(Mark Wallacy’s artice from The ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA on 24 July 2024)
Jim Chilton doesn’t look like someone who could
stand up to the blood-soaked brutality of the notorious Mexican drug cartels. He’s
85, and there’s only one of him. All he’s packing is an old bolt-action rifle
and a handgun. But the veteran cattle rancher has plenty of Arizona grit.
“I’m a cowboy, not a wimp,” Jim says. “It’s outrageous to have foreigners sitting on your mountains, on your ranch. It’s just outrageous.” The cartels come and go on Jim’s southern Arizona ranch like they own the place. It’s not just drugs — heroin, cocaine, marijuana and fentanyl — that they’re bringing through the Arizona border. Now one of their most lucrative businesses is human beings.
We are bumping
along in Jim’s pick-up, heading south through his property to where it borders
with Mexico. He wants to show me the trails used by the cartels to smuggle
drugs and migrants that spider web through his property. This business is so
lucrative there have been gun battles between rival cartels for control of the
trails.
He’s been warned we’re in dangerous territory — the US Border Patrol has told Jim to avoid this area. But Jim won’t let the cartels dictate where he can and can’t go. The veteran cowboy points to a nearby mountaintop.
“All of these
mountains have cartel spotters. Their objective is to be a scout looking for
the Border Patrol,” he says. “The cartel scouts are undoubtedly watching us.
They see us coming and they’re trying to evaluate who we are.”
After two hours of spine-rattling tracks, we arrive at the spot Jim wants to show me. It’s the border, and Donald Trump’s great wall. Jim follows the border wall along the edge of his property.
Trump's border wall snakes along the boundary
between Mexico and Jim's ranch. Rust red, the 9-metre-high steel bollard wall
snakes along the boundary between Mexico and Jim’s ranch. Then it stops. “I
have five miles of the wall. And then on January 21st, 2021, Biden took office
and then stopped all construction,” Jim says.
Where Trump’s wall ends on Jim’s ranch you can simply walk across the border. This is now one of the gateways being used by thousands of undocumented migrants to get into the US. “It’s been an open door for people coming through. The druggers as well as the economic migrants,” Jim says.
This is more
than an unfinished wall. It’s the centre of a political battle that will shape
the presidential election. It’s a monument to Donald Trump’s chaotic
presidency, an unrealised grandiose vision. And it’s a stark reminder of one of
the Biden administration’s political weaknesses — many Americans believe it has
lost control of the border.
‘No-man’s-land’
Anger over the
ceaseless flow of asylum seekers has prompted some to take the law into their
own hands. “Under our constitution, the government’s supposed to protect you.
If the government can’t protect you, you can protect yourself,” Tim Foley says.
“This is no-man’s-land. This is where the bad guys are.”
An army veteran, Foley leads Arizona Border Recon, a
group of armed volunteers that aims to disrupt people smuggling. Today, with
Jim Chilton’s permission, they are on his ranch patrolling along the border. Some
call Foley and his followers vigilantes.
“I’ve been called everything in the book,” Foley says. “But on the back of my neck, I got a tattoo. It says D-I-L-L-I-G-A-F, which stands for, ‘Does it look like I give a fuck.’ And I don’t give a fuck what people think about me, because I know who I am and what I stand for.”
Foley’s radio
crackles into life. It’s a report back from one of his patrol members who’s
spotting immigrants walking into the United States from Mexico. “Coming over
this morning there’s 500,” Foley says. “He said he knows it was more than 500.”
After crossing to the US, migrants walk for kilometres along the wall. Many Americans believe Joe Biden has lost control of the border. Franco and Jenny crossed into the US this morning. They’re from Peru, a country that has been engulfed in protests and political violence for almost two years.
Their journey
was long and dangerous. There have been reports that women and girls have been
raped by Mexican cartel members. “For a woman, yes, it was very risky,” says
21-year-old Jenny, who was a traditional dancer back in Peru.
“I travelled
easily from Peru by plane. But from Mexico it was travelling in the back of a
truck … we travelled for a day without eating, we also couldn’t go to the
toilet. We got to a warehouse and then from the warehouse we had 15 hours
travelling … all cramped up with 15 people alone in a trailer.”
“Sometimes it
was very hot, I couldn’t breathe properly,” Franco says. “There were many days
where you couldn’t sleep … you were afraid, hungry, thirsty.” Jenny says many
of the asylum seekers were terrified of the people smugglers. “They kidnap,
they demand money. Luckily, thank God, none of that happened,” Jenny says.
The deadly dream
Over the next
couple of hours, the trickle of migrants walking around the end of the wall
into the US becomes a stream. There are people from El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras, Mexico and even Bangladesh and India. One man is from Senegal in Africa.
It’s almost 40
degrees Celsius, and they have been walking for hours. “Hungry, thirsty,” says
one man in Spanish, who asks us for water. “It’s very hot since 8 o’clock this
morning.” The pursuit of the American dream can be deadly. Over the years, Jim
Chilton has made many terrible discoveries on his ranch.
“Since the
1990s, I’ve had an estimated 35 people die on the ranch,” he says. “I suspect
that it’s lack of water, getting lost, no food or sometimes they are injured …
if they break a leg or get a bad ankle, the group just leaves ’em.”
Jim has
installed 29 drinking fountains on the southern section of his ranch for people
who’ve crossed the border to use. “People can get a drink and fill up their
water bottle, and go on. I’m sure I’ve prevented a lot of deaths due to lack of
water.”
Once the
immigrants walk into Jim Chilton’s ranch, most head west along a road that hugs
the wall, hoping to be picked up by the United States Border Patrol and
processed. But often, the Border Patrol is overwhelmed.
“This morning
there were two groups that crossed the end of the border wall about seven miles
east of here,” says Andy Winter, who’s running a camp providing shelter, food
and water. “They started walking this way. So when I arrived at 6:15, 6:30am,
there were 202 people exactly. Walking down the road from the end towards here,
with babies, old people, women, children, families.”
Around us, exhausted people sleep on wooden pallets set up under open tents. Others help themselves to water, coffee or hot food provided by Andy and his volunteer group. “No-one would choose to do this unless they felt like there was no other option at all,” Andy says. “Many don’t make it. It’s brutal. It’s just terrifying.”
Dehumanised and demonised
As he ramps up
his campaign to regain the presidency, Donald Trump has increased his
inflammatory and dehumanising rhetoric towards undocumented immigrants like
these. He has said that they are coming in by the millions from foreign insane
asylums and prisons, and are engaged in the “plunder, rape, slaughter and
destruction of the American suburbs, cities, and towns”.
“Trump is Trump.
He tells it like he thinks it is, and he not a politician in the sense that he
gives mealy mouthed words and comments,” says Jim Chilton, who appeared onstage
with Trump at a farmers’ conference in 2019.
Of the nearly 8 million people stopped at the border
since 2021, about 100,000 — just over 1 per cent — were convicted criminals,
according to US government figures. Around 2,000 were identified as gang
members. The former president’s political opponents have accused him of using
Hitler-esque language to demonise vulnerable people.
“They’re
poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said this year. “The Democrats say,
‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not
humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”
Tim Foley and
others warn that among the many seeking the American dream are those who want
to destroy it. “How many of these guys that you don’t know about coming across
are terrorists?” Foley says.
“How many cells
do we have sitting in this country right now just waiting for word?” This year,
eight Tajiks with alleged ties to ISIS reportedly crossed over the southern
border before being arrested.
Democrat Lupe
Contreras is the minority leader in Arizona’s House of Representatives, and a
proud Mexican American.He says Trump’s rhetoric has hurt many in his community,
and beyond. “It’s divided our country.”
“My dad came to this country when he was 12 years old. I am a son of a migrant. My dad’s worked his butt off his whole life. My grandpa worked to the day that he became a citizen. He worked his whole life. They never asked for anything from this country. All they wanted is respect.”
Andy Winter says
the people he meets at the border are “amazing, beautiful, strong people who
are determined to try and stay alive and provide for their families”.
“When I hear Trump
say the crazy things he says about this ‘invasion’, and they’re sending their
rapists and their murderers and they’re emptying their prisons, I mean, all you
have to do is spend a half hour with these people and you realise like in a
heartbeat, you’d take them as neighbours.”
Deportations
The contest in
Arizona is expected to be tight this November. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated
Trump in the state by just 0.3 per cent of the vote. Even senior congressional
Democrats acknowledge the border is a big problem for the administration.
“The immigration
system has broken down,” veteran Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren says. The
asylum system is no longer working as intended. People who are not genuine
[asylum seekers] are admitted because the law needs reform. But all the
statistics show that the vast majority of people who are coming are coming to
better their lives to work, to have hope for their family.”
Republicans and
Democrats last year achieved what seemed like a political impossibility – they
reached an agreement with a bipartisan bill to address the crisis at the
border. The bill would have enabled the administration to deport migrants who
cross into the United States between ports of entry without permitting them to
apply for asylum.
But that
political unity spelled electoral danger for Donald Trump, so in a sign of his
control over the Republican Party, he intervened to kill the bill. “A lot of
the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say,
‘That’s OK. Please blame it on me. Please. Because they were getting ready to
pass a very bad bill,’” Trump said.
In response to
the failure of the bill, President Joe Biden issued an executive order allowing
officials to quickly remove immigrants entering the US illegally without
processing their asylum claims. The Trump campaign slammed the order as not
going far enough.
One of Donald
Trump’s key promises in this election is that, if re-elected, on day one of his
presidency he will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in
American history”. Trump told Time magazine this year he would target up to 20
million undocumented migrants he claims are living in the US.
“Those on the
left hear that and say, ‘Oh my God, that sounds terrible.’ I don’t understand
how that sounds terrible,” says Chad Wolf, who served as Trump’s acting
Homeland Security secretary and who was in charge of the border.
“The idea of
deporting individuals, removing individuals or repatriating individuals that,
again, don’t have a legal right to be here, or perhaps are here because the law
has been abused to get them here, they need to be removed from the country.”
A tall palm tree can be seen through a coiled barbed wire fence, the fence and tree are silhouetted against the dusk sky. But for people like rancher Jim Chilton, who are on the front line of the migrant crisis, deportations aren’t enough.
“President Trump was securing the border. He was building the wall,” he says. “It was a good policy … I would love for Trump to be re-elected and finish the wall and secure the border at the border.”
(Watch Part 1 and Part 2 of the Four Corners special, Retribution, on ABC iview now.)