34 8.23.20 Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New York Times
the sector: 262 miles of border, 90,530 square
miles. But the last two decades have seen a prolif-
eration of ‘‘tactical infra structure,’’ as it’s known:
not just the new vehicle barriers and pedestrian
fencing that have been erected along much of the
Arizona borderline but also unmanned aircraft,
motion sensors buried in the ground and, one
of the latest innovations, towers equipped with
some combination of high- defi nition cameras,
night vision, thermal- imaging sensors and radar.
The result is what the Department of Homeland
Security calls ‘‘wide- area persistent surveillance.’’
Vasa vilbaso pulled into Sa sabe, Ariz., and
turned west onto an unpaved track that ran
along a stretch of fence. Sa sabe is divided from
El Sá sabe, Sonora, by the border. Vasa vilbaso
had known this land man and boy, he told me.
He was born in Arizona and grew up in Nogales,
Sonora. Long before there was a fence, his uncle,
a rancher, used to bring his herds up here to
water. Like many border families, Vasa vilbaso’s
had members on both sides. They were Mexican
and American. Citizenship wasn’t an issue. He
was familiar with the local coyotes, of course
— everyone was. ‘‘They were mom-and-pop
operations,’’ he said.
That had all changed. As an agent, he watched
as the Mexican criminal organizations took over.
On the Arizona border this meant, principally, the
Sinaloa cartel, which in its heyday had at its helm
the redoubtable Joaquín Guzmán, lately of Colora-
do’s Supermax penitentiary. If it wasn’t ‘‘El Chapo’’
who fi rst conceived of merging drug- traffi cking
and people smuggling, he refi ned the merger, as
he did so much illicit border commerce, making
migrants just another product he moved.
As the business changed, so did the cargo.
In 1993, 97 percent of migrants apprehended
by the Border Patrol were Mexican. So few
people of other nationalities were there that
they were collectively known as O.T.M.s, Other
Than Mexicans. Last year, close to 20 percent
were Mexican. Seventy- three percent were
Central American.
The special agent in charge of homeland-
security investigations in Phoenix, Scott Brown,
told me that for the Mexican organizations,
migrants became ‘‘easy and additional profi t.’’
They represented income in themselves, but
they could also serve as drug mules, willingly
or unwillingly, or as diversions away from drug
mules. If Border Patrol agents have to track
large groups of migrants who are simultane-
ously being fanned out by their handlers onto
diff erent trails across the desert, the agents are
less likely to come upon a small band of smug-
glers. Vasa vilbaso and Hernandez averred this,
and added that they believed this tactic could
partly explain why coyotes had started moving
migrants in such immense groups.
In the fall of 2018, Central American migrants,
including many families, began arriving in
northern Mexico in daily busloads. Tucson was
overwhelmed. The Border Patrol and Immi-
gration and Customs Enforcement processed
so many people that they had nowhere to put
them, and they took to turning groups loose in
the city. Temporary shelters were set up. The
largest was in an old Bene dictine monastery.
When I fi rst visited it, in early 2019, about two-
thirds of the migrants were Guatemalan, but
there were people from all over the world: Indi-
ans, Russians, Congolese, Venezuelans, Cubans.
That year, the Border Patrol apprehended
migrants from over 140 countries. That shel-
ter has since been moved to a former juvenile
detention center.
When Caty’s parents crossed into the U.S.,
one coyote took you all the way from Guatema-
la to Arizona. He had been at it for years and
had close relationships with the Mexican desert
guides. Since then, border crossing had become
an anonymous volume business. To a new gen-
eration of coyotes, a migrant like Roberto was of
no more value than a load of fentanyl or a kilo-
gram of cocaine. Rather less, actually, because
his passage cost less than the value of the drugs,
and because unlike the drugs his arrival was in
the main irrelevant. Whether he turned up in
the United States alive or dead was of no conse-
quence to his handlers so long as he paid. There
would always be more like him. Along the way he
might be kidnapped, murdered or raped, or he
might die in the desert — not because he might
get lost, but because he would be abandoned. If
migrants were exhausted or injured, they were
simply left behind to die, and the profi teering
didn’t cease with death. Coyotes and a hem of
freelance extortionists that had grown up around
the trade contacted families to lie about the fates
of their missing loved ones, saying they had been
abducted or waylaid or injured and could be
freed for an additional cost.The Mexican organizations, meanwhile, had
introduced their signature military prowess to
the merged migrant and drug trades. I spoke with
an undocumented migrant from Honduras whoarrived at the border with no money and unat-
tached to a coyote. If you arrive on your own
this way, you are liable to be recruited or press-
ganged by the plaza boss, who monitors migrant
traffi c for the cartel. He was taken to a safe house
and was told at gunpoint that if he couldn’t come
up with the money to cross, he could carry drugs.
Or he could die.
He chose the drugs. He was outfi tted with a
camoufl age suit and carpet shoes, along with a
heavy rucksack. He was told not to open it. He
complied. He was put into a group with four other
men. They trekked through the desert, mainly by
night, only in their group. They were not allowed
near other migrants. They were accompanied by
escorts in front and back who never spoke to
them, save for threats. On the hilltops along the
entire route, there were lookouts. He said: ‘‘There
were cartel people everywhere. There were more
of them than migrants.’’
For every Border Patrol innovation, Hernandez
told me, the people smugglers had an answer.
They had persistent surveillance of their own. The
lookouts used encrypted radios, signal repeaters,
long-range video equipment. He recalled catching
a lookout. When Hernandez questioned him, the
lookout, apparently wanting to talk shop, listed
each location Hernandez had been to that day.
The organization had tracked his every move.
‘‘They have great, great counter surveillance,’’
Hernandez said. ‘‘These guys are incredibly
sophisticated.’’
‘‘You have to always assume you’re being
watched,’’ Vasa vilbaso said.
The Border Patrol has expanded its Search,
Trauma and Rescue Unit, and mobile rescue
beacons are now situated throughout the des-
ert. They feature a large red button that, when
pressed, sends a signal to the Border Patrol, and
in some cases a phone. Still, deaths go uncounted.
A 2017 USA Today Network investigation found
that ‘‘hundreds of border deaths involving
migrants were not included in offi cial Border
Patrol statistics over the past fi ve years.’’ It was
25 percent higher in Arizona over this period,
the report said, ‘‘but some years it was 100 per-
cent higher.’’ Almost all of Arizona’s share of the
border is on public land. In Texas, where almost
all of it is on private land and where many of the
border counties don’t have medical examiners,
the situation is pre modern. ‘‘Many of these juris-
dictions don’t track migrant deaths.’’
The pedestrian fence that Vasa vilbaso drove
along was composed of high steel bollard beams
separated by narrow gaps. From a cross rail
above hung two spools of concertina wire. There
had been rain the night before, and while on the
American side of the fence the track was tidy, on
the Mexican side the water had amassed at the
base of the fence a miles-long berm of what the
agents called ‘‘migrant trash.’’ Jackets and back-
packs and diapers and socks and black gallon
water jugs. In some washes, the berm was several‘HE MADE UP HIS
MIND TO LEAVE IN A
MATTER OF THREE
DAYS. IN THREE DAYS,
HE REALIZED HE
HAD TO MAKE THAT
JOURNEY. I TOLD
HIM NO. BUT HE DIDN’T
TAKE MY ADVICE.’