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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Unlike big governments, small community hospitals cannot run deficits forever. The Copper Queen's shortfall from treating illegal aliens grows each year. This year it will be about $450,000, bringing the total for the past few years to $1.4 million. With each money-losing year, a tiny piece of the 14-bed hospital dies. When that happens, the entire community suffers. Dickson's most agonizing decision came when he was forced to shutter the long-term-care unit. "It was the only place the elderly could go," he says. "If someone had dementia, we had a room for them." But no more. Now if people who spent their life in Bisbee need elder care, they must leave the area. "The more free care we give," Dickson says, "the more we have to ration what's left."

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Dickson emphasizes that not all the free care is going to illegal aliens passing through on their way to other states. About half goes to Mexicans who use the Copper Queen as their personal emergency-care facility. In effect, the hospital, which performs general surgery, has become the trauma center for that stretch of northern Mexico. If an ambulance pulls up to the border-crossing point near Bisbee and announces "compassionate entry," the border patrol waves it through, and the Copper Queen is compelled to treat the patient. It is one more program that Congress mandates but does not pay for. "If you make me treat someone," says Dickson, "then you need to pay me. You can't have unfunded mandates in a small hospital." Although the Medicare drug act that passed last year provides for modest payments to hospitals that treat illegal aliens, Dickson says there is a catch that the U.S. government has yet to figure out. "How do I document an undocumented alien? How am I going to prove I rendered that care?

They have no Social Security number, no driver's license."

The limits of compassion are also being tested on the Tohono O'odham Nation. About twice the size of Delaware, the tribe's reservation shares 65 miles of border with Mexico. Like the residents of the small Arizona towns just to the east, the Native Americans, many of whom live without running water and electricity, are overwhelmed. The Nation's hospital is often packed with migrants who become dehydrated while crossing the scorching desert, where summertime temperatures reach upwards of 110(degree). The undermanned tribal police force helps the border patrol round up as many as 1,500 illegals a day. "If this were happening in any other city or part of the country," says Vivian Juan-Saunders, Tohono O'odham chairwoman, "it would be considered a crisis."

Yet the highest levels of the U.S. and Mexican governments have orchestrated this situation as a kind of dance: Mexico sends its poor north to take jobs illegally, and the U.S. arrests enough of the border crossers to create the illusion that it is enforcing the immigration laws while allowing the great majority to get through.

Local lawmen like Jim Elkins and Larry Dever have learned the dance firsthand, and their towns and counties have to pay for it.

Elkins has been the police chief in Bisbee for 12 years, on the force for 30. Dever has been the sheriff of Cochise County—which includes Bisbee and encompasses an area almost the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, with 84 miles along the Mexican border—for eight years and a deputy before that for 20 years. The two lawmen handle the same kinds of citizen demands made on local law-enforcement agencies everywhere—from murder to drugs to reports of abandoned cats. But never have they seen the likes of today's work, in which their time is monopolized by relentless reports of alien groups making their way through the area. The entries from Bisbee police logs speak for themselves, these a sampling from Friday, May 7: 9:05 a.m.: "[Caller] advised udas [undocumented aliens] on foot, west [of] high school on dirt road. At least 10 in area. U.S. border patrol advised of same. 38 udas turned over to U.S. border patrol."

4:31 p.m.: "[Officer] located three udas walking on Arizona and Congdon. All three turned over to usbp [U.S. border patrol] Naco."

4:32 p.m.: "[Officer] copied a report of a silver-in-color van loaded with approximately 30 udas left Warren. Later copied vehicle went disabled at mile post 345 on Highway 80. Thirty to 35 udas were located with vehicle. udas turned over to U.S. border patrol."

7:52 p.m.: "[Officer] located a group of udas in the area [of Blackknob and Minder streets]. Fifteen udas turned over to BP." 10:02 p.m.: "Reported a group of udas gathering on the bridge on Blackknob at Minder. Officers located six udas. tot [turned over to]usbp."

On and on it goes. "Every day we deal with this," says Elkins.

"People don't feel safe. The smugglers are dangerous people ... I find it hard to believe we can get 80 to 100 people in our neighborhoods. They come across in droves." Transporting them requires fleets of stolen cars, which explains why Arizona ranks No.

1 in cars stolen per capita, with 56,000 ripped off last year. "This is a lot of work for us. We're a small department," says Elkins, who has 15 officers. "So much of our time is spent on federal issues. We should be getting money for this [from the Federal Government]. But we don't."

The kinds of crime found in most communities are interwoven with the illegal-alien traffic on the border. "Our methamphetamine problem is alarming," Elkins tells TIME. "The last three homicides here were related to meth. Kids doing meth will take a load of udas to Tucson or Phoenix for a couple of hundred dollars."

Sheriff Dever says more than a quarter of his budget "is spent on illegal-immigration activities," and he points to the ripple effect through the criminal-justice system: "The illegal aliens can't make bond, so they spend more time in jail. They're indigent, so they get a public defender. If they have health problems, they have to be treated."

Dever feels overrun and doesn't mind who knows it. He relates a story about a recent visit by a television crew that arrived in his office and asked whether he was aware that a group of presumably illegal aliens was camped out in a drainage ditch next to the sheriff's headquarters. Sensing a story, the crew wondered if he was embarrassed by the aliens' presence. A plainspoken man, Dever said he was not the least bit embarrassed. Their presence, he said, illustrated quite pointedly just how pervasive the problem was.

The people who probably should be a little embarrassed are the folks up the road at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., home of the U.S. Army's top-secret Intelligence Center. The facility, which trains and equips military-intelligence professionals assigned around the world, also happens to be a thoroughfare for illegal aliens and drug smugglers, with mountains on the base providing a safe haven.

Using some of the same routes as the people smugglers, the drug runners are well armed, equipped with high-tech surveillance equipment and don't hesitate to use their weapons. That's what happened earlier this year, when law-enforcement officers and Mexican drug runners engaged in a fire fight at the border in front of a detachment of Marines just back from Iraq, who were installing a steel fence to prevent illegal aliens from driving through the flimsy barbed wire. The Marines, unarmed, watched placidly. None were injured.

The situation across southern Arizona has spun so far out of control that many on the border believe a day of reckoning is fast approaching, when an incident—an accidental shooting, multiple auto fatalities, a confrontation between drug and people smugglers—will touch off a higher level of violence. And the nightmare scenario: some resident frustrated by the Federal Government's refusal to halt the onslaught will begin shooting the border crossers on his or her property. As a rancher summed up the situation: "If the law can't protect you, what do you do?" Everyone, it seems, is armed, including nurses at the local hospital, who carry sidearms on their way to work out of fear for their safety.