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<b>Toll Increases for Mexicans Crossing Border <br>
By TIMOTHY EGAN <br><br>
</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=4>Published: May 23, 2004
<br><br>
</font>OVERED WELLS, Ariz., May 20 - At the bottleneck of human smuggling
here in the Sonoran Desert, illegal immigrants are dying in record
numbers as they try to cross from Mexico into the United States in the
wake of a new Bush administration amnesty proposal that is being
perceived by some migrants as a magnet to cross. <br><br>
<br>
"The season of death," as Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner in
charge of the Border Patrol, calls the hot months, has only just begun,
and already 61 people have died in the Arizona border region since last
Oct. 1, according to the Mexican Interior Ministry - triple the pace of
the previous year. <br><br>
The Border Patrol, which counts only bodies that it processes, says 43
people have died near the Arizona border since the start of its fiscal
year on Oct. 1, more than in any other year in the same period.
<br><br>
Leon Stroud, a Border Patrol agent who is part of a squad that has the
dual job of arresting illegal immigrants and trying to save their lives,
said he had seen 34 bodies in the last year. In Border Patrol parlance, a
dead car and a dead migrant are the same thing - a "10-7" - but
Mr. Stroud said he had never gotten used to the loss of life. <br><br>
"The hardest thing was, I sat with this 15-year-old kid next to the
body of his dad," said Mr. Stroud, a Texan who speaks fluent
Spanish. "His dad had been a cook. He was too fat to be trying to
cross this border. We built a fire and I tried to console him. It was
tough." <br><br>
If the pace keeps up, even with new initiatives to limit border crossings
by using unmanned drones and Blackhawk helicopters in the air and
beefed-up patrols on the ground, this will be the deadliest year ever to
cross the nation's busiest smuggling corridor. The 154 deaths in the
Border Patrol's Tucson and Yuma sectors last year set a record.
<br><br>
"This is unprecedented," said the Rev. John Fife, a
Presbyterian minister in Tucson who is active in border humanitarian
efforts. "Ten years ago there were almost no deaths on the southern
Arizona border. What they've done is created this gantlet of death. It's
Darwinian - only the strongest survive." <br><br>
For years, deaths of people trying to cross the border usually occurred
at night on highways near urban areas, killed by cars. But now, because
urban entries in places like San Diego and El Paso have been nearly
sealed by fences, technology and agents, illegal immigrants have been
forced to try to cross here in southern Arizona, one of the most
inhospitable places on earth. <br><br>
They die from the sun, baking on the prickled floor of the Sonoran
Desert, where ground temperatures reach 130 degrees before the first day
of summer. They die freezing, higher up in the cold rocks of the
Baboquivari Mountains on moonless nights. They die from bandits who prey
on them, in cars that break down on them, and from hearts that give out
on them at a young age. <br><br>
The mountainous Sonoran Desert, between Yuma in the west and Nogales in
the east, is the top smuggling entry point along the entire 1,951-mile
line with Mexico, the Border Patrol says. Through the middle of May,
apprehensions of crossers in the desert south of Tucson had jumped 60
percent over the previous year. Nearly 300,000 people were caught trying
to enter the United States through the desert border since last Oct. 1.
<br><br>
After a four-year drop, apprehensions - which the Border Patrol uses to
measure human smuggling - are up 30 percent over last year along the
entire southern border, with 660,390 people detained from Oct. 1 through
the end of April, federal officials said. <br><br>
The crossing here, over a simple barbed-wire fence, is followed by a walk
of two or three days, up to 50 miles on ancient trails through a desert
wilderness, to reach the nearest road, on the Tohono O'odham Nation
Indian Reservation, a wedge of desert the size of Connecticut that is
overrun with illegal immigrants, or on adjacent federal park or wildlife
land. Most people start off with no more than two gallons of water,
weighing almost 17 pounds, in plastic jugs. In recent days, with daytime
temperatures over 100 degrees in the desert, a person needed a gallon of
water just to survive walking five miles. <br><br>
The desert is littered with garbage - empty plastic jugs, discarded
clothes, toilet paper. <br><br>
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