The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  “The whole international community was telling the United States: ‘These people are refugees; they need to be protected by law.’ It’s the same as what’s happening in Europe now. You guys keeping talking about a great tradition of caring for refugees: well, you’re not doing it.” There it was again: the sea, the desert; to die due to water or its lack. Geography enlisted as both cordon and executioner. Notifying the Attorney General in March 1982 that his church was declaring itself a sanctuary, Fife wrote: “We believe that justice and mercy require that people of conscience actively assert our God-given right to aid anyone fleeing from persecution and murder. The current administration of the United States law prohibits us from sheltering these refugees from Central America. Therefore we believe that administration of the law is immoral as well as illegal.”

  Southside was infiltrated by undercover FBI agents and paid informants, and in 1985 the recordings those individuals secretly made were used to indict Fife and fifteen others. As well as himself and Jim Corbett, the accused included two Catholic priests, three nuns, and two other Quakers—“the usual desperados.” Two days before the trial, the defendants’ attorney was advised by the judge that he could say nothing in the group’s defence about refugee law or conditions in El Salvador or Guatemala. “I used a lot of four-letter words.” The sixteen, sentenced to five years’ probation, immediately resumed their work, and in the meantime sued the Attorney General. “The next day we get a call from the Justice Department, saying, ‘Wouldn’t you like to negotiate a settlement?’ They agreed to stop all deportations. And they agreed to give everyone who was here without documents temporary protected status. And then the peace accords were signed in Central America in ninety-two, so we called an end to the Sanctuary movement. And quite frankly I was exhausted. I’d thought we were going to be dead meat hanging in the town square.”

  In 1992 the leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. That same year, Operation Gatekeeper was instituted by the government. Beginning in Texas and California, its purpose was to “harden” security in the vicinity of towns and cities close to the border. The intention was to usher would-be crossers into more “hostile” areas—into the desert—as a form of deterrence. The strategy was subsequently extended across the entire border, but the immediate effect was an increase in corpses in the desert south of Tucson. “I thought: damn, here we go again,” said Fife. The networks that had created the Sanctuary movement in Tucson were reactivated and various groups created to survey the desert between Tucson and the border, leaving water, food and other provisions along the migrant trails. One of these groups was No More Deaths.

  The opening up of U.S. markets to Mexican consumers instituted by NAFTA ruined many small Mexican farming communities, which could not compete with America’s subsidised agricultural giants. It has often been men and women from rural areas—tropical Veracruz, the cool mountains of Oaxaca—whose lives end in the desert. “It’s a war against the poor,” said Fife, and even this he uttered with a low outraged chuckle. “If you look at it overall, the United States is conducting a low-intensity conflict against the poor, with thousands of casualties. In the eighties, when we were smuggling people across the border, there were 284 Border Patrol agents for the whole Tucson sector. That’s why we got away with it. Now there’re 4,300. And all of the technology and the helicopters, and drones; all the crap that’s out there.”

  The surviving Salvadorans from the group found by Border Patrol in 1980 had eaten sand. Like Pablo Valencia they had removed their clothing. One had jammed his head into a fox hole. They had already drunk their piss, naturally, and when it had ceased to come, perfume and shaving oil. What was more haunting? Their unwitnessed desperation, or their city innocence? That their satchels contained shaving oil? The work continued, said Fife: the desert would go on consuming those obliged to cross it. Congress was deadlocked on border policy. He added as I was leaving: “I have a friend, a Latino ethicist. He says: ‘You guys are doing it all wrong. You keep talking about hope: there is no hope! Are you kidding me? You think your little project out here is going to deal with neoliberal economic power? Bullshit! You just need to stop telling people that it’s hopeful. What you need to do is realise it’s hopeless: they’re going to win.’ So therefore you’re free!” said Fife. “You’re free—if you realise it’s hopeless—to just fuck with the system!” He laughed again, but loud and liberated this time—“And I think he’s right. Just fuck with the system any way you can! Just go fuck with it.”

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  SINCE THE 1990s a doctrine known as “prevention through deterrence,” inspired by the success of Operation Gatekeeper, has been practised by the United States Border Patrol. Only 565 kilometres of the country’s 3,145-kilometre southern border are effectively fenced, 18 per cent. The stretches in between are marked by nothing more than a triple strand of cattle wire, or barbed wire, if by anything at all. Increasingly Border Patrol is deploying remote electronic surveillance technology, the so-called virtual wall—infrared cameras, motion-sensors, pressure-sensors, drones and radar blimps—but in many places you can still pass from the southern side to the northern with a single step. Even if that step must be flanked by a million others. “The overarching goal of the strategy,” goes a congressional report, “is to make it so difficult and so costly to enter this country illegally that fewer individuals even try.”

  Still the desert border remains largely unfenced, but by obliging those who are determined to cross to do so in the most isolated areas, the strategy has become one whose efficiency can be measured not only by the number of would-be migrants discouraged from embarking (which is anybody’s guess) but by the number of human remains recovered from arroyos and bajadas and the shadows of ironwood trees. Between October 2000 and September 2014, in southern Arizona alone, this number was 2,721. Among these people—who succumbed to heat exhaustion or dehydration, or fell from cliffs or died of snakebite or heart attacks—some eight hundred are unidentified. And we must add to this number—perhaps doubling it, perhaps tripling it—those remains that have not been found, either because of their remoteness or, more likely, because they have simply been erased.

  Sometimes the desert preserves—remember the Hotan mummy with her small grey tongue. More often it obliterates. Those shapes helixing high above, shuddering on their huge wings, are turkey vultures, and with the coyotes and the foxes they will strip a body of meat and disperse its bones over several square kilometres in the course of a few days. As you wait in Nogales or Sonoyta on the Mexican side of the border before trying to enter the desert, therefore, you do so in the knowledge that it is not just your life you will be staking, but—in the absence of your corpse or, if your corpse is recovered, any way of identifying it—your loved-ones’ opportunity to properly grieve for you.

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  ONE MORNING Dan Millis and I drove out to the border to meet a rancher he knew, Tony Sedgwick, whose three hundred hectares lay east of Nogales in the Santa Cruz Valley. Dan worked for the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club, the environmental organisation. He’d also been involved with No More Deaths as a volunteer. He was young, younger than me, shaven-headed, friendly, sceptical. For the first hour he watched my face as I spoke. But then he made a decision about me, I suppose, and we grew easy in one another’s company. In 2008, while walking in the desert, he had found a body. A fourteen-year-old Salvadoran girl, Josseline Jamileth Hernández Quinteros. She’d been reported missing by her parents in Los Angeles, whom she had been trying to reach. She was wearing a pearl bracelet, Dan recalled. Two days later, returning to the spot to leave provisions for other crossers, Dan was confronted by National Park rangers, and cited—cited for littering (plastic bottles, buckets full of fresh socks and biscuits). Declining to pay a fine, he was convicted in federal court and given a suspended sentence. This was how you became a system-fucke
r—seeing how it ranged against kindness.

  We met Tony Sedgwick outside a diner on the edge of Nogales. He wore a spotless white Stetson and his hips had a castered looseness when he walked. What you get for fifty years on horseback. Tony had been a lawyer, and once, years ago, ran for political office (Republican, who else?). “It was a lot of fun, but I was not successful,” he said. “Mexicans don’t vote; if they’re illegal, they can’t vote; if they come into the country as registered aliens, they’re not allowed to vote. And besides, they don’t want to vote, they don’t care about voting, they’re just glad to be working. Today, blacks have way more power than Mexicans. I’m not saying black people aren’t totally screwed, but think of a single Mexican politician. Marco Rubio? Marco Rubio can barely speak Spanish.”

  We spent the morning on his ranch. Tony had been fighting the Department of Homeland Security’s positioning of one of its surveillance towers on the highest hill on his property. They had asked his permission and when he refused they had gone ahead and installed it, citing the law of eminent domain and handing him a few thousand dollars. The hilltop was now the government’s. What had begun as a personal disagreement had swollen to a broader awareness. He had come to understand that those frustrations he’d experienced as an affluent white rancher, a man with influence and reputation, were as nothing beside what was meted out to Mexicans and Central American migrants. He had been given a taste of powerlessness. But the tower was not what he wanted to show me.

  The border wall cut across hills of sweetgrass, Fremont willows and creosote bush. You could see it from many kilometres off, a close-set rank of rusted palisades five metres tall. Tony’s gorgeous steers lounged in the shade of cottonwoods. The sound of birdsong was constant. This too was the desert. In the wall’s shadow, the grass was tall and flowers seemed to grow more abundantly than elsewhere. Blue flowers, especially, asters and flax. Perhaps they fed on something leached from the iron or concrete, or simply preferred the shade. As we descended into the valley and the vegetation thickened and became taller, the wall ended. You could still follow the line—barbed wire and steel tank traps—but there was little to keep a person on foot from crossing from one country to another, and indeed the purpose of the remaining barrier was to control cattle and the narcos in their cocaine trucks. But drugs, like water, would find their way. Here, fifteen kilometres from one of the main international ports of entry, you could edge along the banks of the Santa Cruz and duck under a fence into the United States with little more inconvenience than wet feet. “It’s interesting,” said Tony, meaning: “It’s ludicrous.”

  That afternoon, as we approached Nogales, Arizona, in Tony’s truck, the wall was a disorienting aberration; as if it had been drawn on acetate and laid over an image of the city by some speculative planner. Its geometry seemed warped, dislocated; like an Escher print. What is the function of this black blade, the eye asks, pressed down into hills and streets? To look east onto the broad green valley of the Santa Cruz was to see, instinctively, a corridor—where water flows, so will clouds, seeds, Harris hawks, jackrabbits, javelinas.

  “The traditional migration pattern to this country was to come here and create a new world,” said Tony: “New Jersey, New York, New you-name-it.” We’d stopped for quesadillas in a roadside diner. He was getting into his stride. “People who come here now, they would rather not come; they would rather stay home. They didn’t burn their boats like Aeneas. They come here, and they work—and what do they do with their money? They send it home. Home is over there. This is not home.”

  We drove on into Nogales. The wall, they call it, though it is not the blind concrete monolith of Israel or China. As it crosses Nogales, it is an array of steel girders set a few centimetres apart, each triangular in cross-section and five metres tall. The wall is prefabricated in ten-girder sections, each crowned with an unbroken blade a metre high and five long. The sections are planted in a concrete block that reaches to waist height and bears the grain-pattern of the timber form it was cast in. The steel above, untreated, is red-brown with rust, and this rust in turn has leached into the paler concrete, and drained down its sides to the ground.

  “Our country is based on the concept—at least our judicial system—that it’s better for a hundred guilty guys to go free than an innocent man to be convicted,” said Tony. “That’s what we’ve always heard. And this type of structure, this says exactly the opposite.”

  Wherever there is a dip in the terrain, the foot of the wall is fitted with a line of low floodgates secured with a single massive bolt, a bolt that can be slid out with nothing lighter or more mobile than a forklift. Pressed up along the Mexican side, like fish in a net, are clothing and litter and rubble and vegetation—Nogales, Sonora’s flood-trash. When the monsoon floodwaters come—and they come from the Mexican side—debris accumulates in Nogales, Sonora, until the water can no longer flow between the palisades. The slope nearby, on our side, showed the violence of the water’s sudden escape, the ground sluiced back to the bedrock. For the wall is also a dam. The previous year’s floods toppled sections of it and in 2008 the waters rose so high that a neighbourhood of Nogales, Sonora, was devastated, with eight million dollars’ worth of damage done to homes, businesses and vehicles. Two bodies were recovered, unidentified, but believed to be men trying to enter America through an underground storm tunnel.

  On one of Nogales, Arizona’s slopes, where there were few houses, the wall’s concrete base had been used as a shrine. Ranged along an iron reinforcement joist that slanted from the concrete were some burnt-out tealights in glass jars. Knotted to the vertical palings above were a curling length of yellow ribbon and, tied in place with the same kind of ribbon, a bunch of dirty plastic daisies turned brittle by the sun. Nogales, Sonora, lay on the other side, six metres below, and I realised that the wall stood on its own ridge—steep on the Mexico side, like a castle dyke. In order to climb the wall you first had to climb the slope. About twelve metres. Between the steel posts that made up the wall, I could see—in Mexico—a white windowless building and a sign: DESPACHO JURIDICO, legal office. Stencil-sprayed on the adjoining wall, a young man’s face—a boy’s really, in its chubbiness—repeated over and over, like a crude Warhol. An image of martyrdom. RIP JOSÉ was penned in black on the rust-stained concrete. José Antonio Elena Rodríguez. He died in Mexico; the bullets that killed him were fired from the United States. It had happened on this spot on an October night, Tony said. Border Patrol had been called to a report of men climbing the fence. As the agents converged, the men climbed back over to Sonora. A crowd gathered on the Mexican side and began throwing rocks over the fence at the patrolmen. Among the rock-throwers was José Antonio Elena Rodríguez: this is the official version. José Antonio Elena Rodríguez threw no rocks, he was merely walking past the fence on the way home from basketball: this is the unofficial version, the version told by Rodríguez’s friends and family and other civilian witnesses. José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was sixteen. That much everyone seems able to agree on.

  Atop the six-metre bluff, behind the five-metre fence, stood the Border Patrol agents, eight of them. Among the agents was Lonnie Swartz. At the foot of the bluff was José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, walking home from basketball, or throwing rocks—both, perhaps—throwing rocks over the top of the fence, twelve metres above him. Again there is no question that Lonnie Swartz approached the fence, and drew his firearm, and shot down on José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, hitting him ten times.

  “They call it a bollard wall,” said Tony. “The agent stood right here, put his firearm between the bollards, and shot Rodríguez eight times in the back.”

  It is not an easy target, a sixteen-year-old’s back, at that range.

  “Imagine trying to throw something over that. It’s very difficult to understand.”

  The federal case rested not only on whether Swartz’s actions were reasonable—he feared for his life, rocks big as pomegranates
raining down—but on whether the killing could even be described as criminal when the kid was a Mexican in Mexico and his killer an American in America.

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  AFTER 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security evolved a new method of “prevention through deterrence,” which it called “enforcement with consequences.” Until 2001, those apprehended in the desert were processed and dispatched to the nearest port of entry without prolonged detention. This was called “voluntary departure,” as the migrant waived his or her right to a judicial hearing. Naturally, once removed from the country, they attempted to cross again as soon as possible—the next day, why not, since you’ve come this far? Part of “enforcement with consequences,” since 2005, has been Operation Streamline. Instead of being allowed to leave the United States under the terms of “voluntary departure,” apprehended migrants are instead processed through the federal criminal-justice system. Under Operation Streamline, first-time offenders can be sentenced to up to six months in jail, repeat offenders to up to two years.

  Tucson is often the first objective of undocumented migrants trying to cross the Sonoran Desert. It is also where those who are picked up by Border Patrol are taken for trial. Given the very large numbers of people—tens of thousands—apprehended each year, it is not possible for due process to be applied. This is the nature of streamlining, and it can be seen if you go to Tucson’s federal courthouse on any weekday afternoon.

  “Please rise,” said the judge.

  A massed jangling as sixty young men got to their feet. They were manacled and fettered. It was an old, old sound, this jangling, not new to the USA or anywhere else. It was nauseating. “When your name is called, please rise and say ‘Present.’ ” They were tired, and slow. They had come, most of them, directly from a cell, having been picked up in the desert in the past twenty-four hours. Who knew how far they had walked or how long since they’d slept? They looked around. The courtroom was cool, high-ceilinged and bright, its walls lined with pastel-coloured fabric. How strange to find yourself here: perhaps days spent trudging over the hills and arroyos, your clothes shredded by cacti, the birds circling overhead; and then to be transported first to a cell and then to this hushed theatre with its air of order and privilege, itself symbolic of what you have been seeking, and your appointed attorney placing his bejewelled hand on your shoulder.