42 is now expired as of an hour ago.
Maria Hinojosa: Title 42 is an obscure health law. It was first invoked by the Trump administration at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Essentially, it closed the border by turning people seeking asylum right back around, without giving them a proper asylum screening.
Trump: We closed the borders very early. We made a great decision, took a lot of heat over that decision, but it turned out to be the right decision.
Fernanda Echavarri: And as the years went on, vaccines became available, mandated masking ended, and Trump left office, border agents continued using it at the direction of now President Joe Biden, even as he declared an end to the pandemic.
Reporter: Is the pandemic over?
Joe Biden: Pandemic is over.
News Anchor: President Biden declared the coronavirus pandemic is over.
News Anchor: President Biden promised to end Title 42. Instead, he is now expanding restrictions on asylum seekers.
Fernanda Echavarri: So much for a temporary policy that was supposed to be about the pandemic, huh?
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: And here’s the thing, the whole time this policy was in place, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world stayed in Mexican border cities waiting.
Fernanda Echavarri: So when the policy ends, that’s when we started to see large groups of women, children, families, all crossing the border wanting to turn themselves into the Border Patrol to begin the asylum process that had been denied to them for so many years.
News Anchor: The number of people crossing illegally into America this past year has been staggering, 10,000 a day last week. It has been a record-breaking year, and objectively, it seems clear that the U.S. Government has lost any sense of control.
Fernanda Echavarri: In Mexico, these groups have been managed, you could say, by smugglers working for Mexican drug cartels. And they started pushing large groups through Sasebe.
Dora Rodríguez: That’s when we started seeing the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people presented in our borders. But this is people who were already a lot of it in Mexico. So this is the consequences.
Maria Hinojosa: That’s Dora Rodríguez, once again, she’s the humanitarian migrant rights activist from Southern Arizona.
Dora Rodríguez: It is millions of dollars being made by this bottleneck that had happened in Mexico due to the policies that were created during the last administration.
Fernanda Echavarri: David Saucedo, a security consultant in Mexico and expert in drug cartels says that the cartels take advantage of this.
David: “Las políticas migratorias de Estados Unidos son aprovechadas en cualquier sentido y en cualquier modalidad por los carteles mexicanos.”
Fernanda Echavarri: They look at changes to U.S. Immigration policy, even if the migrants themselves are completely unaware of any of it.
Maria Hinojosa: If we look back to the early 2000s, we would see small, sometimes family-run groups known as polleros or coyotes, and they would organize how and where people could cross illegally into the U.S. Trying to go undetected.
David: Tenían un negocio muy lucrativo.
Fernanda Echavarri: They had a lucrative business. But it was essentially a family business.
David: Que era el llevar migrantes mexicanos o centroamericanos hacia los Estados Unidos en búsqueda del sueño americano.
Maria Hinojosa: At the time, David says, the smugglers’ clients were mostly Mexican or Central American adults migrating for economic opportunities. And about 15 years ago, the big Mexican drug cartels began to take notice. They could make a lot of money trafficking people.
David: Empezaron, primero a reclutar a los polleros.
Fernanda Echavarri: So first, the cartel started recruiting those polleros and coyotes.
David: Y después a desplazarlos por completo para adueñarse ellos de este lucrativo negocio.
Maria Hinojosa: Only to displace them altogether and take over the business of smuggling migrants.
Fernanda Echavarri: Plus, David says, the cartels could make even more money by kidnapping or extorting migrants along their journey at the hands of their own cartel members.
David: Muchos grupos de migrantes son secuestrados los mismos cárteles.
Maria Hinojosa: An extension of the realities of Mexican victims of crime at the hands of the ruthless cartels in Mexico, making now even more money off of migrants.
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: With that much money to be made, the territorial disputes that we talked about that happened in October and November in Sasabe, Mexico, when Dora was working at the library, all of that heated up. That’s also at the time when the construction company had closed the gap in front of the town.
Maria Hinojosa: Remember, two wings of the Sinaloa cartel started to fight for territory to smuggle people. And that violence affected the quiet border town, forcing locals now to seek refuge in the U.S.
Fernanda Echavarri: It was a turf war unlike anything Sasabe, Mexico had ever seen. Many residents told Dora:
Dora Rodríguez: Nos vamos a morir, nos van a matar, nuestros niños.
Maria Hinojosa: We are going to die. They’re going to kill our children. So Dora says hundreds of residents ran to the Port of Entry on the Mexican side and begged Mexican customs officials to help them. Many of them ended up sleeping right there, outside of the Mexican border office.
Dora Rodríguez: This went by for almost a week and a half, and there was no one, no one showed up from the Mexican government to protect these people. That own National Guard that is right across the street from our own resource center shut their door, and hide.
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: And then, November 6, a young man calls and says:
Dora Rodríguez: Dorita, we cannot let our people die here. We have to do something. And I say: do whatever you want to save your family.
Fernanda Echavarri: Dora drove to the border and saw that people had cut a hole in the fence and were rushing through.
Dora Rodríguez: With the little ones in their arms, people in wheelchairs, women with their walker, a man with a broken leg. That kind of scenario. Running all over, like, we’re out.
News Anchor: A town violence has sent people living in the border town of Sasabe, Sonora, fleeing for their lives, crossing the border into Arizona.
News Anchor: El terror se ha desatado en distintos poblados del norte de Sonora debido a enfrentamientos armados entre grupos criminales.
News Anchor: Caught in the crossfire, residents then scrambled into the U.S.
Dora Rodríguez: “It was crazy, It was something that you see in movies.” (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: We asked Customs and Border Protection for comment on what their agents saw at the official port of entry in Sasabe, and they sent us this written statement from the time of the outbreak back in November. It says: “Customs and Border Protection is aware of the recent violence in Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico. Many residents of this town found haven at the Mexican immigration authorities and Mexican Customs until the violence subsided. Individuals who presented themselves at the port of Sasabe, Arizona, were evaluated on a case by case basis.” end quote.
Fernanda Echavarri: We also asked officials with the Mexican government for comment, but they did not respond. As the violence continued, Sasabe, Mexico, became a ghost town.
Dora Rodríguez: So this town, this place, got to be from 2,500 people to what, 50 now?
Fernanda Echavarri: And Dora had to make a difficult choice: to close Casa de la Esperanza.
Dora Rodríguez: It was not lightly. So this is, uh, what is really hard, personally, because I knew we were pretty much saving lives.
(MUSIC)
Dora Rodríguez: At least we had a center where we could help them.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Dora hasn’t crossed into Sasabe, Mexico, a place that she would go to several times a week. She hasn’t been back since the day that she closed Casa de la Esperanza shelter last fall.
Dora Rodríguez: My heart breaks, my heart hurts.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Now, she’s focused on helping residents of Sasabe, Mexico, who crossed into the United States during the crisis. Dora says that some of them hope to stay in Tucson, but others really want to go back to their homes, and some already have.
Fernanda Echavarri: During our visit to the U.S. side of the border, in Sasabe, Arizona, we hadn’t planned on crossing into Sasabe, Mexico, because of this violence. But when Gail Kocourek, a volunteer with the Samaritans in Tucson, tells us that she’s going to cross just feet from the port of entry, we decide to cross with her for a few minutes in the cold and windy pouring rain.
(RAINDROPS)
Gail: Okay, let’s come over here with the bag.
Maria Hinojosa: Gail is crossing to bring food to the abandoned dogs that the Sasabe residents had to leave behind in November when they were running north to save their lives.
Gail: See there’s some doggos there right now. They’re gonna be so happy when they see us. They’re gonna go, here comes that lady!
Maria Hinojosa: Gail is super energetic, super fierce. She also used to run Casa de la Esperanza, the shelter with Dora, but unlike Dora, Gail has been crossing at least once a week back into Sasabe with her 50-pound bags of dog kibble.
Gail: And look what happens when you bring the food. They know, when they saw the car, those dogs came crazy running over here.
Fernanda Echavarri: Oh my goodness, there’s so many of you! There are about 15 dogs that run straight to Gail once they hear her calling them and shaking the bag of food. It’s a pretty wild sight.
Gail: And usually on Wednesday I bring food for people too. So because food is very expensive here, there’s no jobs, and it’s really difficult for the people that have returned to this community.
Maria Hinojosa: Not long after the dogs surround us, two women start walking over to us.
Fernanda Echavarri: One of them tells us that she and her family left, back when the locals fled in November, but came back recently and looking around right now, she can still remember the fear she had, as she saw houses being set on fire all around her.
Fernanda Echavarri: She adds that while things have been much more calm, she’s sad to see her hometown become a ghost town.
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: If you’ve been around the borderlands long enough, you may have heard this expression: “when the U.S. sneezes, Mexico catches a cold.” That’s because the deep connection between the two countries is really palpable here at the border.
Maria Hinojosa: And the cartel violence that ravaged Sasabe, Mexico, since last fall has not only affected the locals, it’s put migrants and asylum seekers from all over the world right into the crossfire.
Miguel: Yo nunca pensé que iba a pasar todo eso.
Fernanda Echavarri: That’s Miguel. We’re not going to reveal his name or exact age because he fears for his safety. Just know that he’s a young adult from southern Mexico. And he saw firsthand the cartel violence that was happening at the border.
Maria Hinojosa: Miguel tells us that his uncle lived in Tucson and had been working at a restaurant for many years.
Maria Hinojosa: Miguel was in Mexico starting a family and he needed money, so his uncle told him he would pay for smugglers to get him across so he could make a living, buy his house, and start his new family.
Miguel: Él es el que pagó todo eso.
Maria Hinojosa: Miguel had no idea what was going on. It was his uncle who took care of everything. He paid the smugglers, he left his home in Tucson in order to make that trek north with his nephew. Miguel tells us that they met up with coyotes who transported them mostly by bus from his town to right near the border. And their journey of about 1,500 miles went pretty much okay, Miguel said, until they got to the Sasabe area in Mexico.
Maria Hinojosa: Remember, this is just months after that gun battle crisis that forced residents in Sasabe to escape their town. But Miguel and his uncle didn’t know anything about that.
Miguel: Era todo la luz de la luna.
Maria Hinojosa: Ya, era de noche.
Miguel: Sí.
Maria Hinojosa: Noche, noche, noche. Caminando, todo bien.
Miguel: Todo bien, hasta que de repente nos rodearon.
Maria Hinojosa: In the darkness of night, Miguel and the group of about 25 people, mostly from Central America, were walking, they were being led by a smuggler, and then out of nowhere, they were suddenly surrounded by a group of men with flashlights and guns.
Miguel: Dice: ¿con quién viene?
Fernanda Echavarri: The armed men asked the group who they came with.
Maria Hinojosa: Osea, ¿ellos querían el nombre del coyote?
Miguel: Ajá. Algo así, pero como nadie contestó y como luego luego empezaron a disparar hacia arriba, del cielo, como que nos entró más miedo.
Fernanda Echavarri: They wanted the name of the smuggler, but no one in the group said anything. So the ambushing group told all the men to run and began shooting at them, separating the women and children.
Miguel: Pues a mi tío le dieron en la pierna y él gritó, entonces yo me regresé.
Fernanda Echavarri: He says his uncle was shot in the leg. Miguel took off his jacket, put it on his uncle, and hugged him.
Miguel: Y lo tapé con la chamarra y me encimé encima de él y se escuchaba cómo corrían y los disparos y la gente gritando.
Fernanda Echavarri: He laid on top of his uncle and could hear gunshots screams, and people running around.
Miguel: Cuando me dice él: ya no aguanto. Me dice, cuídate mucho.
Fernanda Echavarri: His uncle told him to leave him behind. “I can’t take it.” He told Miguel to take care of himself.
Miguel: Y a los 5 minutos pues se murió en mis brazos.
Fernanda Echavarri: And five minutes later, he died in Miguel’s arms.
(MUSIC)
Miguel: Cuando amaneció este, pues lo único que hice fue subirme al primer cerrito y fue cuando vi la barda.
Maria Hinojosa: Miguel stayed with his uncle’s body until dawn in the desolate Mexican desert, all alone, and with the light of day, he went up a hill and that’s when he saw the border wall and the United States right from where he was standing.
Miguel: Mi miedo era de regresar hacia atrás.
Fernanda Echavarri: His feet covered in blisters, Miguel walked by the dead bodies of people in his group. He was too afraid to go back. Once he got to the opening that we’ve been describing throughout the episode, where the 30-foot wall just ends, he crossed and he kept walking. He made it to the camp where the Samaritans were, but he didn’t stop.
Fernanda Echavarri: He needed to keep going. So he kept walking until a Border Patrol helicopter went by, in the desert, and he signaled to it. And now, Dora is trying to help Miguel in Tucson.
Dora Rodríguez: He deserves protection because, God forbid, if anyone finds out that he was part of the, the murder, the ambush that they did to these people, who knows if they’re going to come after him.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Even though at first Miguel was an economic migrant, Dora says now he’s the victim of organized crime and he fears for his life if he were to be sent back to Mexico. So, he’s asking for asylum, and Dora is helping his case in Tucson.
Dora Rodríguez: Miguel is real, his uncle died. At this moment, I don’t know how I’m going to help Miguel to get, to find his, his uncle, to at least give him a decent death, a decent grave.
Maria Hinojosa: Hearing Miguel describe what he experienced, it’s really clear that he is still in shock and attempting to process the trauma.
Miguel: Un psicólogo me dio terapia.
Maria Hinojosa: He’s met with a psychologist and had therapy for the first time.
Miguel: Me dijo para que tranquilizara mis nervios, mi miedo.
Maria Hinojosa: Trying to help him calm his nerves and control his fear.
Dora Rodríguez: The people who is coming north seeking asylum or migrating, they are coming into a war zone that they don’t even know they are trapped too, because these groups are not telling them; Hey, we’re fighting for this area. They’re not. They want their money.
Fernanda Echavarri: Money, like most things. This is all about money.
Maria Hinojosa: That’s coming up after the break. No te vayas.
(MUSIC AND AD BREAK)
Maria Hinojosa: Welcome back to Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa.
Fernanda Echavarri: And I’m Fernanda Echavarri. That cold rainy morning in March at the humanitarian camp on the U.S. side of the Sasabe border, just as the rain started to pick up, we saw two young-looking men walking up. Gail, the fierce and bubbly dog lover who crosses to feed the dogs in Mexico once a week, had just driven the two men here from a few miles away.
Gail: We went to the end of the wall, we turned around and came back and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s two men sitting there and they were praying.’
Fernanda Echavarri: So Gail turned to the other volunteer that was in the car with her and said: “It’s pouring. We’re not leaving these people here.” The men were so deep in prayer and relief to have entered the U. S. that they didn’t even look back at Gail as she drove up to them. The men were Ángel and Emmanuel. They had both left their homes in Guatemala six weeks earlier.
Emanuel: Ya venimos pa’ dentro. Fue el destino donde topamos y ahí nos vinimos apoyando unos al otro.
Fernanda Echavarri: They didn’t know each other but met along the way, and they’d became like brothers.
Emanuel: Cansado, un poco agotado, sí.
Maria Hinojosa: They are looking so exhausted. They tell us that once they got closer to the border, they didn’t join any large group led by any smuggler, which is not the norm these days. Instead, they quietly followed a group from a distance and hid behind them.
Emmanuel: Entonces nosotros miramos que hay gente, pues nos quedamos ocultos. Y cuando miramos que ella se mueve, seguimos.
Maria Hinojosa: They waited until just this morning to cross, and they did it by simply going around the waist-high vehicle barriers, where the 30-foot wall just ends.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: When we asked them who they left behind back at home, they both break down talking about their families. They’re young children, and then Ángel starts weeping uncontrollably.
Ángel: A una familia, a los hijos y es como quitar un pedazo del corazón. (Sobs) Solo Dios sabe la necesidad.
Fernanda Echavarri: A handful of the Samaritans who are there bring over warm blankets and hot coffee. They welcome the men to the camp, offer hugs, words of encouragement, a laugh, and of course, a charger for their phones and Wi-Fi to connect with family members who hadn’t heard from them in days.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: The plan, as it usually goes, is to wait for Border Patrol to come by and check if anyone needs to be picked up from the camp. Whether or not Angel and Emmanuel have an asylum claim, that’s unknown. And that’s up to U.S. asylum officials. But for now, they’re going to wait to be picked up, processed by Border Patrol, and either get deported immediately or open an asylum case and remain in the U.S.
Fernanda Echavarri: Not far from where Angel and Emmanuel were sitting trying to stay warm and dry off, there is a metal sign.
Bob: Oh, this is a new sign.
Debbie: Oh, yes. Wow.
Fernanda Echavarri: Wait, what does it say? Can you read it?
Debbie: Transportation of undocumented non-citizens is a federal crime.
Maria Hinojosa: These new signs are posted near the border wall, and Debbie believes that they’re posted in direct response to the humanitarian workers who are driving people to this tent camp.
Debbie: These people are seeking asylum. We believe that that is not a crime to help them get to the authorities.
Gail: I don’t care what their signs say. It’s not against the law.
Maria Hinojosa: The way she sees it, she drives people along the wall to the camp for shelter, but she doesn’t transport anyone into the country.
Debbie: We aren’t in furthering anything by making a lateral move to a camp for Border Patrol come to pick them up.
Maria Hinojosa: And it’s not just Gail. The Samaritans do use their vehicles to bring people to the camp sometimes as well.
Debbie: If we need to move them from these extremely remote areas where there’s no way to contact Border Patrol or they’re in medical distress. A pregnant woman in labor, for example. We have a protocol to call 911. Sometimes we can’t get cell reception. We’ll move them to where it’s, uh, an ambulance can get to them.
Maria Hinojosa: But you have to call 911 and let them know you’re doing it so it’s on record.
Debbie: Yes.
Fernanda Echavarri: We heard from the Samaritans and other volunteers that there’s a relatively good open communication line between them and many Border Patrol agents in the area right now. And we saw that during one of our visits to the camp. When we spoke with Border Patrol supervisor Marlon Layugan.
Layugan: Buenas tardes.
Migrant: Buenas tardes.
Layugan: ¿Está bien?
Migrant: Sí.
Layugan: ¿Está enfermo?
Fernanda Echavarri: He and his team stopped by the camp to take a man into custody.
Migrant: Estoy cansado nomás.
Layugan: ¿Qué tiene en la mochila?
Migrant: Una cobija y unos atas.
Fernanda Echavarri: He asks the man if he’s hurt or if he needs medical attention. The man says no. Then he asks him if he has any weapons.
Layugan: ¿Tiene armas, algo que me pueda hacer daño?
Migrant: No. Una navaja.
(LAUGHS)
Fernanda Echavarri: Layugan enlightens the mood by following up with..
Layugan: ¿Algo más? ¿Bombas atómicas?
Fernanda Echavarri: Do you have an atomic bomb?
Maria Hinojosa: The man is in his 60s and he says that he had worked in a ranch for decades in a nearby town close to Sasabe. But with the spike in violence, cartels burned down the ranch where he worked. They killed anyone who was inside, so he ran away with nothing but his backpack. And now he’d like to get protection in the United States.
Layugan: What the Border Patrol does is we have to know who he is first, right? After they’ve, after we run records, then we’re able to make a determination as to whether the guy has to see the judge or for, for like a criminal prosecution, or if um, if he claims asylum, that’s a whole nother pathway, so…
Fernanda Echavarri: Today, he says, is a slow day. But in his experience, that could suddenly change.
Layugan: We’ll have nothing, and then suddenly there’s 150 people here. And, you know, these guys are helping, but you just get overwhelmed very quickly, you know.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: In recent months, the Tucson sector has been the busiest, or one of the busiest, nationwide. The sector covers most of the Arizona border, spanning across 260 miles, with more than 3,500 agents assigned to it.
News Anchor: Now here’s some statistics. Encounters here at the Tucson sector have gone up 140 percent in the fiscal year of 2024.
News Anchor: The number of migrants crossing the U.S. Mexico border has climbed, and it has only continued to climb, and it is now pushing border towns to their limit. One of the busiest spots is right here in Arizona.
Maria Hinojosa: At this very camp, volunteers have helped groups of 50, 100, sometimes even more. Smugglers guide them to the end of the wall and then tell them to cross.
Fernanda Echavarri: People from Africa, India, Haiti, Venezuela who have no idea that it will take them hours to walk the 10 miles up and down those steep hills to get to the nearest Border Patrol station. So they are relieved when they get to the camp. And they can catch a break.
Maria Hinojosa: We spoke with U.S. Customs and Border Protection multiple times to get an interview scheduled, but in the end, they said, they could not accommodate our request.
Fernanda Echavarri: So we then sent them specific questions related to the story. And they sent an email with only this answer on the record: “CBP remains vigilant to continually shifting migration patterns and will continue to adjust operations as necessary. CBP continues to work with our partners throughout the hemisphere, including the government of Mexico and around the world, to disrupt the criminal organizations and transportation networks who take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants.”
(MUSIC)
Fernanda Echavarri: Standing here in the barren desert, it’s hard not to think about how politicized this area will be in the coming months leading up to the election. And as we’re leaving the camp, we run into someone who knows about that all too well. Rancher Jim Chilton, one of the most prominent voices in the area. Back in 2016, when Trump promised to expand the border wall, Chilton was, quote, “elated.” He’s a fifth-generation ranter in his mid-eighties whose property touches the border.
Jim Chilton: I have five and a half miles of the international boundary.
Maria Hinojosa: Over the last 20 years, Chilton has testified in Congress multiple times regarding the politics and policies of the U.S.-Mexico border. He’s been an avid supporter of the border wall and, at times, of Trump.
Fernanda Echavarri: But he has also seen the shift in demographics at the border. From the Mexican single men crossing, trying to evade the authorities, to the multi-national families seeking asylum.
Jim Chilton: I have 24 wells, 13.5 miles of pipeline, and they go to water trials for my cattle to drink, and I put fountains on them so people can come along and get a drink their water and fill up their water bottle and go on. Since I’ve been on this ranch, over 35 people died on the ranch. It’s just horrible.
Jim Chilton:I don’t care whether they’re drug packers, who I really dislike, or just immigrants coming through. No one needs to die. No one needs to die on my ranch.
Maria Hinojosa: According to a recent NPR/PBS poll, almost 40 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of independents say immigration is the number one issue in the upcoming election. And like in previous elections, Chilton will be talking to anyone who will listen.
Jim Chilton: Well, some people call it an invasion. All I know is a large, huge number every day come across the end of the wall, which is on my ranch and come walking down towards Sasabe and the Border Patrol, they want to be apprehended. The ones I’m concerned about coming through my ranch are walking north in camouflage, uh, and many of them are packing drugs.
Fernanda Echavarri: Recently?
Jim Chilton: A couple of years ago. A couple of years ago.
Fernanda Echavarri: I asked Chilton about the shift in recent years.
Fernanda Echavarri: Now that it’s mostly asylum seekers who are looking for Border Patrol rather than evading them.
Jim Chilton: Yes, two different types. And so the cartels have shifted, uh, people this way. Uh, one time I came along this road and saw 205 people. I counted them. I’ve heard that as many as 400 people would walk in in a day. The Samaritans and the humanitarian, humane borders people, uh, help them and it’s really nice. It’s very significant and wonderful.
Fernanda Echavarri: There’s a lot that can be said about the border, good and bad, terrifying and hopeful and, at the risk of sounding super cheesy, the more time we spent with the Samaritans, honestly, the more we saw these kind hearted folks as beacons of light in a bleak situation.
Maria Hinojosa: Especially Dora, who you’ve been hearing from throughout our episode. And she also has a message to anyone hearing about a so-called invasion at the border.
Dora Rodríguez: I really want people to understand that that is a very, very dangerous word to use. Words make a difference.
(MUSIC)
Dora Rodríguez: They’re, they’re not going into our communities illegally. They are processed, they have a paper in their hands, the allow them to be here with documents, you know, there is no invasion.
Maria Hinojosa: In the last couple of months, the number of people that the Border Patrol has taken into custody have, in fact, decreased, not just in Arizona, but across the U.S. Mexico border.
Fernanda Echavarri: And there are many factors that contribute to the number of people coming across the border at any given time. You have Mexico’s own ups and flows of how it works as an extension of the wall, by stopping or detaining non-Mexican migrants along the journey.
Fernanda Echavarri: You have the smuggling tactics and patterns at the hands of cartels, pikes in violence in Mexican border towns like what happened in Sasabe, here’s also natural disasters in certain countries, changes in political stability in others. And of course, changes in policy coming out of the White House.
(MUSIC)
Dora Rodríguez: Washington D.C. is way out there making these decisions. These policies are signed in the morning and in the night and afternoon we already had the effects of those policies in our borderland. We have those people who already are either not allowed to cross in that area, who are going to be processed differently, who are going to be pushed to the most remote areas to cross and die, or who have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to this organized crime in order to seek protection. It is not okay.
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: As political ads saturate our media consumption in a presidential election year, it might be tough to separate the politics from the day-to-day at the border.
Fernanda Echavarri: And here, in this barren patch of desert where a 30-foot border wall just ends, the realities of what happens to the communities south of that wall, and the thousands of people from all over the world who make it past that wall, are not abstract, they’re not politics. They’re real. And there’s sometimes a matter of life and death.
(MUSIC)
(THEME SONG)
Maria Hinojosa: This episode was reported and produced by Fernanda Echavarri and myself. It was edited by Peniley Ramírez. The sound design is by Jacob Rosati. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebow and Julia Caruso. Fact-checking for this episode by Roxana Aguirre. The Latino USA team includes Victoria Estrada, Jessica Ellis, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., Andrea López-Cruzado, Glorimar Márquez, Marta Martínez, Mike Sargent, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Peniley Ramírez is our co-executive producer. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Xenia Rubinos. I’m your host and co-executive producer, Maria Hinojosa. Remember, join us on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on all of your social media. I’ll see you on Instagram, where I have a lot of fun and remember: No te vayas. Ciao!
Stephanie Lebow: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Heising- Simon Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. More at hsfoundation.org, the Tow Foundation, and W. K. Kellogg Foundation, a partner with communities where children come first.
