“It’s public land owned by the taxpayer and needed to be opened.” The dramatically enhanced security enabled the park to welcome back visitors, said Range, the superintendent. He could not provide exact comparisons but said it marked a steep fall from previous years, reflecting a trend along the entire border. Border-crossers resorted to this route in the 1990s after US border security choked off traditional routes near urban centres.īorder patrol agents now intercept about 23 people in the park daily, said a spokesman, Anthony Scott Good. Mountains and gorges rise and fall with cruel gradients. Should he try again via Organ Pipe, formidable natural and synthetic obstacles await.Ĭactus spines penetrate boots and slash clothing. Lavenant drank filthy water from a cattle tank and hurt his leg during one fraught, failed crossing attempt. “What am I gonna do here? I gotta get back,” he said, speaking in a Catholic church-run migrant shelter in Altar, Sonora. He spent 35 of his 41 years in the US, working in construction and raising six children in Santa Ana, California, only to be deported in May for driving offences, he said. “But they go.”įor would-be crossers like Albert Lavenant, marooned in Mexico, there seems little choice. I say don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” said Francisco Beltran, a Catholic priest in Sonoyta, a violence-wracked Mexican town abutting the park’s southern perimeter. The wilderness is so desolate that some corpses lie undiscovered for years, degrading to skeletons or just bone fragments, their identities a mystery. One set of human remains is found on average each month, according to migrant activists. A discarded bicycle was thought to have been left by a border crosser. An unknown number succumb to the ferocious heat, freezing nights and treacherous terrain. But not for the dwindling number of migrants and drug smugglers who use it to illegally enter the United States. “We’re looking at a bright future,” said Brent Range, the park’s superintendent. When the Guardian visited one recent morning, the breakfast clientele comprised a middle-aged couple in hiking gear, two sheriff’s deputies, three park rangers and five border patrol agents. So too at Grannie Mac’s Kitchen, a diner off Highway 85. Roads and highways bristle with guns and badges. In addition to manning checkpoints and vehicle and pedestrian fences, which now stretch across much of the desert, they run fleets of helicopters and SUVs and monitor ground sensors and surveillance towers. The park ranger staff tripled from five to 15 and the number of border patrol agents exploded from 15 to 500, with a new, sprawling base. The government funnelled a chunk of the post-9/11 border security expansion to Organ Pipe, a 30-mile segment of the 2,000-mile frontier. The shock of his death transformed the park. In 2002, Trump could have pointed to one tragic incident: drug cartel gunmen shot and killed a park ranger, Kris Eggle. He wants to build a wall to stop them and to “protect America”. The leading Republican presidential candidate says criminals and rapists, among others, are swarming across an open border. Numbers have jumped more than 30% since it fully reopened to the public last year. The 530 square mile park, a Unesco biosphere reserve, is enjoying a tourist boom. This is the new normal on the front line of America’s border crackdown. One seeking recreation, the other survival. One park with two very different types of visitor. Don’t do it repeatedly because it will become toxic.” If you have no water, drinking urine can sustain you for a while. You can drink cactus fruit but the skin has nearly invisible spines. Carry one gallon of water in each hand and six litres in the backpack. “Use the north star and the movement of the moon to guide you towards the north during the night. An identical-sized pamphlet on cheap paper, which you find in Mexican towns bordering the park, offers starker tips in Spanish.
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