Minutemen, Migrants and Seven Strands of Wire 

Text and photos by Jan Stürmann

Tear Drop Tattoo

At a drug rehabilitation center in the prostitute section of Agua Prieta, Mexico, four recovering addicts build a water tank stand they will erect the next day near the Arizona border. Illegal migrants crossing into the US may find the water, and avoid dying of thirst in the desert.

Ninety people, too poor to pay for treatment, live here at the Center for the Rehabilitation and Recuperation of Infirmities from Drugs and Alcohol (CRREDA #8). Crack addicts call this place home. Street kids find refuge here. Abandoned old people come to die. The mad find sanctuary behind these walls.

A young man, with a tear drop tattooed under his left eye, cooks rice and beans over an open fire. On the kitchen wall, a picture of The Last Supper hangs next to grease-smudged pin-up girl posters. The tear drop commemorates three years spent in California's San Quentin prison for selling drugs, after which he was deported back to Mexico. If he is caught again in the US, he'll be locked up for twenty-five years.

A few miles away, members of the all-volunteer Minutemen Project patrol the border. They hope to prevent illegal migrants from entering the US. "My daughter's best friend was car-jacked by two Mexican gang members," an Arizona local explains. "We just can't let this continue."

Border Symbiosis

An hour earlier I met Tommy Bassett outside the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona. He once ran an electronics factory in Mexico. As we drove together across the border to Agua Prieta, where CRREDA #8 is located, he tells me of a dead Mexican woman he found on his property. She is one of hundreds who die of thirst each year attempting to cross the desert into the US. He could not abide this death, and helped initiate a cross-border program called Agua Para La Vida (Water for Life), which sets up emergency water stations along the border. For a small stipend, the recovering addicts at CRREDA #8 provide the labor.

 "I can't influence the forces of politics and economics," he tells me. "But I know what we do saves lives."

Later, on the way back to Douglas, we stop at the border bus station where scores of buses from all over Mexico unload migrants desperate for work in the US. Guides, called Coyotes, stand outside the bus station and arrange to smuggle the migrants across the border. Ten years ago they charged each person $50, today migrants must pay over $1500.

A Coyote will take a group of migrants by taxi to the border. There they slip through the fence, dodge US border patrols, and walk 80, 120, 200 miles through the desert to a prearranged pickup place where, hopefully, a driver will meet them and take them to Phoenix. There migrants get fake documents, then scatter across the US hoping to find work.

This desert border region, with its shutdown mines and overgrazed land, is economically dependant on human smuggling. "The Coyotes and the US Border Patrol (USPB) are in a symbiotic relationship," Tommy explains. "If the Border Patrol is too effective the Coyotes will simply shift their operation elsewhere. And then the five hundred well-paid USBP agents in Douglas will be laid off, or posted elsewhere, and the town's economic spring dries up."

As we wait in line at the border checkpoint into Douglas, I ask what motivates him to do this finger-in-dyke work. "I try to live by what the Bible says: give water to the thirsty, food to the hungry." We are waved through, and he looks me in the eye, "The truth is, I just don't want to find another dead person on my property."

Blesses The Water

The next morning I'm back at CRREDA. In a truck with broken springs, loaded down with 160 gallons of water, we drive to the border east of town. The illegal crossings have shifted here since the Minutemen started patrolling the western side.     

By a roadside shrine along Highway 2 we stop, unload, and follow the footprints of migrants to the border. Circles of gray ash mark where they camped, waiting for the Border Patrol shift change, before crossing into the US.

Near the border Sergio Pan Duro, a former addict, places the tanks on the wooden stands, fills them with water and raises a blue marker flag. Father Rubio blesses the water and reads from his Bible about Moses.               

As we pack to return, a group of migrants appear from behind some bushes. They're sunburned and hungry and Father Rubio offers them food and water. Their guide abandoned them last night. Without him they don't know where to meet the pickup van on the other side.               

 I talk to a man who has worked illegally in the US for five years. He went back home to visit his family, but now must return. "There is just not enough work in Mexico to support my family," he says. The group decides to go back to Agua Prieta with us and find another guide.

 Five minutes later, a man with a two-way radio comes towards us. Eyes shift, hands fidget, shoes scuff at dirt. He is their Coyote from last night, back to reclaim his group. In rapid Spanish he convinces most to attempt another crossing. They have little choice. We separate.

  Undocumented Border Patrol Agent

"I want the media to know that we are not racists," Ron Mills tells me as we stand by his truck at the border. He has a pistol strapped to his waist. "We are just Americans trying to protect our homeland." He has come down from Phoenix to patrol the border with fellow Minutemen from around the country. An estimated 800 volunteers will spend a month patrolling the border between Naco and Douglas.

The day before, at the registration in Tombstone, the press seemed to outnumber the Minutemen. What these citizens are doing has struck a national nerve: moms and dads and grandparents out here on the border defending the homeland against the swarms of invading migrants.

As we watch the sunset, Paul from New York tells me, "The federal government is just not doing enough to stop illegal migrants." His T-shirt reads Undocumented Border Patrol Agent. He explains how illegal migrants are straining social services, eroding the quality of schools, taking away jobs. "It's my duty and right, as a citizen, to embarrass my government into action."

  Spiked Chock Collar

On a ranch west of Douglas I meet Casey Nethercott, leader of the Arizona Guard militia group. A jury recently acquitted him of threatening a federal agent. He spent six months in jail awaiting trial.

He greets me at the gate, dressed in fatigues, bush boots and mirror glasses. He shows me his patrol vehicles--a Chevy Blazer painted black, a dune buggy with a flat tire, and a Dodge van. He kicks the side of the Blazer. "This car has been reinforced with quarter-inch steel plates. No small arms fire will penetrate."

He regards the Minutemen's effort as too polite and politically correct to be effective. "They are trying to hold back the ocean with a mop," he tells me. "The difference is that they are civilians, we are soldiers." On the forth of July he plans to "shut down the border" between Douglas and Naco. By then he estimates his militia will be 300-strong. "It will take my men twelve minutes to secure this whole border."

As we talk, a fellow militia member joins us. His face is obscured with hat, glasses and camouflage bandana. Politely they both pose for pictures.

A Rottweiler ambles over, sniffs my hand. "I have ten thousand dollars invested in this dog," Nethercott says, stroking its huge head. "He eats better than my men."

The Arizona Guard will use dogs to patrol the border, and he offers to demonstrate how well the dog is trained. As the militia member protects his arm with a padded sleeve, Nethercott slips a spiked choke collar around the dog's neck and attaches a leash. He gives the attack command in German. The Rottweiler leaps at the man and clamps teeth to sleeve. They grunt and growl in a cloud of dust and sweat. Nethercott shouts another command. The dog reluctantly heals. He pats the panting dog, proud as a father.

Godfather and Infant Daughter

When, nine years ago Agent Sanchez, who grew up in the Chicano projects in Texas, joined the US Border Patrol, she asked her godfather in Mexico if she was betraying her people. "No," he said, "You are helping to protect them. Just do your work honorably."

We meet in the afternoon at the Tucson Border Patrol Headquarters. Her gun belt is slung casually over one shoulder as we shake hands. In a Jeep we drive to the tiny border town of Sasabe. As we near, the radio crackles: a motion sensor just went off nearby. Sanchez agrees to check it out. She turns onto a dirt road and drives to the border fence. The broken strands of wire could not keep out a determined goat.

We see fifteen migrants climb from a blue van near a small white shrine. "Before they cross tonight," Sanchez says, "they will pray there to Juan Soldado, the patron saints of illegal immigrants. I pray to catch them before they die in the desert."

Back in the Jeep, we drive west along the border and join a group of agents operating an infrared night vision video camera mounted on a truck. In the cab, as country music softly plays, an agent watches the glowing landscape on a monitor. He soon picks up a line of thirty migrants walking towards us. Four agents go out to intercept them. On the monitor we see the migrants stop suddenly as they hear the approaching agents, then scatter stumbling into the night. Most are caught, too frightened and disoriented to flee far. The agents escort them back to where we wait.

A young couple sit huddled together as they are searched. Their names are Enrique and Claudia from Chiapas. Needing work, they left their infant daughter with Claudia's mother, rode the bus for 36 hours to the border town of Altar Sonora, where they paid a guide $2000 each to get them to San Diego. What were abstract numbers to me a week before, becomes all too human, as these two stand here before me so frightened and fragile. "What now?" I ask. "I don't know," Claudia says. An agent gently helps her into the van that will take them back to Mexico.