Who Left the Door Open?

Sunday, Sep. 12, 2004 By DONALD L. BARLETT ANDJAMES B. STEELE
BLIND EYE: The Border Patrol installed portable guard booths called cyclopes, but it doesn’t have enough agents to man them
VINCENT J. MUSI / AURORA FOR TIME
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"Patience is my forte," he says, "but it's getting lower." The 14,000-acre Ladd ranch, in his mother's family since the 1800s, is right on the border. Ladd and his wife and three sons as well as his father and mother have their homes there. The largely flat, scrub-covered piece of real estate, with its occasional groves of cottonwoods, spiny mesquite and clumps of sacaton grass and desert broom, seems to offer few places to hide. But the land is laced with arroyos in which scores of people can disappear from view. Ditches provide trails from the border to Highway 92, a distance of about three miles. That is the route that Ladd says 200 to 300 illegals take every night as they enter the U.S. They punch holes in the barbed-wire border fence and then tear up the many fences intended to separate the breeding cattle—Brahmin, Angus and Hereford—that divide the Ladd land.

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Ladd doesn't blame the border patrol, most of whose officers, he says, are doing all they can under the circumstances. Indeed, apprehensions of illegals in Arizona have soared from 9% of the nation's total in 1993 to 51% this year. "I have real heartache for the agents who are really working," he says. "They track down the [smugglers], and the judges let them off, and they get a free trip back to Mexico, where they can start all over." The border-patrol agents, Ladd feels, "are responsible guys in a hypocritical bureaucracy."

Border crossing at the Ladd ranch is so flagrant that sometimes the illegals arrive by taxi. A dirt road parallels the border fence and the Ladd property for several miles, in full view of border-patrol electronic lookout posts that ceased functioning long ago. When drivers reach an appropriate location, passengers pile out and run through one of the many holes in the fence and make their way across the ranch.

These gaps present their own special problem. On the other side are Mexican ranches whose cattle wander onto Ladd's. "I'm up to 215 Mexican cows that I've put back into Mexico," he says. "I've got a dual-citizen friend—he's Mexican and American—works on this side for Phelps Dodge [Mining Co.], but he's got a ranch over at the San Jose Mountain. So I call him, and then he calls the Mexican cattle inspector. Then that guy meets me at the border and then coordinates the cows getting back to the rightful owners in Mexico." Ladd acknowledges that his do-it-yourself cattle diplomacy is "breaking both countries' laws." How so? "[In] the United States, you're supposed to quarantine any Mexican cattle for 30 days, and they test them for disease and everything else. What the problem is, there isn't enough cattle inspectors to do that, and then they don't have a holding corral anymore to do that."

Why does he spend so much time returning strays? So his counterparts in Mexico will return the favor because some of his cattle amble across the border through the same holes. "The whole reason that I started doing this for the Mexican ranchers was to show 'em, 'Yeah, I'm honest. I'm going to give you yours back, so you give me mine.' And it's worked. But the whole story is that I've spent money on long-distance and talked to everybody from the Boundary Commission to usda to border patrol to customs and everybody else, and I said, 'You need to do something with your international fence.'" He's still waiting.

While the Department of Homeland Security seemingly lacks the money to secure the border, it does have money to spend in quixotic ways.

In a $13 million experimental program started in July, the border patrol will not just drop illegal Mexican aliens at the border but actually fly them, at taxpayer expense, into the heart of Mexico. The theory is that it will discourage them from making the trek north again. But as one illegal, a Dallas construction worker who was among the 138 aboard the first flight, told a Los Angeles Times reporter, "I will be going back in 15 days. I need to work. The jobs in Mexico don't pay anything."

The plight of Jim Dickson, a hospital administrator in Bisbee, is summed up with one image. It's an ambulance that pulls into tiny Copper Queen Community Hospital and discharges illegal aliens injured in an auto accident. The border-patrol officers—on orders from Washington—have refused to take them onto the hospital property after taking them into custody. Instead, the officers have called an ambulance for the injured. If the officers were to arrive at the hospital to make their drop-off, then the border patrol (make that the U.S. government) would be responsible for paying the medical bill. And that's something the Federal Government (make that Congress) will not do. Instead, the government stiffs Dickson, 56, the genial CEO of the Copper Queen, a hospital that dates back to the turn of the previous century, when Bisbee was the largest town between San Diego and St. Louis, Mo.

Dickson and his community hospital symbolize much of what has gone wrong with the immigration policies of the U.S. and Mexico—"the irresponsibility," as Dickson puts it politely, of both governments.

He figures he has another three years, maybe a little longer, before he might be forced to shut down the hospital. "We used to have 250 emergency-room visits a month. Now it's 500," says Dickson. They range from a lone man or woman rescued in the desert, suffering from dehydration or a heart attack, to multiple victims injured when vans jammed with 20 or more illegals crash during high-speed chases. Along the way the hospital is seeing more and more tuberculosis, aids and hepatitis. "We don't have to do disaster drills like other hospitals," Dickson says. "We have enough real disasters every year."