Earlier this month, I descended upon the southern Arizona city of Tucson and then drove to the border town of Sierra Vista in Cochise County, one hour south of the city. The path to Sierra Vista is covered by the arid, venomous desert, mostly unconquered and home to man’s natural enemies, the snake and scorpion. For our southernmost communities, the desert’s venom not only endangers residents from snake bites, but from the sore openness of their communities’ border with Mexico posing daily threats from illegal crossings.
The most familiar form of illegal border crossing involves individuals and families crossing and immediately surrendering to local or federal law enforcement to receive initial documentation and a court date for a hearing for an asylum claim to permanently remain in the United States.
A migrant crossing in 2024 will receive a hearing in 2032. During President Donald Trump’s first term, he required these individuals to remain in Mexico while they awaited their hearing date. President Joe Biden instead permits their release into the United States and gives them free plane tickets, often to the American cities of their choice.
The Arizona-Mexico border is the second longest of the four state borders with Mexico, at 372 miles. Texas’ is the longest at 1,241 miles. The border in Cochise County is 84 miles long and contains miles worth of border fencing built by the Obama and Trump administrations. However, much of the county’s border is without any fencing or regular patrol, due to a lack of Department of Homeland Security Border Patrol agents.
Unknown to most Americans, including many of our politicians, are the sort of crossings that occur daily in Cochise County. These are different from the norm. Here, almost no migrant comes seeking asylum and most who cross attempt to avoid law enforcement at all costs so their activity cannot be tracked. Those who cross are either cartel members or their accessories, and their day mimics that of anyone commuting from the suburbs to a job in some city. They come to the U.S. to smuggle humans and narcotics during the day and then they return to Mexico that evening.
The border portion most easily crossed, adjacent to Coronado National Park, contains border technology built by Presidents Barack Obama and Trump. In Trumpian style, Trump’s is 15 feet taller, as the Army Corps of Engineers concluded that a fence 30 feet or higher imposes a psychological doubt in someone attempting to climb such a wall and then jump or repel down the other side.
Our escort to the border was the Cochise County Sheriff’s special operations unit, the Southeastern Arizona Border Region Enforcement Team, or SABRE. Upon one’s arrival at this section of the border, one can see that the area around the border is lined with millions of dollars’ worth of unused fencing materials left there following Biden’s decommissioning of border wall construction when he came into office in 2021. What remains is wasted taxpayer money and an unfinished wall easily crossed by the cartels.
In military fashion, cartels dress in camouflage, blending into the desert’s environment to avoid detection, a similar tactic to an army planning an invasion of a neighboring country.
Seemingly of little interest to our federal government, the open border location, just up a light hill, is a hot spot for cartels. As seen in the photo below, a ladder lay on the ground and is used to aid migrants climbing the fence. The ladder sat on the Mexico side of wall as I stuck my phone through the wall to photograph it.
The most striking scene I witnessed was a cartel lookout just beyond the unfenced border where a young cartel member could be spotted with binoculars. He was positioned there to alert en route members when anyone was approaching from the U.S. side. His head could be seen emerging from rocks along the ridgeline along with the occasional puff of smoke, likely from electronic cigarette giving away his location.
The SABRE team uses hidden cameras powered by solar panels disguised as rocks to monitor the activity. The cameras are seldom detected by cartels. Once a cartel member or associate is detected on U.S. soil, the information is relayed to the Border Patrol so an arrest can be made.
During the arrest of one cartel member, he told a SABRE agent, “F— Trump, I came here because Biden allows us to.”
The SABRE team said that many federal Border Patrol agents are often tied up in other matters and aren’t available. In those instances, Border Patrol’s advice is to release the individuals, and if they are picked up by a driver, to give the vehicle description and the direction they were heading to Border Patrol.
If border agents pursue them, high-speed chases are common but can be called off if the high speeds pose a danger to other drivers. This doesn’t stop cartel members from escaping at high speeds well after the agents drop their pursuit. A few months before our arrival, a woman and her son were killed while headed to her birthday party when a cartel member collided with them head-on eight miles after agents disengaged.
After the border visit, I rode along with the Cochise County deputies to see examples of the crime the county commonly experiences. I rode with a deputy who was a 20-year Marine veteran with five combat tours, a true defender of America and patriot, to say the least.
A ride-along that was meant to be 90 minutes turned into three hours when a suspicious driver, with tags registered to Phoenix, had been parked for five hours at a nearby auto parts store complaining of an overheated engine. Often, cartels hire drivers from Phoenix to pick up illegal aliens, so when an out-of-town driver acts suspiciously so close to the border, it sets off alarms. The deputies offered help, but he refused, so they left while keeping an eye on him.
Nearing the end of the ride-along, we saw the same car drive away, so the officers in my car began slowly following him. Eventually, the car pulled over with its hazard lights flashing. At this point, Border Patrol has a drone overhead and records two individuals entering the vehicle. This alerts all ground patrol that the driver likely picked up two recent border crossers that Border Patrol had seen on camera earlier that day.
As our patrol car began to pursue him, I pointed out that his windows looked very tinted, and the deputy agreed that was probable cause to stop him. The driver did not pull over, and what began as a slow pursuit became a chase that reached 100 miles an hour on a lonely Arizona road as dusk hit.
A mile ahead, other deputies laid down a spike strip in case the driver refused to stop. But before he reached the spike strip, he stopped his car, and the deputies surrounded his vehicle.
The driver admitted he had been working for the cartels to aid in a crossing. He was arrested on a felony charge for facilitating human smuggling across an international border.
As the sun set, the community was safe for another day, but the heroes of the night receive no rest while the Biden administration recklessly refuses to fix some of the greatest dangers at our border.
While America’s politicians in Washington will enjoy the upcoming holidays, Cochise County will spend Christmas with its back door open to cartels and the violence they bring, denying the peace that this American community so desperately deserves.