The Border Fence, Brownsville 
The Battle for the Border
Illegal immigration is exploding in Maverick County, which will soon become the busiest crossing point from Mexico into the U.S. Ranches are being overrun by drug smugglers, houses robbed, cattle stolen. Men have been shot and killed.
Dob and his dog Runt patrol the ranch.
Photograph by Judy Walgren
Dob Cunningham stood on a ridge overlooking the Rio Grande and surveyed the vast stretch of Maverick County where his family has ranched for more than half a century, a lonesome spread of mesquite-studded brush country that sprawled along the border. He had stood there many times over the years and watched, one hand shading his eyes from the sun, as illegal immigrants waded the river and scrambled up the banks onto his land. But they no longer crossed the Rio Grande here one or two at a time; now they came, sweat-stained and weary, in groups of twenty, forty, even one hundred people—ragtag processions of Mexico's poor that snaked across the brushland. His ranch was scarred with their footpaths, hard-packed and worn smooth. And though each morning he knelt to pick up the empty water jugs and plastic bags that skittered in their wake, he knew these were useless gestures. This land no longer felt like his own.Dob had faced droughts, disease, and dwindling returns, but this was a crisis he was powerless to stop. A meager stretch of river, he knew, could not hold back desperate people who saw the land of opportunity lying just beyond their reach. Whenever he stumbled across illegal immigrants on his land, he doctored their blistered feet and gave them dry clothes and food before turning them over to the Border Patrol. But mixed with his sympathy was bitterness too, for the relentless flow of people coming northward had taken its toll. His fences had been cut, his cattle stolen, his house robbed. He knew that at any time of the day or night, strangers might be darting, ducking, crawling, crouching, and running through his ranch. Not all of them were trying to make their way north: Drug smugglers used the same footpaths, ferrying tens of thousands of pounds of marijuana and cocaine by backpack across Maverick County ranches like his each year, often while armed lookouts kept watch from across the Rio Grande. Dob had once loved this land for the freedom its wide-open spaces provided. Now he rarely stepped outside his house without a gun.
All around him, a border war is unfolding. In only a few years, the U.S. Border Patrol station in Eagle Pass, fifteen miles downriver from the Cunningham Ranch, has been transformed from an obscure outpost into the busiest station in Texas, and the Border Patrol estimates that within two to three years, this area—from Del Rio to El Indio—will become the busiest illegal crossing point in the nation. By 2004 nearly half a million people may try to cross here each year. The inexorable flood of illegal immigrants, combined with an increasingly brazen and violent drug trade, has struck fear in even the most stubborn veterans of the border, many of whom are moving out.
Among the landowners who are staying behind, empathy for their southern neighbors has given way to anger and a new militarism. Many now patrol their land armed. Their frustration has turned unexpectedly bloody: During the past two years, Mexicans passing through this corner of South Texas have been the targets of six shootings. Two of the victims were killed. All of them were shot in the back.
One victim was shot near Dob Cunningham's ranch, by a man Dob had trusted enough to allow him to live on his land: an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency who, the rancher later discovered, meted out his own strange justice after hours. The shooting left a Mexican teenager paralyzed for life and forever altered the way Dob looked at his desolate sweep of brushland. For the rancher, all the rules seemed to have changed, rules that said there was dignity in hard work, that a man could make an honest living raising cattle, that his grandchildren would someday work the land too. He used to regularly visit friends in Mexico. But ever since he looked across the Rio Grande through his binoculars and saw a man studying him back through the scope of a rifle, he had been wary. Even the most basic of rules—that this side of the river was his, and that that side of the river was theirs—had eroded. "No one seems to understand," Dob said. "There isn't a border anymore."
The Cunningham ranch lies along a rutted clay road that threads through irrigated fields of sorghum and oats, past the black iron silhouette of a cowboy at Dob's ranch house, and then ascends into the rough hills lining the Rio Grande. Dob's land overlooks the Quemado Valley, a verdant spread of pastures and pecan groves that runs alongside the river for twelve miles up to the Las Moras Ranch—a once-infamous drug-smuggling site that federal authorities seized from Mexican traffickers three and a half years ago. Spanish explorers named the valley "Quemado," or "Burned," long before an irrigation canal was dug through it, having appraised this once-barren land as a place so devoid of vegetation that it appeared to have been ravaged by fire. The austere terrain surrounding the valley, where Dob's land climbs to a precipitous and rocky ridgeline, and farther upriver toward Del Rio, still evokes the dusty expanses of the Old West, so much so that the nearby Moody Ranch served as the backdrop for the filming of Lonesome Dove. This version of the West, however, is increasingly defined not by exuberance or optimism or any sense of manifest destiny, but of men slowly retreating from their land.When the Cunningham family moved here in 1949 from the border town of Socorro, a few miles southeast of El Paso, locals still called this place the Free State of Maverick County, a nod to the fiercely independent nature of those who settled here. Dob, the grandson of homesteaders, sees himself as part of a distinctly Western tradition. He learned to ride and rope as a boy, and once his family came to the Quemado Valley, he began working cattle on his father's seven-hundred-acre stock farm, the same modest spread that belongs to him today. Cowboying was in his blood: His father had grown up ranching in Oklahoma, and his future wife, Kay, whose great-grandfather had been a Kansas cattle driver, shared his restless energy and love of the land. Dob enlisted in the Army at the age of nineteen and worked his way up to the rank of sergeant while stationed in Germany, but Texas had an ineluctable pull. He returned to Maverick County to work cattle, and when he tired of being a ranch hand, he did what many cowboys who could barely scratch out a living in South Texas did. In 1960 he went to work for the Border Patrol.
As a Border Patrol agent in Mercedes and Falfurrias, he would track a group of Mexicans for days or lay up by a well-worn footpath at night and listen for the faint sound of rustling in the brush. He relished the thrill of the chase, tracking footprints all day beneath a wide-open sky. He liked to work alone, roving the canebrakes and sagebrush until he found his quarry. Backup was far away, but he never felt uneasy. "The illegals you'd catch back then were campesinos: very polite, very humble gentlemen from the country who knew how to survive out here," he said with a certain admiration. "They could live off mesquite beans and prickly pear apples. They killed rabbits with slingshots, and they used the sun as a guide." Dob spoke Spanish well, and when he caught a group of men in the brush, he would ask them about their long journey north and the dusty towns they had left behind. Just as often, they would plead with him for mercy. "They'd say, 'Why won't you let us go? We're not criminals. We just want to work,'" he recalled. "And it was hard to know how to answer them."
Sitting at his kitchen table one morning this winter, Dob grew quiet at the memory. He had moved back to the ranch in 1970, when he went to work for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Eagle Pass. He eventually became the port director there and retired eleven years ago. Dob had the lean, spry build of a man who has worked outdoors for the better part of his life and brown eyes set deeply in a face accustomed to squinting in the sun. His low-slung ranch house, shaded by red oaks, smelled of coffee and deer sausage that morning. Its walls were lined with Indian arrowheads he had collected along the riverbank. An American flag hung outside his front door, as did the sun-bleached skull of a Hereford bull—one that Dob says Mexicans shot through the eye and then axed to death. The bull's cruel slaughter marked the end of the relative peace that had spanned the river. "This isn't the same place I came back to thirty years ago, that's for sure," he said as his little dog, Runt, whined at his feet. "They killed the Hereford bull around the time I retired, and by then, it had all changed. Nobody left their doors unlocked or put laundry out on the clothesline or rode horses down by the river anymore."
Though he has suffered six break-ins and had ten head of cattle stolen, tools and water pumps filched, and hogs killed, he considers himself lucky. Dob's ranch is relatively sheltered, running along a deep part of the Rio Grande that slows passage from Mexico. His neighbors a few miles upriver are more vulnerable and have been hit hard by thieves and the drug trade. Some have been robbed, threatened, or in one case, shot at. "These sorts of things are so ordinary now, they don't even make the paper," he said.
One friend, a rancher who asked not to be named, has found 350-pound loads of cocaine stashed in his irrigation ditches and deep depressions in his corrals where tons of marijuana have been piled awaiting transport. At night pickup trucks cruise his roads with their headlights off and armed drug traffickers have the run of his land. The Border Patrol once made an eight-thousand-pound marijuana bust on the land adjoining his. Soon afterward, a rifle slug was fired into his dining room while he sat eating lunch. Now his ranch, like many along the river, bears a For Sale sign.
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