PALOMAS, Mexico- Santiago waits on a bench in the town plaza, a small denim backpack tucked between his feet. His hope, like that of the two dozen others at this staging point just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, is to find a “coyote” who can smuggle him north.
But he’s not interested in the more popular staging points to the west, through the southern Arizona desert.
“It’s better here,” says Santiago, an 18-year-old from a small ranching community in the state of Guanajuato, who only gave his first name.
“Here” is the border of southwestern New Mexico, an area that has never been considered a major crossing point for illegal immigrants, largely because the remote, desert terrain on both sides of the border make crossing and reaching a major highway difficult.
But with the Border Patrol cracking down in Texas and California and enforcement being boosted in Arizona, many say a shift toward more illegal border crossings through New Mexico is inevitable.
It is “the last, major unfortified stretch of U.S.-Mexico border,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego.
In recent years, as the Border Patrol focused on crossings in Texas and California, many migrants turned to Arizona, with its access to major highways and well-established smuggling networks.
Now, with enforcement being boosted in Arizona, including a $10 million plan announced last month to add agents and unmanned aerial drones, many say New Mexico will become the final battleground.
Along the 180 miles of border, thousands of miles of buffalo grass and mesquite brush are dotted by ranches, farms and a few small towns. The terrain is mostly marked only by barbed wire and guarded by a few cameras, some underground sensors and a small corps of Border Patrol agents.
Border Patrol agents in New Mexico have had to make do with less, relying on instinct and old-fashioned tactics to supplement a smattering of technology and help from surrounding communities.
In the Bootheel, for example — the sparsely populated ranch land in the extreme southwestern corner of the state — agents have no cameras or barriers. The Lordsburg station’s 52 agents are responsible for 81 miles of border and the 3,000 square miles north of it.
Instead of technology, Border Patrol agent Patrick Musante relies on his own eyes to search for tracks made by vehicles or people.
“We do the best we can,” Mr. Musante says. “We come out here, and we work a lot of hours and drive a lot of miles, but there’s just so much of it.”
From October 2003 to March 2004, Border Patrol apprehensions in the Lordsburg station’s area were up 85 percent, to 4,797 persons, over the same period the previous year.
Some agents have noticed increasingly aggressive efforts by border crossers.
When Miguel Gonzales began his Border Patrol career four years ago at the Deming station, he rarely encountered crossers who would run or fight.
Recently, however, Mr. Gonzales tailed a car that reportedly had driven across the border. Eventually, the car stopped, and a man and woman jumped out and ran back across the border. Tucked under the man’s arm like a football was a toddler. The driver got away, too — taunting Mr. Gonzales as he fled.
“Total disregard for the people in the vehicle,” Mr. Gonzales says, “That’s typical for smugglers.”
It’s that increasing desperation that worries border residents such as Bill Johnson, a fourth-generation farmer west of Columbus. There’s 17 miles of border along the family’s land.
There was a time when Johnson’s family confronted the foot traffic and smugglers headed north across his land. But it got too risky, “and we’re not putting our life at jeopardy like we used to,” he says.
“And let’s face it, today what is coming across here, the drug smugglers as well as some of the illegal-alien smugglers, there’s such big money in it [that] life means nothing to them.”
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