Five years ago, an extraordinary scene played out regularly in the southwest Arizona desert near Yuma. Groups of illegal aliens, sometimes 300 or more, would stage mad rushes across the largely unfenced Mexican line, challenging an undermanned Border Patrol to stop them.
Agents rounded up as many as they could, but the numbers were grim. The 126-mile-wide Yuma sector held the dubious title as the nation’s prime entry point for illegal aliens from Mexico.
In 2005, agents made 138,437 arrests in the sector. But by 2009, the number had dropped to 6,951.
What happened?
The answer is confirmation of an argument enforcement advocates have long made – effective fencing, in tandem with additional manpower and technology, can greatly reduce crossings, especially around urban areas.
“In 2005, things were wild here,” says Ken Jensen, a Border Patrol spokesman in Yuma. “We couldn’t keep up with the crossings. But now Homeland Security has designated this area as operationally controlled, meaning if anyone tries to cross here, there’s an excellent chance we’ll catch them.”
The success has multiple explanations, including Border Patrol’s Operation Streamline. The program requires all adults convicted of entering the U.S. around Yuma to serve some jail time, which deters crossings. The declining economy has also played a role, and Yuma, with its largely flat ground, is ideal terrain for ground-based radar.
But fencing is a key ingredient to the success in Arizona’s southwest desert.
Fence building began in earnest after President George Bush signed the Secure Fence Act in October of 2006. Since then, the Yuma sector has gone from having almost no border fencing – except around San Luis, Arizona – to having 81 miles of pedestrian fencing and 45 miles of vehicle barriers.
“Every place we can put a fence, we’ve put one,” says Jensen.
The pedestrian fencing includes an 8.3-mile triple-layer barrier at San Luis, population of 23,000. The town sits right on the border, 19 miles south of Yuma.
Crossers here encounter a 12-foot metal wall, followed by more than 30 yards of floodlit ground, then a second fence, this one a 16-foot-tall steel mesh. Those who breech this encounter the third barrier, a chain-link fence with razor wire on top.
For businessman Henry Chavez, whose company, San Luis Cooling, sits right on the border, the new fence has been a blessing. Before its construction, crossers regularly climbed the ten-foot landing mat fence then blocking the border. Town neighborhoods were overrun with illegal aliens and police were sometimes fielding 20 prowler calls per night.
“I had between 10-20 undocumented people coming over that mat fence and crossing my property every day,” says Chavez. “But since the triple-layer fence went in, I haven’t seen anybody. Not one.”
The benefits have been felt throughout Yuma County, where beefed up enforcement has been a major factor in a significant drop in border-related crime, says Eben Bratcher, patrol captain for the Yuma County Sheriff’s office.
Between 2005 and 2008, traffic accidents in the county dropped 30 percent, auto thefts 54 percent, drug and DUI cases 38 percent; and burglary and other thefts were down 88 percent.
“We had bunches of cases where border bandits were robbing illegal migrants,” says Bratcher. “They’d wait until groups crossed into the U.S., take everything they had and flee back into Mexico. The fence has stopped that completely.”
A similar story has unfolded east of El Paso, Texas, around the border community of Fabens, now protected by an 18-foot, double-layer mesh fence extending 21 miles along the Rio Grande River.
Prior to the start of construction in 2008, Border Patrol was arresting 250 illegals a day around Fabens. “Today, if we see five apprehensions a week, that’s a lot,” says Valeria Morales, a supervisory Border Patrol agent who works the Fabens area.
She acknowledges that some illegals still climb the fence, and others go around it and attempt to cross at open areas. “But the groups that do that are much smaller than before, and out in the remote areas we have more time to make arrests.”
As for the fence itself, agents say its primary benefit is forcing crossers to commit. In border areas once blocked only by barbed wire, detected groups could easily flee back into Mexico. But now, after jumping the tall fence, they have no place to run if Border Patrol approaches. In other words, the fence is effective at keeping crossers in the country.
Another benefit: Steel fencing prevents American and Mexican cattle from mingling through cuts in the old barbed-wire fence. Animal health experts say if the wrong disease were to migrate north and infect American cattle herds, it could do serious damage to the beef industry, which comprises 3-5 percent of the American economy.
For example, an outbreak of the highly contagious foot-and-mouth virus could be devastating, says Rick Willer, former head of the prestigious U.S. Animal Health Association. “If we had a foot-and-mouth outbreak, our entire beef export market would cease to exist overnight, and the effect would ripple through the economy,” says Willer.
New fencing outside Nogales, Arizona, 300 miles west of Yuma, has made it impossible for Mexican and American herds to mingle. It has also helped restore the land itself, says Keith Graves, former district ranger for the Coronado National Forest.
He cites the national forest land west of downtown Nogales, almost 4 miles of which is blocked by a new, 18-foot bollard fence, consisting of rectangular panels four inches apart. The problems once plaguing the land on the American side — piles of migrant trash, the trampling of sensitive forest land, migrating cattle — are mostly gone.
“Those miles are no longer a significant problem for the forest or for the ranchers who have grazing permits there,” says Graves, now a liaison between the Forest Service and the federal government’s Secure Border Initiative.
With its hills, deep canyons and sheltered forests, the terrain around this border town, 60 miles south of Tucson, is a challenge to patrol. But Alan White, Border Patrol’s chief agent in Nogales, says the new fencing – which also extends 8.7 miles east of downtown – is part of a package of improvements that is yielding results.
In the past year, narcotics seizures in the Nogales sector have dropped 27 percent and arrests are down 23 percent.
White cites a common argument of fence critics – that an 18-foot fence can be foiled by a 19-foot ladder – and acknowledges that some “spry young people” probably climb the new fence every day.
But, he notes, they can’t drive over it in trucks packed with people; it must be climbed one person at a time; and it can’t be scaled by someone carrying a 70-pound bundle of marijuana.
“The fence slows down the flood to levels we can manage,” says White. “And the dirt road running underneath it is just as important. Now we have a piece of infrastructure we can defend, and the access to defend it.”
White’s biggest challenge now is getting money to replace the 2.7 miles of landing mat fence currently separating downtown Nogales from Mexico. Built in the mid-1990s, it stands 12 feet tall and is routinely climbed, tunneled and blow-torched. In a six-month period from last October to March of this year, vandals on the Mexican side put 240 holes in it.
Lately, the old landing mat has seen more climbers, because the better-engineered and taller bollard barriers have pushed foot traffic back toward downtown — as well as out onto national forest land, past where the bollard fence ends.
The lesson, says White, is that effective fencing can help Border Patrol control a specific piece of ground, but crossers will always try to get around it and through it. Yuma County’s Eben Bratcher echoes that, saying the fight for a secure border requires constant vigilance.
“This is a resource game and we can’t let down our guard,” he says. “I’d hate to see a shift of Border Patrol agents out of Yuma now that we’re under control. The fence and additional agents have really helped here and nobody wants to go back to the way things were.”