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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THE CHECKPOINT SOUTH OF SARITA, which I visited one morning in July, hardly looked like the kind of place that so much human drama revolves around. The traffic stop, demarcated by orange pylons, sits next to a brightly lit Border Patrol office, where three Mexican nationals waited for their paperwork to be processed. A line of cars trickled by. I watched as a succession of drivers—oil field workers, truckers, green card holders, college students returning from South Padre Island—was waved through, answering the question “Are you a U.S. citizen?” as a dog trained to sniff out contraband circled their vehicle. A few were pulled over for more-rigorous inspections, but it was a slow morning, and they yielded nothing. Most of what happens here takes place not at the checkpoint but around it, on the ranchland that extends beyond the highway. The Border Patrol deploys many of its agents out in the brush, where they track the movements of groups of illegal immigrants using night-vision goggles, infrared scopes, and sensors and by “cutting sign,” or reading the ground for tracks. On busy days, agents apprehend hundreds of “brush walkers,” whom they bring to the checkpoint and question. More and more, though, it is the checkpoint 22 miles to the west, in Falfurrias, that is recording the greater number of illegal immigrants. “If you want to see what’s really going on, go to Fal,” one Border Patrol agent advised.
There are only two major highways out of the Rio Grande Valley: U.S. 77, which runs north through Sarita, and U.S. 281, which runs north through Falfurrias. For the past few years, the Border Patrol has concentrated on slowing illegal crossings in Brownsville, and coyotes, in turn, have turned their attention west, ferrying more illegal immigrants out of McAllen on 281. To get around the checkpoint, they have taken increasingly remote routes, and though apprehensions in the region have dropped, the number of deaths has soared. In the Border Patrol sector that includes Sarita and Falfurrias, 30 illegal immigrants died crossing in 2002. In 2006 that number had shot up to 81. (The Border Patrol tracks fatalities by fiscal year, which runs from October to September.) This year alone there were 245 rescues, nearly double what there were in 2004. “There’s a lot more at stake now,” Agent J. J. Garcia told me at the Falfurrias checkpoint. “As the Border Patrol gets bigger, it becomes harder to cross the border. We have more cameras, more agents, more sensors in the ground. We’ve got the National Guard assisting us. By the time people get this far north, they have invested a lot of time and money in getting where they’re going. If they’re from El Salvador or Honduras, they may have been traveling for months. They’re going to do whatever it takes to get around the checkpoint.”
The Border Patrol has been so overwhelmed by the number of illegal immigrants in medical distress that it has stationed its own search-and-rescue team in Falfurrias. “We’re trying to save lives, whether we’re apprehending people in the brush or treating them,” said Agent Alejandro Garcia, when I asked him whether his job as a medic worked at cross-purposes with the Border Patrol’s mission. “You don’t think about whether they’re illegal when they’re hurt; they’re human beings.” I was tagging along with Garcia and two of his colleagues, Isaac David and Jose Puebla, as they patrolled U.S. 281. Just over an hour passed before a call came across the radio about a rollover accident in a secluded stretch of ranchland twenty miles northwest of the checkpoint, on Texas Highway 339. The dispatcher reported that there were at least eight people in the Suburban and that two were believed to be dead. “We’re seeing more of these kinds of accidents,” David shouted over the roar of the Humvee as he steered us, at top speed, toward the scene. “It’s usually an older vehicle, and the shocks are worn. A smuggler is picking up a group that has walked through the brush, or dropping one off, and they’re in a rush to get out of there, so they’re driving too fast. No one is buckled in. When you hear numbers like that—eight adults in a Suburban, this far out—you can be pretty sure we’re talking about a group that is being smuggled.”
When we arrived at the scene, on the heels of a local EMS unit and the sheriff’s department, the accident was even worse than the dispatcher’s report had let on: Fourteen passengers had been riding in the Suburban, and all of them had been thrown. People lay in the grass on either side of the two-lane highway. Blankets had already been draped across the faces of the three who were dead. The Suburban was beached on its side, next to a frayed tire that had split open. Strewn across the pavement were empty water bottles and cans of Red Bull, sneakers and soiled clothes. One man sat in a daze as blood seeped from his forehead. The only sound was that of a woman moaning as EMTs struggled to stabilize her. David and Puebla ran to assist another young woman, whose legs were bent at odd angles; her right shin bone protruded from her skin, and her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she were concentrating on the pain. “¡Mis piernas!” (“My legs!”) she screamed when David wiggled her toes. The medics administered oxygen and an IV and tried to keep her calm. Her hair was dirty and matted; she hadn’t bathed in a long time. When David asked her when she had last eaten, she whispered that it had been three days.
A justice of the peace, an older man in a white straw hat, pulled on latex gloves and began to catalog the dead. A DPS investigator took photos. The injured were loaded into ambulances, including the woman David and Puebla were working on. Her lungs had begun to fill with fluid, and her blood pressure had dropped precipitously low. “I need to get her to a hospital, quick,” an ambulance driver said before peeling off. The injured woman, like several others in the group, had come from El Salvador. “These people had been walking for a long time,” said Alejandro Garcia, as we watched the ambulance race down the highway. “They did it the hard way. They walked all the way out here so we wouldn’t find them. They had made it. It all came down to a blown tire.”
EXCEPT FOR A TOUR OF VIETNAM that began in 1968, Donald Strubhart has never lived farther than the neighboring county, where he grew up on a dairy farm outside the town of Riviera. He was the oldest of thirteen kids, and Spanish was spoken often enough at home that he was the only Anglo placed in a remedial English class when he started elementary school. “I was twelve or thirteen before I saw an immigration officer,” he said. “In the fifties there were maybe two or three of them in all of Kleberg and Kenedy counties. There were more game wardens back then. Mexican nationals would come to our house tired and hungry. They would work for us for five or six days, and we would feed them and give them a place to stay. The women would wash clothes and help around the house. The men repaired water lines and fence lines; they would feed and milk the cows. They slept in the barn because that was all we had. Once they were fed and rested and back on their feet, they went north to make more money.”
Strubhart was drafted when he was nineteen, and he served as an Army Ranger with military intelligence, tracking the Vietcong through the jungle on long-range reconnaissance patrols. “Eighteen of us went, and three of us came back,” he said. He had been captured after being knocked out by a concussion grenade and was tortured until he was rescued, three days later, by his fellow Rangers. He returned home with seven Purple Hearts and no job prospects. He married Dee Deanda, a pretty brunette from the South Texas town of Agua Dulce who was a waitress at a local cafe, and after he had worked construction and cowboyed for a while, he started his own home-repair business. Strubhart loved to hunt and work outdoors, and the solitude of living on a ranch appealed to him. After he grew his repair business into a successful construction company, he left it behind to manage Cielo de Cazadores de Codorniz. He built the ranch house himself, out of cedar, and he and Dee moved to a more modest house next door.
At the time, Border Patrol initiatives in El Paso and San Diego were having some success, and traffic was shifting to more-desolate crossing points, which led north through places like Kenedy County. Strubhart was stranded in the middle, left to find the sick and the lost who stumbled out of the brush. The ones who were in the worst shape made their way to the house. “Dee and I came back from town a few years ago, and a thirteen-year-old girl—she didn’t weigh seventy pounds soaking wet—was lying in our driveway, next to the dogs,” Strubhart said. “She’d been lost out here for three days and three nights. She was scared to death; she couldn’t hardly breathe. She’d been drinking dirty water out of the troughs, and her clothes were torn and filthy. She was from El Salvador, and she was trying to get to her brothers who lived in North Carolina. Her daddy had sold some cattle so she could cross. It was raining, and she was shivering when we found her. We sat her down on the porch, and Dee put the girl’s head in her lap and tried to calm her down.”
Strubhart calls the Border Patrol whenever he sees illegal immigrants passing through the ranch, and he is grateful for the help, but he is unsure what effect they have on the number of people crossing through the property. “When we go quail hunting, we have pointers—the best hunting dogs in the world—and they don’t find but twenty percent of the coveys,” he said. “And we know where the coveys are. Immigration has told me that they think they catch about ten percent of people coming through here.”
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