The Border Fence, Brownsville 
The Desert of the Dead
Far from the divisive debates in Congress about immigration, illegals are dying in record numbers along a desolate stretch of south Texas scrubland. For the ranchers and border patrol agents who find them, it’s a nightmare without end.
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“I used to ask people why they would risk so much to come here,” Cuellar told me, as he turned down another sandy road, a long way from where we had started. “One man told me that his family was dying of hunger over there, and he could make enough money for food over here.” He handed me a set of old keys to unlock the last ranch gate. I swung it open, and he drove through. We were close to Baffin Bay, and thunderheads hung in the sky over it, to the east. The salt air was thick and humid. Cuellar steered his pickup past an old wire fence, into the cowboy cemetery where many of the Kenedy Ranch’s vaqueros and ranch hands have been laid to rest. It was a wild, shaggy place overgrown with sunflowers and grape vines. “My grandfather is buried over there,” Cuellar said, gesturing toward the section to the west where the old tombstones stood. “And over there,” he said, motioning to the east, “is where we bury the immigrants that can’t be identified or whose families never come for them.”
Thirty-four plain pine crosses stood on the east side of the cemetery. Aluminum markers, driven into the dirt in front of them, offered whatever meager information there was: “Unknown skeletal remains.” “John Doe.” “Unknown Male.” “Female Unknown.” The salt grass had grown high around the markers, and I had to kneel down and push back the undergrowth to read them. Cuellar stayed behind in his pickup, staring out at the paupers’ graves. As sheriff, he had made sure that the immigrants who were laid to rest here had received a proper burial, with a priest, if he could find one. The pallbearers were usually himself, his chief deputy, the mortician, and his assistant. “See the space right here, between the crosses?” he asked when I got back into the truck, pointing to a gap in one row. “We exhumed the body of a seventeen-year-old boy after we tracked down his family through the Mexican consulate. Eighteen or twenty years ago, he had run east from the checkpoint at night, and he got lost. I found his body a week later. He had fallen back on his legs, kneeling, and he died like that.”
Cuellar turned in his seat to look at the newest cross, beneath which grass had just started to grow. A long, empty space for future graves ran south of it to the cemetery fence. “There are going to be more crosses there by the end of the year,” Cuellar said. “That row is going to fill up, and we’ll have to start another. And there’s no way we can stop it, as long as they have nothing to eat over there.” He shook his head as he looked out at the pine crosses, and then the sky beyond it, which was growing dark. He turned the key in the ignition. “We should go,” he said. “The rain is coming.”
“LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF TRAFFIC went through here last night,” Strubhart told me one morning as he studied a patch of earth on the north side of Cielo de Cazadores de Codorniz. “I’d say it was a group of about twenty-five people. See the grass, how it’s flattened?” He was stooped over, inspecting an area by the side of the road that had caught his attention. The tall prairie grass lay at an angle, some of it flush with the ground. The trail continued on for a distance, as if a group of people had trampled through it single file.
“They funneled through here,” Strubhart said as we started to follow the path. “They must have been walking after the rain, and it rained yesterday at noon. See the dirt from their shoes? See how it sticks to each blade of grass? If they had passed through here before the rain, it would have washed the dirt off. They probably crossed late last night or early this morning.” We continued on until we had reached a mesquite thicket. “When they walk through this part of the ranch, they’re following the gas pipeline, over there,” he said. “It runs north from McAllen all the way to Chicago. It’s on all the coyotes’ maps.” He ducked under mesquite branches and followed the trail. “I’m guessing they took this little detour because they got spooked by something, or they were trying to avoid the sensors,” he said. “You know Immigration puts sensors in the ground so they can tell where illegals are walking?” He bent over to examine a sun-bleached jawbone with two prominent, pointy bottom teeth—“Javelina,” he announced—and then resumed his search, his eyes trained on the ground. “Looks like one person walked out here and checked that everything was clear, and the rest followed him back to the pipeline,” he said.
We continued the conversation back in his truck, and as we talked, he made his way through the property, eyeing the fence line to see where it needed fixing, stopping at each windmill to make sure that the trough beside it held plenty of water. Every now and then he spotted something that needed his attention, and he hopped out to tinker with a feeder or adjust a water pump. “The ranch is eight miles across, and there is a trail every mile or so,” he said. “The coyotes use different paths; it just depends where Immigration is putting pressure on them. When a group has to cross a caliche road, the last person wipes his footprints out with a branch. So I look to see if there are brush marks on the road.” He knew the terrain well enough that he could tell where they had been, not only by the plastic bags and water jugs and cast-off clothes they left behind but also by the way they altered the landscape. “I could tell you if someone had broken a limb off that tree, just like you’d notice if you came home and someone had moved a piece of furniture in your living room,” he said.
As Strubhart drove, he would stop occasionally to lift his binoculars; squinting into them, he would fall silent, studying the wildlife from a distance—a white-tailed buck, a flock of wild turkeys, a nilgai antelope. Cielo de Cazadores de Codorniz, which means “Quail Hunter’s Heaven,” is the private hunting preserve of a retired banking executive, and it falls to Strubhart and his ranch hands to keep its wildlife flourishing until deer season. Just as Strubhart keeps track of how many does are dropping fawns, so he notes the progress of immigrants through the ranch; as we talked, he stopped to pick up a blue oxford shirt that lay, incongruously, in the middle of the wilderness. “The largest group we ever had come through here was fifty-four people,” he said. “Usually it’s groups of twenty people, or five or six. Most groups have kids in them. We see a lot of pregnant women who want to give birth on this side of the river. I’ve seen mothers carrying infants that still had their umbilical cords.” Strubhart sighed and studied the road ahead. “Last week, I came across a group of twenty-two kids who were walking with a guide, and I called Immigration,” he said. “Not a one of them was older than fifteen.”
Dust kicked up behind Strubhart’s truck as we headed deeper into the ranch. “The coyotes have GPS systems, night-vision goggles, cell phones, hand-drawn maps,” he continued. “They’re professionals. They have scouts they send through this country. They watch when Immigration goes up and down the highway, and they know when the shift changes happen.” The mechanics of human trafficking, he explained, were as clever as they were mercenary, with a skilled coyote charging each illegal immigrant anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500. Each coyote has a crew, he explained, and each crew has a driver who drops the group off in the brush somewhere south of the checkpoint. “You can see them at sunset—a whole carful of people bailing out into the brush,” he said. “Sometimes they leave the bail-out cars by the side of the road with the doors hanging open.” Another member of the crew takes them into the brush, Strubhart said, and guides them past the checkpoint to a predetermined spot. Then a driver picks them up by the side of the road and takes them to stash houses in cities farther north.
“The coyotes know how hard the trip is, but they paint a pretty picture for these people,” Strubhart said. “You can tell by what they’re carrying that they have no idea what they’re getting into. They’ll bring a toothbrush and toothpaste but no antibiotics, no soap, no clean clothes, nothing they can doctor themselves with. They wear cheap tennis shoes that fall apart. By the time we find them, they’re crawling with ticks. They’ve run out of water, so they’re drinking from the troughs. They’re carrying plastic jugs that are full of brown water.” Strubhart lit a cigarette and cracked his window open, slowly exhaling into the hot air outside. He looked tired in the morning light. “When I went to Vietnam, I saw real poverty,” he said. “Most people have no idea what it means to live in a place with no education, no opportunity. The Vietnamese had nowhere to go. Mexicans have somewhere to go, so they come here instead of making their own country better. And as long as they can find jobs here, they’ll keep coming. I’m not for or against them. It’s just hard seeing how much some of these people suffer.”
To prove how tough the journey is, Strubhart took me to a well-traveled area near a deer blind, a sandy slope studded with prickly pear and huisache, a few miles from the highway. “Try walking that little hill, just so you can see what it’s like,” Strubhart suggested, and I did. The sand was as loose and fine as sugar, and it shifted under my boots. Each step required effort, and after a few minutes, my legs started to ache. The air was thick and humid, and the heat was unbearable. “Imagine doing that for a couple of days with a twenty-pound sack on your back,” Strubhart said when I returned, short of breath. “They’ll get in this sand and it will spill into their shoes. Pretty soon they’ve got some unbelievable blisters. Then their feet get so swollen that they can’t get their shoes back on. We find people out here, barefoot. When they can’t walk anymore, the group leaves them behind.”
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