Family ranch swallowed up in the madness of the border
ARIVACA, ARIZ.>> Jim Chilton, 84, had named the dirt roads and pastures on his land in honor of four generations of family cattle ranchers, but now he prepared to drive across his ranch on the U.S. border unsure of what he might find. He packed a handgun in case he encountered more smugglers working with the Sinaloa cartel and bottles of water for the migrants he’d recently seen lost and dehydrated in the Sonoran Desert.
“Do you have your satellite phone?” asked his wife, Sue Chilton, 81. There was no cell service on most of the ranch and no other homes for several miles.
“I’ll take it with me, but assume no news is good news,” Jim Chilton said.
His plan for the day was to survey three remote water tanks and locate a few lost cows — simple tasks in a place where everything had become increasingly complicated during the past several months. Chilton laid out a map of southern Arizona on the hood of his truck and showed his wife the route he planned to take across their cattle grazing land, an area three times the size of Manhattan located on the outskirts of Arivaca, Ariz. He traced his finger over a desolate mountain range, across six canyons, and down to the 5 1/2 miles of their ranch that ran along the U.s.-mexico border in what had become one of the busiest corridors for a record wave of illegal immigration.
“You’re sure you have everything you need?” Sue Chilton asked.
Jim Chilton searched the bed of his truck for his first-aid kit and double-checked his supplies. “I’m as prepared as I could be,” he said.
“I guess it depends on what version of the border you see today,” Sue Chilton said. Lately, she had been telling friends that understanding the current border crisis reminded her of an old folk tale about a group of blind men encountering an elephant. One man touched the trunk and thought it was a snake. One touched a leg and thought it was a tree. One touched the tail and believed it was a rope.
The Chiltons had spent the past several years trying to unravel the mysteries of their own backyard and grasping at partial truths as the situation worsened on their ranch. They discovered drugs and at least 150 smuggling trails on their grazing land, so they put up security cameras and offered to arm all five of their working cowboys. Those cowboys started to see groups of migrants stranded near the border, so the Chiltons installed water fountains in the desert to help keep people alive. Their security cameras recorded hundreds of men walking by each month in camouflage, so they testified before Congress and campaigned alongside Donald Trump for a wall, hoping it might slow the procession of people onto their ranch.
But now more immigrants entering the country illegally were crossing the southern border than ever before, including a record 302,000 in December alone. Each night, the crisis brought more danger and desperation onto their ranch, and the Chiltons were still trying to get their minds around the whole elephant: It was a humanitarian disaster. It was a drug crisis. It was a national security emergency. It was a cartel war and an American political battle all playing out during a presidential election year within the remote confines of their ranch.
“I’ll be back in five or six hours,” Jim Chilton said. He waved to his wife and turned onto a dirt road headed south.
Chilton descended into Chimney Canyon, where a few years earlier a Border Patrol agent came upon a group of drug smugglers and was shot five times. Chilton continued driving over a hillside where he remembered hearing a child from Honduras screaming for help, and then he’d followed that boy over to his mother, who was dying of complications from diabetes.
He turned onto a rugged road that paralleled the border wall and drove for a few more miles, until he saw a campfire burning in the distance. He was on the most remote corner of one of the most remote ranches in America, but as he drove closer, he counted more than 45 people sitting near the fire. Children shouted in French. A woman prayed in Arabic.
“What in the world is going on?” Chilton wondered.
Brian Best, 64, recognized Chilton’s
truck and walked away from the campfire to flag him down. Best was a volunteer aid worker from Tucson, Ariz., and lately he’d been spending two days each week on the border road as the first and sometimes only American to greet immigrants entering the country illegally who were crossing in historic numbers.
Best had watched cartel guides lead more than 170 people through that opening in the past few hours, including dozens of women and children who said they planned to seek asylum in the United States. They were fleeing civil war in Sudan, caste discrimination in India, starvation in rural Guinea and organized crime in Albania.
Best had been traveling to the border for several years as part of a volunteer group called Tucson Samaritans, and for most of that time their work had been quiet and predictable. They left water, clothing, first-aid kits and food alongside hundreds of covert migrant trails through the desert and planted honorary crosses in the spots where people died of dehydration. Best rarely encountered immigrants entering the country illegally on those trips because fewer were crossing.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Trump invoked a public health rule called Title 42 that allowed agents to turn away migrants at the border. Over three years, the United States used Title 42 to turn back people more than 2.8 million times. But the Biden administration allowed Title 42 to expire last May, and border policy defaulted to the previous standard, which allows most asylum-seekers to stay in America while their cases play out in the backlogged court system. Soon after, Best started running into large groups of migrants near the border wall who often included women and children from all over the world.
Almost half had come from West Africa or Asia. By late December, the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol was encountering almost 20,000 migrants in a single week, a 300% increase over the past year.
Best handed out granola bars as he watched a mother and her 4-year-old draw smiley faces with sticks in the dirt. He handed out fruit and added wood to the campfire as a group of men from Guinea removed their socks to warm their feet. The men said they had pooled their life savings to fly from Istanbul to Bogota, Colombia, to Nicaragua. They had spent 12 nights sleeping in the Mexican desert before crossing the border with the help of cartel guides, who they said stole what little money they had left before pointing them through the fence.
“Someone is coming to get us soon?” one of the men asked Best in English. He replied that he hoped so, but he could not be sure.
“This place breaks your heart every day,” Best told Chilton. “They’re exhausted. They’re sick. They’re confused. They’re cold, and they just have to wait. How can this be our system?”
Chilton was still processing what he had seen a few days later, when he invited Lowell Robinson up to the house for coffee. Robinson, 56, was the lead cowboy on the Chilton Ranch. He had spent most of his life in a house a few hundred yards north of the border, studying it from his own back porch.
“All those people were stranded out there,” Chilton told him, recounting his recent trip to the wall. “Maybe it would help if we took in more legal immigrants every year. Two million? Three? I don’t know, but it keeps troubling me.”
For five decades, Robinson and his family had owned a neighboring cattle ranch, which Robinson managed alongside his father and his own sons. Their cattle grazed on 18,000 acres pressed against the border, which Robinson initially considered a gift of geography. He learned to speak fluent Spanish. He drove through his backyard to the beaches in Mexico.
He swapped cattle and equipment back and forth with ranchers across the international line until the last decade, when the Sinaloa cartel took over sections of the Mexican border and suddenly Robinson’s neighbor was what the FBI considered one of the largest and most dangerous criminal organizations in the world.
“Ranching is hard enough without another disaster thrown on top of it,” he told Chilton.
His wife of 36 years eventually left him and went to join her parents in California. His daughter, a veterinarian, moved to Texas. His sons quit ranching and started a welding business, and then it was just Robinson left on the property where he had spent his whole life, with little choice but to sell. On the day the real estate agent showed the property last year, several immigrants crossed onto the ranch. Robinson found himself hoping the prospective buyers might walk away, but the deal went through.
“It’s a whole legacy that disappeared out from under me,” Robinson said.
The Chiltons had thought about selling, but Jim Chilton had been ranching since his father gave him a saddle at 5, and he had kept getting back on a horse even after he was bucked off and broke four ribs in his late 70s.
For years he thought he could overcome their border problems, too, if only the right people listened. He gave speeches at his church, took politicians on tours of his ranch and celebrated the construction of Trump’s wall. But parts of that wall remained unfinished and other parts were riddled with gaps, and now the Border Patrol was preoccupied with the record number of asylumseekers at the border.
Despite three decades of activism, he believed most of his ranch was less secure than ever. He had taken to monitoring the cameras he had hidden on five of the ranch’s 150 smuggling trails, and now he opened his laptop and called his wife into the kitchen to review the motion-activated footage from the past several months.
“This is mostly from down by the corrals, in that nice little oasis,” he said.
“With the deer grass and the beautiful Emory oaks,” Sue Chilton said.
“It looks like we have at least an hour of images,” Jim Chilton said, as he hit play.
In total, the cameras had collected images of more than 1,000 people crossing on those five trails — a tiny sample of what the United Nations considers the largest global movement of displaced people since the 1950s, with millions fleeing gangs, economic collapse and political instability around the world.
“It’s a multi-ring circus, never mind just three,” Sue Chilton said.
“It’s hard to watch, given all the possibilities,” Jim Chilton said. Their house had been broken into three times. Once, all that was missing was food and apple cider. Another time, someone had stolen several guns.
Sue Chilton watched the parade march across the screen and closed the laptop. “I already think about it,” she said. “I dream about it. That’s enough.”
She got up from the kitchen table, and Jim Chilton followed her to their circular bedroom, perched on a hill overlooking the ranch. They had installed 18 windows with views in every direction so they could watch their herd migrate across the desert and storms roll in from Mexico. “The skyline is our fence line,” Jim Chilton liked to say, and for years they had found peace in their solitude. But now the sun was dropping over the mountains, and Jim Chilton looked into the dying light and wondered who might be out there, and which versions of a crisis were unfolding on the ranch.