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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Dee keeps extra rosaries on hand to give to the occasional strangers who wander up her driveway so they can have a source of comfort when they are taken to the checkpoint. She shows them what kindness she can. “Last October an illegal was limping along the fence line,” she told me. “He was an older man from Mexico, I’d say in his mid-fifties. He was tired and his shoes were falling apart. He asked if it was okay if he could sit under that tree, in the shade. I fixed the man some sandwiches and tea. I gave him a pair of socks and an old pair of sneakers my son outgrew. Was that illegal? Should I not have helped him? A grown man had asked me for permission to sit in the shade. These things stay with you.”
What stays with Strubhart are the things that Dee never saw—the teenager who was eight months pregnant who lay in the dirt, abandoned by the group she had been traveling with. The woman he found cowering in the grass with an infant. The bodies he kept discovering. “I found an older man who died from a rattlesnake bite,” he said, when I asked him about the others, besides Ezequiel Amaya Escobar, he had come across. “There was a nineteen-year-old boy who had been dead for three days, who died from dehydration; I was by myself when I saw buzzards on him. I found another boy, who tried to cross the lake and drowned. He was floating on the shore. Six years ago I found a human skull. It wouldn’t surprise me if we found only half the people who’ve died out here. I’ve looked with Immigration for three bodies that illegals have told us about—people they say died out here—who we never found.”
IN SARITA I HEARD ABOUT Deyanira Gallegos Tapia, a 24-year-old illegal immigrant who had lost her legs in a train accident near the ranch. A Univision reporter in McAllen named Victor Hugo Castillo had taken an interest in her case, and he put me in touch with her husband, who had made the journey with her and who was living in the Valley.
Alejandro Sedano Gutiérrez met me one afternoon in Weslaco, neatly dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, his jet-black hair combed smooth against his forehead. Deyanira had gone to Mexico with her mother for an extended visit to see her family, he explained, but in her absence, he agreed to tell me her story. Deyanira had come from the village of Chignahuapan, near the industrial city of Puebla, Alejandro said, where she had supported herself and her six-year-old son by making Christmas ornaments for $18 a week. Her father, who was a police commander, had been murdered when she was a teenager. Alejandro and Deyanira had started dating when he came to Puebla to see relatives; he was already living in the U.S., washing dishes in a restaurant in Missouri. Deyanira’s half-brother, Andrés, had gone north as well and was living in Houston. Both men had slipped across the border years before without any problems. Andrés was visiting family in Puebla last spring, and when he and Alejandro were ready to head back to the U.S., Deyanira decided to join them. She asked her mother to look after her son, promising to come back for him once she had gotten settled up north.
On April 13, 2005, Alejandro said, they all took a bus to Reynosa. They paid a coyote $350 to drive them to the river and guide them across, paddling on a raft to the opposite bank when the coyote’s lookouts on the Texas side said it was safe. From there, they were loaded into a station wagon and driven to a motel in McAllen, where they waited for four nights. A coyote said she would take them to Houston for $1,500 apiece, and Alejandro helped pay Deyanira’s way with money he had saved washing dishes. “The coyote said she would drop us south of the Sarita checkpoint,” Alejandro told me in Spanish. “She told us we would walk around the checkpoint for four hours and then get picked up. Andrés never told us this was a different coyote than the one he had used before.” They were driven up U.S. 77 and let out along a dirt road by some railroad tracks. The coyote came with them. “She walked with us for about four hours,” he said. “She pointed at some lights and said that was the checkpoint. She said she would pick us up once we had walked around it, and she left at about two a.m.” By dawn, they knew they had been tricked; the lights were distant radio towers. “Andrés said, ‘The checkpoint shouldn’t be much farther,’” Alejandro explained. “He said, ‘Let’s keep walking.’”
And so they walked. “Five nights we were out there,” Alejandro said. “We would walk at night and sleep during the day. When we saw Immigration, we would hide under mesquite trees. We ran out of water the second day. Food was gone by the third. I had a map, but I couldn’t figure out where we were.” Only later did he understand that they had been dropped off in Raymondville, a full fifty miles south of Sarita—not the four-hour trip they had been promised. “We started drinking from the troughs,” Alejandro said. “The water had algae on it, but we were thirsty. At night, you could hear the coyotes howling.” They prayed for food, and on the fourth day, as if by divine intervention, they found two cans of beans, two cans of corn, and a can of mandarin oranges on the well-worn footpath they followed. On the fifth day, they saw a train that had slowed for long enough that they thought they could jump onto it, and they started to run toward it. “I grabbed onto the ladder on the side of the train,” Alejandro said. “Deyanira was next, but it sped up and her left hand slipped. The train started moving faster and she was knocked off balance. When I saw her falling, I jumped off. Both her legs were cut off. The train never stopped.”
Alejandro stared at the floor, and his shoulders sagged as he sat in silence. He pulled a worn piece of paper out of his pocket, reinforced with Scotch tape, that was beginning to come apart at the folds and handed it to me. At the top it read “You are an alien present in the United States who has not been admitted. … Notice to appear in removal proceedings under section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.” He had a hearing soon, he explained, which would determine whether he would be able to stay in the U.S.; Deyanira was waiting to find out if she would be able to return at all. She was confined to a wheelchair and was dependent solely on her family. He had already received a hospital bill for $114,000, he said, which he was working to pay off. He had bought a twenty-year-old truck with pressure washers and had started a mobile car wash business that was making enough money to support them both—money he hoped to use to buy her prosthetics so she could walk again. “Deyanira tells me I can’t ask God why this happened, that we have to accept it,” Alejandro said. “We kept the can of oranges we found, as a reminder. It’s a sign that, as hard as things are for us, the hand of God is always there.”
“IF I GET UP AFTER THE SUN RISES, I feel like I missed the whole day,” Strubhart told me on my last visit to the ranch. “I like watching the world come alive.” We were facing the eastern sky, sitting on the back porch with his daughter, Melissa Webb, who is the ranch’s bookkeeper, and her seven-year-old, Lexy, waiting for the sun to come up. Strubhart had wanted me to see daybreak on the ranch before I headed home because it is the best time, he said, to be at Cielo de Cazadores de Codorniz. He was as cheerful and energized as I had seen him, though it was only six in the morning, and he stared out into the pitch-black wilderness as if he were awaiting a virtuoso performance. As the light started to break across the sky, he leaned forward in his chair so as not to miss a detail. “When the bobwhite quail mate in the spring, it’s like listening to a symphony,” he said.
The sky eased from black to gray. “Usually the coyotes are yelping and hollering and singing to each other by now,” Strubhart said. “I guess they must have gotten their stomachs full last night.” He dragged on a cigarette that glowed in the gloom. “Now you can hear the chicharros—the cicadas—getting started,” he said, as the silence gradually filled with a clattering sound. Strubhart handed me a pair of headphones that he used during hunting season when he worked as a guide. They had directional microphones that amplified sound, and through them, I could hear the cacophony of the ranch at dawn—or what seemed like each cicada, each feather that rustled, each twig that broke under the weight of a deer. “There’s a scissortail,” Strubhart said, pointing. “And a whistle duck … Do you hear the mourning doves? … That’s a female quail calling a male.” A doe ambled up to a feeder about fifty yards away, and then more deer began to emerge from the shadows, five of them in all. “You need to listen for when the turkeys come off the roost,” he said. “When they start squawking, they sound like a bunch of old ladies.”
The sky brightened, and ranch hands began turning their pickups into the drive. “Yesterday morning I drove down this road at daylight, and I saw where seven groups had crossed,” Strubhart said. “The smallest group had six in it and the largest had twenty-five. After a rain, you can really see their tracks. The first set of tracks were about four hundred yards from here. Then, at one mile, there were two groups. At two miles, two more. The farthest ones I saw were six miles in.” He pointed toward the headphones, which his granddaughter had placed over her ears and was listening to, enthralled. “I’ve been out here at night with those, listening for varmints, and I’ve heard people talking in Spanish,” Strubhart said. “They’ll be six hundred yards away, and you never can see them, but you can hear them talking.” He stared out into the ranch. Somewhere in the distance, people were making their way north.
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