Sensing change, migrants rush to the border

Many of the migrants also are being driven by a desire to get into the United States before the likelihood that lawmakers further fortify the border.

Since the United States tightened security at the main crossing points in Texas and California in the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of migrants have turned to the hard-to-patrol, mesquite-covered Arizona desert, risking rape, robbery and murder at the hands of gangs and now facing armed U.S. civilian groups.

Welcome to Sasabe
About 2,000 people a day pass through Sasabe, a hamlet of just a few dozen houses and a Western Union office west of Nogales, says Grupo Beta, a Mexican government-sponsored group that tries to discourage migrants from crossing the border and helps people stranded in the desert.

On a recent afternoon, at least 40 vans overflowing with migrants arrived in the desert near Sasabe in less than an hour. Migrants and their smugglers waited for nightfall before starting a desert trek that would involve up to a week of walking in baking heat during the day and biting cold at night.

Grupo Beta agent Miguel Martinez mans a checkpoint 20 miles south of Sasabe, where he warns of the dangers of the desert, such as bandits armed with knives or guns who order migrants to strip naked, rob them and sometimes rape them.

He also tells about the volunteer border-watch groups that have sprung up in Arizona.

“Right now there are migrant hunters who are armed, and you should be careful,” Martinez told a group traveling in a rickety van missing some of its windows.

Robbery in the U.S.
At Grupo Beta’s office in Nogales, Raul Gonzalez, 44, said he walked in the Arizona desert for five days before turning himself in when the blisters on his feet started bleeding and his left leg swelled.

Like most migrants interviewed for this story, Gonzalez said he was robbed at gunpoint just after crossing into the United States. “The guides and the robbers are all the same,” he said.

Gonzalez said the first time he sneaked into the United States, he did it through Tijuana, across the border from San Diego. He said he worked illegally at a printing shop in Chicago for 15 years but got homesick before he could settle the paperwork for legal residence.

Despite the robbery and his failed trek, Gonzalez said he would try again once his feet heal. His bricklayer’s salary of about $60 a week in the western state of Jalisco simply is not enough to provide for his four children.

“It’s hard to cross,” he said. “But it’s harder to see your children have little to eat.”

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