[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 52 (Tuesday, April 1, 2003)]
[House]
[Page H2560]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, I would urge my colleagues to consider 
and to just picture something with me, and that is, picture a life in 
rural Arizona, a life that is in the one of the most bucolic settings 
one can possibly imagine, the beautiful desert, a life where a family 
has been operating a ranch for generations, as a matter of fact, six 
generations.
  Imagine waking up every morning to that kind of an environment and 
going out to do what is necessary to keep that ranch going, as it has 
been going and has been running for someone's parents, grandparents, 
and generations on back. It is a beautiful life, as they say, and as 
the movie title goes.
  Then one day, picture this. One day a person gets up, but their whole 
life is completely turned around because of something that has 
happened, a change in the environment I guess one might say. Imagine 
finding that across the land people are coming, and people are coming 
in very large numbers. People are coming by the hundreds, by the 
thousands. People are cutting the fences in order to get on the land. 
People, once they get on to the land, are defecating in the water 
supply and/or breaking the water valves. This is, remember, the middle 
of the desert, and the water there is the most precious commodity 
imaginable.
  Imagine them strewing trash all over the ranch so that the cattle 
begin eating some of this trash and eventually die.
  Imagine being threatened by these people who are crossing the land. 
Land, remember again, land on which you have been for six generations, 
but your children all of a sudden are afraid to go to their 
grandmother's house because of the danger that exists in moving just a 
few miles across the land.
  This is the situation that Steven and Tammy Sue Smith are facing. The 
Smiths own and operate a cattle ranch located only 30 miles north of 
the U.S.-Mexico border. This is their family. There are, as I say, six 
generations of owners of this particular property. Like many other 
ranch families in Arizona, their family has been there longer than 
Arizona has been a State.
  The Smiths have three children: two sons, Chance, 17, and Will, 15, 
and one daughter, Shaye, Shaye Lynn, that is to say, 14. All three 
children live and work on the ranch while attending school.
  Over the past several years, the Smith family has had to deal with an 
invasion of thousands of illegal aliens trespassing over their 
ranchland. Not surprising when we consider that in one month alone the 
Tucson sector, which is the area in which this particular ranch exists, 
reported that they had, in fact, stopped or identified or collected 
23,000 illegal aliens. That was in the month of November, last.
  Also, remember that they even admit that they get one in five. So, in 
the Tucson sector, where this ranch exists, 100,000 people came across 
that border from Mexico and into the United States illegally, and many 
of them came across this ranch.
  Since September 11, as security at ports of entry in and around 
cities has stepped up, the flow of illegal aliens has shifted to the 
public and private rangeland where countless miles of border are marked 
by barbed-wire fences and little else. There this open rangeland is 
rapidly becoming one of America's most dangerous doorsteps.
  Steven and Tammy Sue Smith have concern for their property and for 
their children and for the safety of their family. This concern is not 
misplaced nor is it exaggerated.
  I will cite a few examples of the very direct and dangerous 
encounters that the Smiths and their children have had on their own 
land. Remember, that this has only really happened to them in the last 
several years.
  The Smith ranch is a popular travel route for people smuggling and 
drug smuggling because of the very mountainous terrain. The hilly and 
rocky terrain makes it harder to track the trespassers and harder to 
see them and apprehend them. Thus, the Smith family finds itself a 
major thoroughfare for hundreds of illegal aliens and drug smugglers 
every month.
  Shaye Lynn, when she was 12 years old, was driving with her 
grandmother across their own ranch to feed some cattle. They were 
confronted on the road by a car with two illegal aliens who subjected 
them to threats of violence. Fortunately, they were able to essentially 
outrun the pursuers. Their vehicle made it to safety.
  Steven, the dad, almost died 2 years after he contracted a very 
serious illness after coming in contact with a cadaver on his land, and 
the doctors asked him if he had, in fact, done that, if he had come 
across something like that, because they told him that they were 
encountering many strange diseases for which they did not have any sort 
of treatment, and they did not know essentially what to do.
  Their son Will rolled his pickup truck in avoiding hitting two 
illegal aliens who tried to hijack him by placing large boulders in the 
middle of the road. I have seen this out there. They, in fact, will use 
either boulders on the road or sometimes they will cut down a tree, cut 
down a large saguaro cactus laid across the road, and then when people 
stopped, they are hijacked. This is on a little, tiny, dirt road in the 
middle of nowhere.
  Will and Shaye were able to identify a man on America's Most Wanted 
one night based on the appearance on their property a few weeks 
earlier. He had demanded food and then tried to steal two horses. 
America's Most Wanted described this man as one of Mexico's most 
dangerous coyotes, the thugs who smuggle people across the border for 
money.
  On another occasion, the Smith family observed a group of 32 aliens 
crossing their lands very near their house. They tracked them and were 
able to stop 27 of them and were able to detain them until the Border 
Patrol arrived. One, who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, was 
later found to have been from Guatemala. This is also very typical.
  These people are homeland heroes, and we should not forget them, and 
we should hold them up in high regard because they truly are on the 
front line of an invasion.




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