Border security: ‘You’ll never get it to zero’

Inside his sprawling ranch house, Jim Chilton walks past a stuffed mountain lion and up a few steps to a heavy custommade wooden dining-room table, and unrolls a map of the border. He jabs at it to make a point — one that is echoed by the local cattle growers association, as ranchers call themselves.

“They should secure the border at the border,” he says.

Border Patrol officials describe their strategy as multilayered. In urban areas such as downtown Nogales, where people can rapidly vanish and agents have minutes at most to detain crossers, they use large numbers of agents and cameras along the fence to try to spot and catch people immediately. In rural and desert areas, where it takes migrants and smugglers hours or days to get to major roads, agents use ground sensors, towers with cameras and night-vision lenses, truck-mounted mobile surveillance systems, agent patrols and checkpoints to try to catch people up to 60 miles north of the border.

Many ranchers say they see the need for immigration reforms, and say there should be easier ways for people who want work to enter the country legally.

But they’re indignant, even infuriated, by a strategy that, as rancher Gary Thrasher puts it, “makes where we live a third country, a no man’s land, and cedes it to the cartels.”

Ask any Arizona rancher about border security and almost inevitably the conversation will turn to Rob Krentz. He was shot to death on his ranch north of Douglas on March 27, 2010, after radioing his brother that he was going to help a migrant who seemed to be in trouble. No suspect was ever identified; but ranchers and most locals presume it was a drug smuggler. Krentz’s death

crossing near Nogales in the past two months. Each time, she says with a sigh, she paid a guide 3,000 pesos — about $240. The first time, she’d walked for three days when La Migra caught her group; the second time, for two days; the third time, she was...