Why does border patrol drag tires

If someone is weak or falters, they just leave them. No More Deaths, a humanitarian group, puts the number of migrant fatalities in at in the Tucson Border Patrol sector alone and says some 3, people have died crossing the border since He has experience to back him up on this. In he published Dead in Their Tracks, a book about the deaths he was beginning to see in the Cabeza and nearby deserts. In addition to the UDAs, the Cabeza is now a prime spot for drug runners.

The smuggling can be very sophisticated: There are often resupply stations set up in the desert, filled with gallon 4-quart jugs of water and covered over in camouflage netting. Spotters, some equipped with night-vision goggles, sit on the mountaintops and radio down to the smugglers that all is clear. Other dope runners load up stolen vehicles with drugs and drive, hell-bent, through the desert to a safe house or a drop in the U.

AKs, Uzis, you name it. A Border Patrol helicopter was fired on last summer. We were making our way down the road to one of the few wells in the Cabeza: Charlie Bell Well. I could see it in the distance—a windmill to bring the water up into a huge tank and a high blue flag put up by a nonprofit group called Humane Borders to signal UDAs that there is water available.

The tank had a faucet at the bottom, so anyone passing by could get good water on demand. The Border Patrol does not stake out the wells. No one wants that. The guzzler was for the bighorn sheep and the Sonoran pronghorn antelope. It looked like people had been at the well very recently. There was some human waste and wrappers from a Mexican brand of socks. These guys brought spare socks.

What does that tell you? Di Rosa was concerned about the condition of the road. As we drove on, it braided into half a dozen tracks that met and came apart where the sand was soft. Other roads, totally illegal, crossed the administrative road from the south. The Growler Valley looked like a four-wheel-drive recreational site. He drove for the next 10 or 15 minutes in a muted fury. It could be an ambush: people waiting in the wash.

They will take your truck. Now we were coming up on a sight that would soon become all too familiar: a black Jeep Grand Cherokee that appeared to be buried to its axles in the sand.

We stopped to take a look. It was a drug rig, with the backseats removed to accommodate the load. The vehicle itself, although almost new, was in bad condition. All the windows were broken, someone had pounded on the hood with a tire iron, and there were bullet holes in all the doors and the tailgate. You take all the trouble to steal what you think is a perfectly good car and then it punks out on you. Pow, pow, pow. Di Rosa got us back to his office after dark.

The Growler Valley was all but ruined, a graveyard for cars abandoned and abused, a labyrinth of off-road tracks, with garbage and human waste strewed everywhere. Do a little hiking. Annerino wanted me to see several intriguing sights in Mexico first. There was a Normandy-style metal fence—newly installed crossbars of iron set in cement—that would prevent cars from entering Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument but would not prevent foot and animal traffic.

We drove a bit farther west, to the border of the Cabeza. There was no vehicle barrier and, for the most part, not even a barbed wire fence. Di Rosa had told us that he had put up warning signs along the border, but they were nowhere to be seen. There is no water, distances are very long, the area is very hot and dry, there is no rescue.

Interstate 8, is a hundred kilometers 62 miles away, by the shortest possible path. They take down my signs. I took a step toward America, then another. To the east, on the sand road in the U. I wondered if I had tripped some invisible sensor. Through my binoculars I could see that it was indeed a white vehicle with a green stripe—Border Patrol—but the truck was not responding to some high-tech alarm.

Instead it was dragging tires behind it, smoothing out the sand so that patrol agents would be able to see where UDAs had crossed. That, as far as I could see, was it for national security on the southern border of Cabeza Prieta: a drag road.

Two miles 3 kilometers past the Cabeza Prieta boundary, at San Cristobal Wash, a dry river bottom, Annerino called for a stop and we went scouting around.

There, under the sheltering branches of a few wash-side trees, paloverde and desert ironwood, we found a dozen one-gallon 4-quart water jugs, each full and unopened. All were spray-painted black. This is a [drug] backpacker water resupply. Hiding in their shade was another abandoned black Jeep Grand Cherokee, which must be one of the most commonly stolen models in Tucson. Drug runners want black vehicles for the same reason drug backpackers carry black water jugs.

The Cherokee had, of course, been beaten to death with a tire iron. The sight was nothing new to Annerino. He had his reasons. A few decades ago, Annerino had been an avid rock climber, but a bad fall put an end to all that. He still walks with a bit of a limp.

But he is an experiential historian with a passion for the routes taken by conquistadores and Indians, by gold seekers and priests. He began running on his bad leg, running until he could go for hours in any temperature.

At the top of the upright crossbar, someone has placed a white Styrofoam ball with a tiny cowboy hat on it. The ball has a big smile painted on it and looks like the jolly round face that rolls back prices at Wal-Mart. The memorial honors an old prospector who, the story goes, is the only man to die of drowning in the Cabeza. Searching for lost burros, he dropped from exhaustion and drowned with his head in a mud hole.

Refuge regulations say that you cannot park a vehicle more than 50 feet 15 meters off the road and that you must use existing pull-outs, of which there are many.

Sleep on your pad on the U. We were only four miles 6 kilometers or so from Mexico, it was a moonless night, and the black Cherokees would be running, probably with their lights off. We wanted to use my truck as a shield. It starts in Caborca, Sonora, and, if you want to take the shortest route to water, it ends near the present-day town of Wellton, Arizona, on the Gila River.

There is water for men and beasts along the way until you cross what is now the Mexican border, and then, for some miles kilometers , water is scarce, hidden, found only in tinajas, great water-holding indentations in the rock of certain canyons.

This event set a certain tone for later calamities. El Camino del Diablo had a sort of heyday from through , when the toughest of all the European explorers, Jesuit Padre Eusebio Kino, mapped the region and traveled the route several times. But then it fell into disuse until , when gold was discovered in California.

To the starry-eyed forty-niners coming out of West Texas and northern Mexico, El Camino del Diablo looked like a shortcut to riches, shaving a good miles kilometers off the established trail from Tucson, Arizona, to California. Summer, it was said, was the time to go. Summer, in fact, is not a good time to go.

Here, two to three gallons 8 to 12 quarts of water a day are necessary to keep a walker from dying. The temperature regularly reaches degrees 43 degrees Celsius and the ground itself is 30 to 40 degrees 17 to 22 degrees Celsius hotter.

It is not a place to fall down, exhausted. People on the ground are literally roasted alive. Just as it does today, the route passed two fervently hoped for tinajas—one in the Tule Mountains and another 18 miles 29 kilometers farther on called the Tinajas Altas, arguably the most famous water hole in the West. In the U. This is the fault of liberals who want their vote in the future. If they try to become American citizens legally, they won't have to be "caged, turned away, and supposedly mistreated".

These people are criminals The Sisyphean task at hand is how to deal with huge numbers that rush the border illegally The problems they experience are of their own making and not the fault of the agencies that are trying to deal with them. The Border Patrol did not create these problems - Congress did.

And things will not get better until Congress corrects these problems! I think the Dug Cartels are finding - it much easier to smuggle narcotics into America - with the existing Border Patrol being tied up babysitting the vast numbers illegal migrants! This blog has always been a safe haven from the diverse political views of every Tom, Dick and Harry who espouse their opinion with every social media available Although rare, I may voice a "political view" from time to time if it is something relevant to a blog post - but I am not interested in an extended dialog in the comments.

If people want to endlessly debate a topic in the comments, I stay out of it. Matthew And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

I agree with Mr. Mahan and John. In San Antonio expressing views like that could be argued by many. My family was one of the many who founded this country and wrote the laws many years ago up to the present. And that is what I believe. This other goes against the country. My father - who was a Justice of the Peace taught me at an early age - the laws of our country are to obeyed.

My own father fined me - and I had to pay the fine for this infraction. Now - if a judge ruled an illegal migrant has to return to his original country - why do these politicians try to help them - so they do not have to go? That is absolutely incorrect! When we start ignoring judicial verdicts - America is going to hell in a hand basket!

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