[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 61 (Thursday, April 17, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E654-E656]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               NATIONAL LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION SYSTEM ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                            HON. ROB BISHOP

                                of utah

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, April 9, 2008

       The House in Committee of the Whole House of the State of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 2016) to 
     establish the National Landscape Conservation System, and for 
     other purposes:

  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit for the 
Record portions of an article from the Tucson Weekly that was published 
on February 15, 2007.

                      Following the Amnesty Trail

       Leo W. Banks follows one of Arizona's most popular illegal 
     alien crossing routes

[[Page E655]]

     and finds piles of garbage trampled public lands, angry 
     residents and the suspected presence of a vicious gang.
       In the coming weeks, as President Bush and the Democrat-
     controlled Congress take up immigration reform, and the 
     political talk turns to amnesty, everyone living along border 
     smuggling routes will hunker down to wait for the worst. They 
     know their lives will get miserable in a hurry.
       The word amnesty possesses remarkable power on the Mexican 
     side of the line. It has the same effect as a starter's 
     pistol.
       Bang! Let the land rush begin.
       It happened after Jan. 7. 2004. when Bush floated his idea 
     for a temporary worker program. The idea was broadly viewed 
     in Mexico as amnesty, and the Border Patrol's own survey 
     proved it. In the weeks following the proposal, the agency 
     quietly questioned crossers apprehended at the southern 
     border and found the president's plan had caused a big spike 
     in illegal crossings. Forty-five percent said they'd entered 
     our country ``to get Bush's amnesty.''
       Nowhere will the coming stampede be more evident than on 
     the smuggling routes that begin at the border at Sasabe, 65 
     miles southwest of Tucson, curl up through the Altar Valley 
     and continue all the way to the Ironwood Forest National 
     Monument, a full 75 miles north of the border.
       The 129,000-acre Ironwood, located west of Marana and south 
     of Eloy, is a desert paradise of giant saguaros and spooky 
     black-rock peaks worthy of a gothic novel. President Bill 
     Clinton declared it a Federal monument in June 2000.
       But the smugglers have turned this signature Arizona 
     landscape into a criminals' playground. The land here is 
     crisscrossed with trails so packed from use, they shine white 
     under the sun. Another Monument resident, Cindy Coping, uses 
     Google Earth to zoom in on the Amnesty Trail, which comes up 
     clear as a bell on her monitor.
       What's it like to live here?
       If you're out on the land a lot, expect to find the corpses 
     of those who've made the terrible decision to cross this 
     desert. Including the three murders last week, seven bodies 
     were found on the Ironwood in the three months prior to this 
     writing.
       One photo, taken sometime in 2000 by my anonymous 
     photographer, shows the skull of a presumed illegal, with 
     other human bones in the foreground. Next to the skull, not 
     pictured, stands a saguaro-rib cross, probably built by 
     companions after the deceased went down.
       For those trying to keep cattle on their land, the 
     smugglers have made living in the Ironwood a nightmare. At 
     this writing, rancher Emilio Figueroa says he has 18 head of 
     cattle, valued at $800 each, on Tohono O'odham land 
     immediately west of the monument. They got out when coyotes 
     cut his fence. Now the tribe is refusing to let him onto 
     Indian land to retrieve them. He's out $14,000.
       For Cindy's husband, Bob, a 58-year-old retired Raytheon 
     engineer, one of the defining aspects of life on the Ironwood 
     is a particular sound he can hear, literally, a mile away. 
     ``I'll be out working and I'll hear, `wappa-wappa-wappa', and 
     I know it's a load-out truck coming down the road with a flat 
     tire,'' he says.
       The smugglers keep driving on the flat until the rubber 
     flies off. Even then, they don't stop. They keep driving on 
     the tire's rim until that, too, falls off or disintegrates. 
     Sometimes the drive train falls out first.
       These smuggler vehicles, most stolen from Phoenix, often 
     travel at night without headlights, with tape over the brake 
     lights, and they've been clocked tearing through the 
     monument's dirt roads at 89 mph. This endangers the lives of 
     residents and visitors alike.
       It also ensures that many of these load vehicles--such as 
     the tan truck pictured--never make it out of the monument. 
     They smash into trees and saguaros, or run into ditches. The 
     BLM has towed 300 vehicles a year out of the monument since 
     2000.
       These load-outs, as well as the constant foot traffic, 
     destroy habitat and threaten cultural sites and endangered 
     species. The trash left behind requires pickup crews to have 
     biohazard training and armed guards watching them as they 
     work.
       Even worse, Vic Brown says that MS-13, the notoriously 
     vicious Salvadoran gang, might be operating on the monument, 
     based on suspicious tattoos law enforcement has seen on 
     smugglers arrested there. The Border Patrol's public 
     information office in Tucson wouldn't return a call to talk 
     about MS-13 in the monument.
       Says Vic Brown: ``We're trying to maintain some semblance 
     of a national monument out there, and to be quite honest, 
     we're not able to do it, because undocumented immigrants have 
     targeted the area. I've watched it degrade from when I got 
     there in 1992, and in the last 5 years, it has gotten 
     progressively worse.''
       The Copings bought their land here in 1995, and since then, 
     they've been eyewitnesses to the explosion of the smuggling 
     trade. In the mid-'90s. it was mainly small family groups 
     that crossed at Sasabe and walked the 75 miles north to the 
     monument, then an additional 18-20 miles to their pickup at 
     Eloy. They rarely used coyotes.
       In 2000, the Copings began seeing vehicles, often Ford F-
     150 pickups, parked at the side of the road. They usually had 
     dark windows, no license plates and the keys resting on a 
     tire. The illegals would drive themselves out to I-10, then 
     Phoenix.
       The abandoned-truck phase gave way in about 2003 to the 
     huge load-out phase. The Copings began seeing SUVs with five 
     to eight illegals sitting on the roof, as Bob says, ``like 
     wasted college students,'' or on the hood, forming a narrow 
     tunnel through which the driver can see.
       Some of these illegals have told the Copings they already 
     had jobs lined up in places such as North Carolina, and 
     curried plane tickets out of Sky Harbor in Phoenix.
       Cell phones revolutionized the smuggling racket, allowing 
     illegals to call ahead to arrange a pickup in the Ironwood, 
     often eliminating the longer walk to Eloy. Independent 
     walkers are gone now. ``Everybody we see now is somebody's 
     customer,'' says Bob.
       The business has become sophisticated, commercial and very 
     dangerous. Cindy, 50, a former engineer at Hughes, used to 
     check fences alone on horseback, but she quit, afraid of what 
     she might encounter. ``Sometimes I'll be at the house alone, 
     and 20 illegals will walk down the road,'' she says. ``It's 
     intimidating. They sound like an army marching.''
       Bob says the number of load-outs in the Ironwood increased 
     last spring before and after demonstrators took to the 
     streets in Tucson and elsewhere to demand a rewrite of 
     American law to accommodate illegal aliens and their 
     corporate partners. The atmosphere, including talk of 
     amnesty, created an explosion in traffic. In April, the 
     Copings counted eight load-outs in one day.
       When the National Guard was sent to the border, the free-
     for-all ended abruptly, if briefly. ``We saw helicopters 
     overhead, military-type aircraft, and we didn't a see a load-
     out for two weeks,'' Bob says. ``The traffic probably dropped 
     90 percent.''
       But the numbers have risen again significantly, and in 
     recent e-mails, the Copings have told me the big load-outs 
     have returned with a vengeance. Cindy's e-mails have the 
     tension and immediacy of dispatches written from a war zone--
     because, in fact, she and Bob live in one.
       Last Thursday, three illegals were murdered in the 
     Ironwood. Cindy and Bob learned of the trouble when a male 
     illegal came to their house, his thigh covered in blood, 
     evidently splatter from someone else's wound. In rapid 
     Spanish, he repeated words like, ``Pow! Pow!'' and ``911'' 
     and ``muerta'' and ``mujer,'' while gesturing of blood 
     pouring from someone's chest. Cindy grubbed her medical kit, 
     and she and Bob and this man jumped into a pickup and raced 
     to the scene.
       Here is what she wrote next:
       ``I called 911 and attended to the woman, who was shot in 
     the shoulder with a bullet wound coming out that soft spot at 
     the bottom of her throat. The 911 dispatcher was 
     simultaneously responding to a similar call from the Asarco 
     Silverbell Mine, which is about a 10-mile drive south. As 
     soon as I could see the woman was in stable condition. I 
     crossed the street and assessed the motionless man on the 
     other side.
       ``I felt no pulse on his still-warm throat. His eyes were 
     closed. I grubbed his wrist, and it cold. Then I saw the back 
     of his head was shot open. He was gone. There was no bleeding 
     at the scene, so I assume this shooting took place earlier, 
     and these four people were unloaded.
       ``The woman, Sebastiana, whom I later found out is 24 years 
     old, began shivering in the morning's chill. I found no signs 
     of continued bleeding. Her wound had been hurriedly dressed 
     with someone's cotton coat stuffed up under her shirt. It was 
     a gaping 2-inch-wide gash between the two bullet holes, but 
     it had stopped bleeding. She was alert and breathing, even 
     able to talk. She had a smaller wound to her abdomen. I 
     elevated her feet, and Bob made two trips back to the house 
     for wool blankets to keep her warm.
       ``A younger (undocumented) woman, Linda, at the scene had 
     blood covering her cheek and circling one eye. She indicated 
     no pain, so this was perhaps someone else's blood. She 
     indicated that something had grazed her face, possibly a 
     bullet. In the dark, it appeared she'd been punched in the 
     eye, but after it got light. I could see it was just dried 
     blood on her face. The first official to arrive on scene was 
     a Pima County deputy who told us that someone had walked into 
     Asarco with four fingers shot off.''
       The e-maiI goes on. It ends with Cindy and Bob retreating 
     to their house and locking the gate, another case of Arizona 
     citizens sealing themselves off from the horrors this 
     invasion has brought to our state.
       But heartrending encounters are not unusual in the 
     Ironwood. In November, a man in his mid-50s showed up at the 
     Copings' corrals and said he'd been drinking his urine for 
     four days. Cindy made him macaroni and cheese and watched him 
     gobble it down. As he ate, he broke down in retching sobs.
       The man said he owned a small farm with 70 pigs in Colima, 
     Mexico, and had seven sons living in Phoenix. Breaking her 
     rule of not allowing strays to use the phone, Cindy allowed 
     him to call them to pick him up. He waited and waited, but no 
     one in his family came for him.
       That night, he slept in the bed of one of the pickups. In 
     the morning, he gave Cindy several necklaces--depicting 
     Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe and other images--then left, 
     and Cindy isn't sure in which direction he went. She never 
     called the Border Patrol to pick him up.
       ``They usually don't come if it's one or two strays,'' she 
     says. ``But mostly I didn't have the heart. I couldn't do it 
     after all he'd been through.''
       Cindy figures she and Bob have made six such ``rescues'' 
     over the years, She has no

[[Page E656]]

     choice. ``If I don't help them, they'll die,'' she says. 
     ``We're 75 miles from the border, No one gets here without 
     walking, at least three days, and it's another 20-mile walk 
     out.''
       But living in the Ironwood presents other tough choices.
       In 1997, as a precaution, Cindy got shots to immunize her 
     from contact with hepatitis A. At the time, she was working 
     with Pima County Search and Rescue, and that agency 
     recommended that its personnel get immunized for the more 
     worrisome, and potentially fatal, hepatitis B. It is spread 
     through contact with the blood of an infected person, and 
     Cindy has had contact with bleeding Third World people.
       She hasn't gotten the second shot yet. ``If I were taking 
     the best care of myself. I'd get the B shot, too,'' says 
     Cindy. ``I probably still will.''
       It's easy to understand her anxiety, and her belief that 
     she is on her own against this invasion--because, in spite of 
     what she calls the dedicated Border Patrol agents on the 
     ground, Cindy knows that the American government has neither 
     the will nor desire to control this border.
       The same year she got the shots, a Border Patrol agent told 
     Cindy that while traveling in Guatemala, he walked by a 
     travel agency in Guatemala City and saw in its front window a 
     map showing the 1,800-mile route to the United States--with 
     her little house in the Ironwood as a landmark.
       But Cindy just shrugged at that disturbing news. After so 
     many years of living on the Amnesty Trail, she's no longer 
     capable of surprise.

                          ____________________