Border Control?

At an emotional meeting held in the Arivaca civic center recently, several people who own land along the ridge poured out their frustration. You build your house next to a wildlife refuge, you tend to think your peace is guaranteed. The Border Patrol was invited to the meeting but did not attend.

The worst and most lasting damage to the landscape, though, is in the 90 percent of the border land that's owned and theoretically protected by the U.S. government. A chain of wildlife preserves and other protected areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, is being destroyed, first by the footpaths and litter of left by the migrants; second, and more seriously, by quasi-military activities of the Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol is flying Black Hawk helicopters and driving all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles around rare, beautiful desert lands, and no amount of complaint from locals, land managers or environmentalists has slowed them down. It is illegal to take vehicles off-road in national parks and preserves, and illegal for citizens to pull off the awful dirt roads of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge anyplace where the soil is undisturbed, or to drive at all when the ground is wet. Cabeza Prieta, home to the last 40 Sonoran pronghorn antelope in the United States, is the wildest and driest of American deserts. The Border Patrol has a major base of operations within the refuge. The remaining traces of the centuries-old Camino del Diablo, the Devil's Highway, have been obliterated, and miles of delicate desert turned to moonscape.

In spite of the collateral damage, what happens next will be more of the same. This March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner announced that the patrol is more than doubling the number of helicopters and planes along the Arizona border and bringing in 534 more agents.

Local opinion on the buildup ranges from outrage among social activists who want an open border all the way to approval from those who think "those people don't belong here." Recent immigrants from the Midwest who don't know or care that Tucson has always been a "brown town" and the desperate ranchers along the border are pleased, if not convinced. Others are horrified that the government, finding that what it's doing isn't working, simply proposes to do more of it, and to do it here. The majority just want the whole mess to go away.

And so we who love this beautiful, dying region now live in a sort of occupied zone within our own nation, pinioned by politicians' indifference and officials' lack of imagination. We expect another bad summer.

Renee Downing is a freelance writer who has lived in southern Arizona for more than 30 years.

Author's e-mail: rdowning@tucsonweekly.com