The Weight of Shadows (20 page)

Someone else says there's a checkpoint up ahead and that we might be asked to identify ourselves. I finger my new US passport in a Ziploc bag in my pocket. According to a 2005 report by the US Government Accountability Office, there are thirty-three “permanent” checkpoints in the Southwest border states. The number of checkpoints actually in operation is not publicly known because there are an undisclosed number of “tactical” and “temporary” ones deployed. Some news outlets report that the number is around 170. The one up ahead has “temporarily” been there for about five years, and the residents of Arivaca have to go through it whenever they need to go to a store bigger than the mercantile exchange, a small convenience store in town, or go to work, school, or anywhere other than Arivaca, really. When the Border Patrol started in 1924, it was “a handful of mounted agents patrolling desolate areas along U.S. borders.” They operated within “a reasonable distance” of the boundary line, but in 1953 the federal government defined this distance as “100 air miles” from all external borders, including coasts. That means that today the more than twenty-one thousand agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stomp around violating the Fourth Amendment on a land area on which about two-thirds of the US population lives. The ACLU reports that “Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area,” and that the area contains “New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose.” I remember that a few years ago an
old friend of mine was snatched off a Greyhound bus on his way home to Chicago from Cornell University.

When we pull up to the checkpoint, an agent looks inside the truck at everyone's faces. He's uninterested because we're headed toward Arivaca instead of coming from there. He asks the group if everyone's a citizen. We all say yes, and he waves us through.

Within twenty-five miles of the border, CBP agents have been given the authority to enter private property (except dwellings) without a warrant.

Arivaca is an unincorporated area of about eight hundred residents and sits twenty-three miles from Interstate 19 and eleven miles north of the border. The main street, Arivaca Road, is lined with a few small houses, some adobe structures, a small store called the Arivaca Mercantile, and La Gitana Cantina. All within about a block there are a small library, a mechanic, and a veterinarian's office. The place looks like an outpost, and as we're pulling into the Merc, a brick building painted an earthen brown with teal and peach accents, everything is quiet and slow-moving. A dried-out old man with a white beard, cowboy hat, and a six-shooter on each hip walks past us into the store, the sound of his jangling keys merging with the din of bugs buzzing in the brush. A man and woman on horseback ride down the main street, the horse's hooves clopping in an even rhythm. In the distance we can see several large vehicles barreling in our direction down Arivaca Road. Three white-and-green Border Patrol trucks, one SUV and two pickups with blacked-out windows, slow as they reach the main drag. The pickups have prisoner enclosures on the beds that look like the dog cages on the back of animal control trucks. The man and woman on horseback pull off the road and stare hard at the trucks as they pass.

We drive through Arivaca to Ruby Road. After a bit, the asphalt gives way to severe dirt terrain, so the car slows as
the morning burns off and the early afternoon makes the inside of the truck feel like a dry sauna. All morning I've been thinking about that map—the red dots that looked like spilled blood covering thousands of miles, and the number of lives that have been ended on this political line. The figure comes from the Border Patrol's own tabulations, which are almost certainly low because of the unstructured, sporadic, and prohibitive ways the dead are counted. Even this low estimate means that since 1998, nearly as many people have died trying to cross the southern border into the United States as there were US soldiers killed in Iraq. Whenever I'm confronted with that figure I try to imagine them embodied, in a group, taking up space and still breathing. A room wouldn't be enough to contain the dead, nor would a warehouse—it would have to be an arena, something like a minor league baseball park packed with men, women, and children, some of whom look like they could be my aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, parents. But most likely it would be two, three, maybe four arenas, because many bodies are never recovered and so never counted. I think about how, even if all the dead were recovered, the figure wouldn't come close to reflecting the embodied traumas of these ongoing killings. Lives aren't units to be weighed like commodities. Each one of these people was a needed member of a family. Officially there are six thousand dead—six thousand forever-open wounds. In reality the devastation is much greater than this.

Desert Camp, the center of operations for NMD, is on a parcel of rough, hilly land that belongs to Byrd Baylor, a children's book author in her late eighties who lives just a couple of miles outside of Arivaca in an adobe and stone structure without electricity. The entrance to the camp is a thick utility strap stretched between two metal fence posts. A young brown-skinned woman with a buzz cut and a black-and-red, photorealistic tattoo of Frida Kahlo removes the strap and lets the trucks in. There's a small clearing in the mesquite
trees and scrub with a couple of freestanding canopy structures that serve as a kitchen, office, and meeting area, flanked by a large military surplus medical tent for anyone who may need emergency care. We're told we can set up our tents wherever we'd like, and I find a shady spot nestled by some mesquite trees. Later one of the long-term volunteers asks me why I set up my tent in Rattlesnake Ridge.

The beauty of the desert doesn't hit me until dusk. Before that all I can feel is the sun, a searing orb too bright to look toward, burning me through my clothes, and all I can think is how horrific it must be to not have any way to escape it. When we'd done a little bit of walking earlier in the day, each step was arduous, with loose rock under every footfall shifting my ankles violently. Nothing was flat or smooth, and massive boulders required significant climbing at points. Within minutes it became obvious how easy it would be to succumb, even for a young person in good health. On our drive into camp I'd seen long stretches of jagged terrain with no more to make shade than waist-high mesquite trees, sprawling clusters of nopales, and ocotillo, a succulent that resembles a cat-o'-nine-tails or a group of spindly coral fingers. It wasn't like anything I'd imagined. The residents of Arivaca and the Tohono O'odham people live in this desert and interact with it knowingly and casually on a daily basis. The climate and terrain are harsh, but they need not be deadly. It isn't exposure or the natural danger of this terrain that ends people's lives. In the Border Patrol's own articulation of their plan to militarize the border, a document titled “Border Patrol Strategic Plan 1994 and Beyond” the agency accepted “that absolute sealing of the border is unrealistic.” The plan instead was “to prioritize . . . efforts by geographic area.” The document includes a brief assessment of the environment of border areas where “illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea . . . can find themselves in mortal danger.” The plan specifies that cities split by the
boundary line “are the areas of greatest risk for illegal entry,” because these “urban areas offer accessibility to roads, rail lines, airports and bus routes to the interior of the country.” The document identifies and names specific sectors that are “the locations of heaviest illegal immigration activity.” They are identified as “avenues of approach” (AA) in order from most heavily trafficked areas (AA1) to least (AA12).

The plan's first phase was supposed to be accomplished in fiscal year 1994–95, and the first areas to be secured were San Diego (AA1) and El Paso (AA2). The document predicted that “as a measure of control is achieved in these corridors, some illegal traffic is expected to shift to AA4 and AA3,” Arizona and South and South Central Texas respectively. This happened as predicted, and, according to the plan, in these areas the focus was on “attaining control of the urban areas first and then the rural areas.” The plan has been stuck here for approximately sixteen years—in funneling people into the “most remote, uninhabited expanses of land” through the harshest avenues of approach.

At dusk a meeting is called, and as I'm waiting on a folding chair around an extinguished campfire for the rest of the group to gather, I feel utterly overwhelmed by the desert. I'd expected to see something barren, reflective of death and dying, but everything is fecund, verdant—teeming. Just beside me, shooting up through the hard earth, are a few long stalks punctuated at their ends by bursts of purple and yellow flowers smaller than an infant's pinky nail. Beyond the edge of the clearing the brush is so thick it seems impossible to walk through without a machete to clear a path. In the middle distance, perhaps a thousand yards from the edge of camp, rise two hills in black silhouette against an indigo, cerulean, and fuchsia sky. This is the first time I see the group together—a motley collection, mostly white women, two women of Mexican lineage, me, and three or four white men. One of the young white women facilitates the meeting. Mostly it's about
how the water drops are done and protocols for situations we may encounter. She finishes by saying it'll be important for us to stay in larger groups this week because a PBS program that used NMD footage aired last night.

Just over two months ago, on the morning of May 14, a camera placed by volunteers captured three agents in bulky green gear walking along a trail at the edge of a cliff. There are six plastic gallons of water visible. The middle agent, who appears to be a blonde white woman, kicks the gallons off the ledge one by one. Some explode when her boot meets them, their tops bursting off, and some survive the initial kick only to tear open on the jagged rocks below. The agent in front, also white, stops to watch and smile. The third agent's face is obscured by his movements.

The kind of cruelty captured on the video isn't an anomaly. NMD conducted a study in which they found that denial of food and water is common, even when migrants are in custody for multiple days and even though most people taken into custody are already experiencing some form of dehydration. Ten percent of interviewees, including teens and children, reported physical abuse, and “of the 433 incidents in which emergency medical treatment or medications were needed, Border Patrol provided access to care in only 59 cases.” One interviewee, a woman who said she had lived in the United States for seventeen years with three children, said agents had made her strip naked. “Then they took her clothes and touched her breasts.” A man from Chiapas reported being kicked to the ground while being apprehended and having a cactus needle lodged in his eye. He was held in custody for forty-eight hours and did not receive medical attention before being repatriated. One female interviewee reported seeing a pregnant woman with a fever requesting to go to the hospital. The guards didn't believe she was pregnant, and she suffered a miscarriage. A sixteen-year-old boy from Guatemala reported being struck in the back of the
head with a flashlight and being held in custody for three days, during which time he only received a packet of cookies and one juice box each day. Several men recounted being hit with the butt of a gun during apprehension. One man reported that migra corridos, macabre songs about death and killing in the desert, were played twenty-four hours a day at extreme volumes, and that every two hours shouting guards would rush their cells and make them line up for inspection. The report concluded:

That night it was impossible for me to fall asleep. I lay awake looking up at the camouflage fabric of the single-person tent I'd borrowed, the moon illuminating the lighter patches. I analyzed every snap of mesquite branch and crackling in the brush, having no firm walls to give me a false sense of security. Before coming to the desert I'd been traveling in California, staying with friends and friends of friends, basically anyone who would let me sleep on their couch or floor. In one of those coincidences that are so eerily fitting people usually imbue them with significance that isn't there, I'd ended up staying in the home of a former Army Ranger sniper, who was currently interning at the Department of Homeland Security and hoping to become an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. I learned this information my first evening in his home when we were making small talk, and I tried not to react visibly when he told me. There was no significance to our meeting. He lived near the border, was ex-military, and needed a better job than the security gig he currently had. He set me up in his son's bedroom, while
the kid stayed with his mother. He let me borrow a tent and gave me an old MRE. On one of the walls of his son's bedroom hung a green felt banner with the famous Hemingway quote: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”

Hours pass in the liminal space between sleep and waking. My body goes numb and I glide just below the surface of sleep, but really I'm just waiting. At one point I think I hear sounds outside the tent, and these sounds merge into the dream I'm having before they become crisp enough to bring me back to waking consciousness. Then a few moments pass before I regain the ability to move. I open my eyes and lie perfectly still, overtaken by fear. It takes a few blinks before I remember where I am, why I'm staring up at patches of green-and-black camouflage fabric. I'm still afraid, but the knowledge that there might be someone injured or dying in the darkness overwhelms my fear. I slowly unzip a corner of the tent to peek toward the sounds. Another volunteer, whose tent is thirty feet from mine, is doing the same. It sounds like someone or something is moving in the brush just beyond the clearing of camp. We listen for several minutes, trying to get a sense of what's making the noise. Earlier in the day, I'd noticed that sounds don't carry in the desert. It's as if there's a moving wall between you and everything else, so you can only hear what's in the immediate vicinity. Now it sounds like twigs and dry plant material shifting underfoot. Whenever there's a loud snap it's followed by several minutes of silence.