By Natasha Korecki
Daily Herald Staff Writer
Sunday, November 16, 2003

Moments after jumping over the border into Douglas, Arizona, one of the Mexican youths jumps back into Mexico after agents detain his friend.

SONORAN DESERT, Ariz. - It's 1:30 p.m. Broad daylight. The fence dividing the countries lures two young men.

They grasp the metal bars and stare at America through the gaps.

In seconds, they're over, easily maneuvering through a trench dug to discourage them and others.

They tear down a dirt path.

In minutes, one scrambles right back over the fence. A getaway car on the Mexican side waits for him.

Behind him, U.S. Border Patrol agents have his friend.

Most are not so bold.

The 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexican border might seem a world away from Illinois, but how agents respond here directly shapes the Northwest and West suburban landscape.

More than 450,000 undocumented Mexicans have succeeded in crossing and end up living in the Chicago metro area, according to the 2000 U.S. census.

Many fail.

Over the past five years, more migrants died trying to cross through this Tucson sector than any of the other eight zones along the border. Agents report 137 died in the Tucson sector in the fiscal year ending in September and 339 died along the entire border.

Because of the border deaths, a rescue unit was introduced in 1998. Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue (BORSTAR) agents are trained to respond to medical emergencies.

In two shifts on two days, border agents struggle over wild terrain to rein in an unending flow.

Driving 40 mph, agent Mario Agundez suddenly comes to a complete stop.

"Fresh sign." He barely puts his Ford Expedition in park before he swings his door open and jumps out.

A half-used roll of toilet paper glows white on the bland beige desert.

No rain on it, no dirt, no hint of animal tracks.

Border Search Trauma and Rescue agent Mario Agundez checks for fresh foot tracks near a pile of garbage left in the desert by illegal immigrants. Such areas of evidence are known as lay-up spots, where immigrants will take shelter and hide beneath desert vegetation during the day, then continue on foot in the cooler night hours. BORSTAR agents are specially trained border officers who have emergency medical technician training.

Someone just dropped it.

An item this small can launch a search because border agents are experts in breaking down evidence migrants leave behind. They call it "cutting for sign."

Agundez crosses the road and scans the shoeprints.

"Four, five, there's at least five of them," Agundez says.

The call crackles over the radio at 10:10 a.m.; five vehicles are loading 100 to 125 people.

BORSTAR agent Paul McKenna, 36, steps on it.

On elevated ground in the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, a vast expanse of 115,000 acres 45 miles from the border, he looks through binoculars for dirt kicked up by a truck or van.

Nothing.

He calls for chopper help, and an agent above spots a crashed pickup.

A young Mexican boy gets his tears wiped away by his mother who is being detained by border patrol agents just north of the border.

McKenna plugs the exact coordinates into a palm-sized global positioning system satellite device. An arrow points in the correct direction and a timer counts down.

He's seven minutes, 25 seconds away.

Up ahead, the terrain looks impassable, with 5-foot-tall trees all around.

McKenna plows through the thick of it, smearing branches along the truck sides and windshield.

They screech like nails on a chalk board.

He finds the empty truck with a door left open.

A Beretta semi-automatic pistol strapped around his thigh, McKenna walks into a thick pocket of trees, disappearing for a few moments.

Then, success.

Behind him, five people walk out solemnly. No struggle, no arguments.

"Ay, my foot," a father struggling to carry two boys complains. He's hobbling, his right foot blistered.

Senior border patrol agent Jorge L. Gonzalez scans the southern horizon of the Sonoran Desert southwest of Tucson for signs of illegal immigrants that were spotted loading up in vehicles nearby.

"I tried to hide from you as long as I could. I ran for an hour," he tells McKenna in Spanish, catching his breath. He points his chin at the confusing landscape. "How far am I going to get out there?"

His "coyote," a smuggler, ran off when the truck broke down.

The man told him to leave behind his boys, 4 and 2.

"I said: åI'm not leaving my children.' "

A second man stops to tend to four, plum-sized, hollow "jumping cactus" stuck to his heel.

Without hesitation, he tears them off. One gets caught on his hand and he pulls at it, raising three points of the skin between his forefinger and thumb. Blood surfaces.

He doesn't make a sound and walks toward McKenna.

"It's rewarding when you're working like that with a group, McKenna says. "It's hot, they're going to get distressed in the desert."

At a Tucson processing center, agents shoot digital photos, take fingerprints, verify names and hometowns, then drive migrants back over the border.

The penalty isn't strong.

Five times getting caught means formal deportation before a judge. A sixth time within six years means a two-to-five-month U.S. jail sentence.

At 3 p.m., the chopper overhead leads agents to an abandoned van. The agents disappear, scattering into the brush to look for illegal migrants.

Soon, they reappear from all sides with groups of people. Six on the left. Eight on the right.

All together, 26 people emerge in quiet defeat. They creep out cautiously, eyes wide.

A woman tries to calm her frightened children. With curly black hair stuck to the sides of her sweaty face, 5-year-old Alicia Ramirez takes in a deep breath and bursts out a hearty, loud-pitched scream.

Tears stream down her face. She's terrified of the helicopter's deafening blades, beating furiously above her and her family.

Alicia's mother struggles to carry her 2-year-old younger sister. An agent offers to help, but the child wails when the tall, built man stretches out his arms.

Alicia's mother says the girls are on school break. They're heading to California to see family over the summer.

Once piled inside the back of McKenna's truck, the children calm down. Alicia's older sister has a bloody nose and sticks a tissue up her left nostril, but most of it is hanging straight down out of her nose.

The girls giggle.

A young Mexican girl takes a long drink from a water bottle after she and her family were detained in a border patrol truck.

Alicia's friend, Alma Rosa Lopez, 6, has a full gum-line smile. Two tiny teeth are just poking through. She points to the Mickey Mouse patch on the left leg of her denim overalls. She says her parents promised her a trip to Disneyland if she kept walking.

"I want to see Winnie the Pooh," Alma smiles shyly and ducks her forehead down.

"I want to see the princesses with the beautiful dresses," Alicia says.

Instead, the girls are on their way to an outdoor detention area where a huge fan blows mist onto migrants sitting two or three to a cot.

It could be five hours before Alicia, Alma and their families are let go.

"Yes, yes," their mother tries reassuring them. "We're going to Disneyland. We're going to get to Disneyland."

Agundez's day ends assisting a big find.

Twenty-one Mexican men, women and children stand shoulder to shoulder, then turn to face the fence for a full pat-down in an Arizona desert detention camp before heading to Tucson.

An hour ago, they were stuffed into a white flatbed construction truck with built-in side toolboxes.

An 18-month-old toddler had been huddling inside a narrow toolbox with her mother, only a fist-sized crack punched in for air.

To the left of the camp line, a young boy cries, eyebrows furrowed in fear. He's standing near 18-month-old Andrea, now is free from the tool box and laying listless in her mother's arms. Pale and sweaty, the toddler is missing a shoe.

To the far right, three young men are in much better shape. They whisper jokes and shield giggles behind cupped hands.

Bouncing up the steps of a bus before he's processed and returned to Mexico, Guillermo Guijano, 21, pauses, turns and slyly half-smiles.

Baring a silver-capped front tooth, he speaks without words:

This won't be the last time.