‘This place breaks your heart every day’
A family ranch in Arizona has become a gateway for desperate migrants entering the U.S., said Eli Saslow in The New York Times, and for cartels smuggling drugs across 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 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 cattlegrazing land, an area three times the size of Manhattan located on the outskirts of Arivaca. He traced his finger over a desolate mountain range, across six canyons, and down to the 5½ 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.
The Chiltons had spent the past several years trying to unravel the mysteries of their own backyard 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. Recently, Border Patrol agents estimated that as many as 250 people each day were arriving on the remote corners of the Chiltons’ ranch after being led across the border by paid guides working on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel.
“I’ll be back in five or six hours,” 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 following that boy over to his mother, who was dying of complications from diabetes.
He stopped to check a water tank in the shadow of the 32-foot-tall steel border wall that Trump built as president. One of Chilton’s cowboys had been checking the same tank a few years back when smugglers jumped him and allegedly threatened to come after his family unless he started transporting drugs. The smugglers stuffed 44 pounds of methamphetamine into the cowboy’s spare tire, and he made drug runs until the Border Patrol arrested him.
“Just when you think you’ve seen everything, this place still shocks you,” Chilton said. 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, part of a group called Tucson Samaritans, 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.
The border wall was now compromised every few miles by rope ladders, small tunnels, gaps awaiting construction, and new pathways cut every few nights by smugglers. One of them was a 3-by-3-foot hole that led to a patch of saguaro cactuses and mesquite trees on the Chilton Ranch.
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.
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 U.S. 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 court system. Soon after, Best started running into large groups of migrants near the border wall that often included women and children from all over the world.
Almost half came 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 percent increase over the last year and
nearly 10 times as many encounters as in the average week in 2021.
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 Bogotá, 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?”
THE CHILTONS HAD thought about selling. They had considered moving closer to friends in Tucson or grandchildren in Los Angeles, but Jim 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 asylum seekers 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 Sue 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 said.
“It looks like we have at least an hour of images,” Jim 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 said.
“It’s hard to watch, given all the possibilities,” Jim 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 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 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 liked to say, and for years they had found peace in their solitude. But now the sun was dropping over the mountains, and Jim looked into the dying light and wondered who might be out there.
ANOTHER NIGHT. ANOTHER few hundred people arriving on the back corner of the Chiltons’ ranch, and Fatma Ali stepped through a hole in the wall and sat on a rock to get her bearings. It was 36 degrees, colder than it had ever been back home in Chad. She saw a cow grazing in the distance. She saw a handwritten sign that said they were 22 kilometers from a Border Patrol station in Sasabe, Ariz., but their group of two dozen Africans had already been walking for many hours and could walk no more.
One of them had a high fever. One had twisted his ankle. One was a 2-year-old who hadn’t eaten all day. And one was a pregnant woman from Sudan named Rania Mohamed, who clutched her stomach, lay down on an abandoned wooden pallet, and slipped in and out of consciousness for a few hours until a Border Patrol van came over the hill.
“She’s dizzy because we walked so much,” Ali told two Border Patrol agents. “She’s sick and exhausted. She’s pregnant and feeling lots of pain.”
Mohamed was already nine months along, and the agents huddled to discuss their options while Ali held her hand and prayed with her in Arabic. “God will protect us,” Ali told Mohamed, in Arabic, which was a version of what Ali had been repeating to herself for the past three months, ever since her relatives pooled their savings so one member of the family could flee the abuses and abject poverty of their life in rural Chad.
Ali had been chosen to go because she, too, was pregnant, and because she had taught herself to speak English as a child by watching American cartoons. She boarded a flight to Istanbul and another to Bogotá. She suffered a miscarriage somewhere between Nicaragua and Honduras. She was robbed in Mexico. After 52 days of travel, she had arrived in the United States with neither a destination nor a plan. The only people she knew in America were the half dozen friends she had made on the migrant trail, one of whom was now lying on her back and writhing in pain on the Chiltons’ ranch.
“Does she think she’s in labor?” an agent asked Ali.
“She’s not sure,” Ali said. She explained that Mohamed was anemic and that all three of her previous pregnancies had ended in C-sections.
“OK. We need to move,” the agent said. He loaded Ali, Mohamed, and the 2-yearold into the van and told the rest of their group to wait on the road until more agents could come get them. The van started off down the rugged road toward civilization, passing other migrants along the way. Dozens of them rushed toward the van to ask for rides, reaching for the windows and crying out for help. But the van kept moving until the headlights disappeared over a hill, leaving the ranch in the dark.
A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.