Water in the Desert
I feel strangely light, like my head is filled with helium. I blink hard and stretch my neck sideways, trying to shake away the floaty, fuzzy feeling.
After 30 minutes on one migrant trail in the Sonoran Desert, I already feel the confusion, the dizziness of mild dehydration. This is only one way that migrants get lost or injured after crossing the border. In the expansive, mountainous landscape of Southern Arizona, summer temperatures typically range from 104 to 118 degrees.
I am observing a volunteer trip with the Tucson Samaritans, one of three Arizona-based humanitarian aid groups that emerged in the early 2000s in response to rapidly rising numbers of migrant deaths. Its aim is to save the lives of these migrant travelers by strategically placing water, food, and other resources on active trails through the desert.
Since the beginning of 2019, 96 human remains have been found in the desert along the 262-mile Tucson Sector of the U.S.-Mexico border. (These remains are only of those discovered in 2019 at the time of publication; they may have died in years prior. Many others may not have been discovered yet.)
“Today’s going to be cool. I think [the] forecast for Tucson is only 102,” Barry G.*, a veteran Tucson Samaritans volunteer, told me just an hour earlier, in the car.
Since around 2012, volunteers say they’ve encountered fewer migrants in previously active portions of the desert. Once-active trails seem to have fallen into disuse.
But this appearance of inactivity isn’t necessarily an indicator of fewer migrants. In the past two years, the cases of recovered human remains have continued to hover over 130 cases per year, according to the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants map.
Migrants’ trails through the desert have changed. Volunteers believe that their trail activity has become less predictable and has shifted into more remote, inaccessible parts of the Western desert. These shifts, combined with the Samaritans’ difficulties in tracking the effectiveness of their aid, continue to hamper humanitarian aid efforts to save lives.
As we make our way to the next drop point, the Samaritans’ bright red SUV rocks back and forth, the tires jostling over the uneven, sand-colored roads. There, they will leave more plastic water gallon jugs, hoping they will be found.
IS THE DESERT A DETERRENT?
I sit in a front-row pew at the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, the headquarters of the Samaritans. White-haired women and men wearing Samaritans gear with red crosses breeze by, preparing for the desert trip training. Some have donned shirts with the words “Humanitarian aid is never a crime” across the back.
The cavernous space, with its high ceilings and dark wood beams, commands respect, but maybe I only feel this way because I know its legacy: this was the first church in the country to declare that it would offer shelter and protection to the influx of Central American refugees in the 1980s — a critical part of the national campaign known as the Sanctuary Movement.
A man with short, silver hair and wire-rimmed glasses of the same hue stands to speak. This is John Fife, one of the founders of the Sanctuary Movement and the Tucson Samaritans. He asks us to gather around a worn poster board with relief map of Arizona and Mexico. Placing his hands on the map, he traces routes along the patchwork of green and brown, pointing out where people get lost, separated, and dehydrated.
Then he flips the board over. It’s the same territory, but this map is covered in red dots clustered in the bottom half of the state. Each red dot is a migrant death recorded from 1999–2012. The map has its own gravity, and the crowd around me leans in.
But, he explains to us, this map didn’t always have red dots. The Sonoran Desert wasn’t always the site of hundreds of yearly deaths.
In fact, Fife suggests that each death is an essential product of the United States’s contemporary border strategy, one that he says “depends on death and suffering in the desert as a deterrent.”
A 1994 Border Patrol document titled “Border Patrol Strategic Plan 1994 and Beyond,” signed by Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, outlines a policy known as “prevention through deterrence.” That year, the goal of Border Patrol shifted: instead of attempting to create an “absolute sealing of the border” and to apprehend all those crossing illegally, Border Patrol sought to enact a different strategy to “raise the risk of apprehension to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.”
Part of the deterrence strategy was adding Border Patrol agents. From fiscal year 1994 to 1995, the number of agents in the Southwest Border Sector, which includes the Tucson Sector, increased from around 3,700 to almost 4,400. Today, the Southwest Sector has over 16,600 Border Patrol agents.
At the time, San Diego and El Paso were the most popular points of entry for unauthorized crossings. This made immigration enforcement difficult. According to Border Patrol, these urban centers provided migrants “an opportunity to assimilate with the population” due to both the accessibility of public transit and large populations. So, enforcement was directed to these areas with the intention that migrant traffic would “be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.”
The Tucson Sector, which includes most of Arizona’s border with Mexico, experienced a “funnel effect.” In other words, more people began traveling through the Tucson Sector portion of the Arizona border. The numbers appear to agree: in fiscal year 1993, prior to this enforcement change, there were around 92,600 apprehensions in the Tucson Sector. After the enforcement change, in fiscal year 1996, there were more than 305,000 of these encounters. Four years later, by 2000, the number of apprehensions doubled to more than 610,000.
It’s important to note that each apprehension is an indication of a migrant’s arrest in the desert. In an era of fewer Border Patrol agents and fewer migrants undergoing the full extent of immigration proceedings (including detention and a hearing in front of a judge), it is possible that many migrants were re-crossing the border soon after their encounter with Border Patrol. This may have created an inflated number of apprehensions that does not necessarily reflect the total number of individuals crossing the border.
Still, this increase in Tucson Sector apprehensions after 1994 is an indication that new enforcement procedures forced migration patterns away from San Diego and El Paso into the more sparsely populated Sonoran Desert.
Fife, of the Tucson Samaritans, attributes the increase in desert deaths to this federal enforcement change.
In years considered to be “pre-funnel effect,” from 1990–1999, the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office, the primary collector of data on migrant deaths in the Arizona desert, encountered an average of 14 undocumented border crosser deaths a year, approximately. But, after the “funnel effect,” in years from 2000–2005, an average of 160 undocumented border crosser bodies were sent to their office yearly.
“As the 90s unfolded — ’94 to 2000, [CBP] did ramp up the enforcement in Texas and California, and succeeded in funneling almost the total migration right through here, and it was the deadliest area of the border. And people began to die. That’s why we’re out there,” Fife explains matter-of-factly, sweeping his arms outward.
ORIGINS
Before the Tucson Samaritans began mapping trails, volunteers — who were trying to find and help migrants — were getting lost in the desert.
At their inception in 2002, the Tucson Samaritans were a mobile search team of sorts, looking for migrants who needed food, water, or medical assistance.
Over time, they shifted their approach: they hoped to place vital resources effectively for migrants, including water, at “water drop points” throughout the desert. Initially, volunteers tried to use informal landmark names to help each other to navigate the desert and to describe where they had placed water. The names were based on what they found nearby: like “Dead Horse Canyon” (after a deceased horse) and “Old Suburban” (after a burnt out car).
That’s why Ed McCullough, a Samaritans volunteer and former professor of environmental geology at the University of Arizona, began a project to map the trails more thoroughly in 2003.
He’d get out of his car and hike with a handheld GPS, looking for debris from traveling migrants. With the GPS, he’d mark waypoints along his walk and then connect the dots to draw trails across maps of Southern Arizona. Soon, other volunteers joined in this mapping effort.
There are general rules that migrant trails follow, laws that don’t rely on searching for debris. Migrants take the easiest path offered by the terrain, as travelers through any terrain might.
“They don’t walk down in the streams, because they’re clogged with debris. And also, when it’s raining, and you can’t walk in the water, some trails will be alongside that. And they go up, they don’t go over the tops of mountains, they go over passes, and stuff,” says McCullough.
When the Samaritans began mapping, the trails were much busier than they are today.
“At that time, anytime you went out, you ran into two, three, four groups, up to 20 people — any day,” he tells me. McCullough stands over his dining room table. Scattered across it are maps covered in red dots, green lines, and landmark names.
Volunteers used to find food wrappers, Red Bull cans, shirts, backpacks, and other litter strewn across the trails. Over time, that’s changed. McCullough says it’s because the debris was leading Border Patrol down the very routes migrants used. Now, it seems like migrants, in order to prevent detection, are keeping cans and other trash with them; the trails of rubbish are largely gone.
But McCullough says the existence of trails can be seen from the sky. In the mid-2000s, he went up over the desert in a light airplane with a pilot who wanted to help with the Samaritans’ trail mapping.
From the air, they could see the veins of trails running across the dirt.
On one of the 2012 trail maps of the Arivaca section, bright green lines converge in clusters, what the Samaritans call migrant “corridors.” Many of the green lines are disconnected — that’s because not all the trails have been fully walked with a GPS yet. The trails of these travelers weave between mountains and bend around the landscape, yet all aim distinctly northward from the dotted black line, the U.S.-Mexico border, at the bottom of the map.
Due to balance problems while walking the trails, McCullough has since retired from conducting water drops. For around five years now, he’s been working primarily on the Samaritans’ data side. But making new maps systematically has been a challenge for the Samaritans; as a volunteer operation, it can be hard to establish specific procedures to continue the mapping process. They haven’t published a map since 2012.
I ask him how people decide where to go out of the forty official water drop sites across the region.
“You know what an Ouija board is?” he says with a smile. “It’s things like, they liked the scenery. They liked the rocks in the area. As long as they’re out there on the trails, I don’t really care where they go, and as long as we continue doing the water drops.”
McCullough admits that it's difficult for volunteers to know their impact in the desert. If a jug is gone, they assume that a migrant picked it up. If a jug is empty, volunteers don’t know who drank the water. But, according to McCullough, regardless of how much water is used by migrants yearly, putting water in the desert is necessary.
“And so then the question that I always ask is, ‘How much is a migrant life worth?’ And it’s certainly worth a gallon,” he says.
The Samaritans can’t measure the unknown number of stories from migrant travelers who have survived by drinking their water. Instead, they depend largely on anecdotes to demonstrate their effectiveness. When McCullough and his wife were at a restaurant in Antigua, Guatemala, McCullough said they struck up a conversation with their waiter, a young man who had lived in the U.S. for many years. He said he had made it to the U.S. by following trails through the desert and drinking the water he found on the way.
In 2003, when the couple began working with the Samaritans, they thought the deaths would end in three or four years. They waited for desert aid to become obsolete, for comprehensive immigration reform. They were hopeful about change.
“17 years later, here we are,” he says.
McCullough remembers talking to a man he met in the desert. The man talked about his family, about how he was making the journey because he needed to provide for them. Breaking down, he asked, “‘Why do they hate us here?’”
MISSING TRAILS
The Tucson Samaritans store their supplies in a beige storage shed, partially obscured by a cove of trees, at the back of a parking lot in South Tucson. Metal shelves hold rows of plastic water jugs, coolers, Ziploc bags filled with granola bars and applesauce, and binders with the words “MIGRANT TRAILS” along their spines.
Barry G. and Bob Kee, our trip leaders and seasoned volunteers with the Samaritans, beeline quickly back and forth carrying crates, water, and backpacks. The back of the two cars begin to look like a Tetris game, the supplies neatly stacked.
As we drive, the low green bushes and dry, reedy plants speed past us along the road. As we venture off the highway and onto ranching land, the purple-tinted mountains replace the corner gas stations and houses.
We’re in the Arivaca area, the locus of the Tucson Samaritans’ 2,400 square-mile desert jurisdiction within the Tucson Sector. The eastern and western boundaries are I-19 and highway 286, or the Baboquivari Mountains, respectively. It stretches north almost to Tucson and down south all the way to the border. To its west is the rest of the Arizona desert’s region: first, the Tohono O’odham Nation and then the most remote section, what volunteers call the “West Desert.”
As the typical signs of trail activity in the Arivaca region — the debris of travel — have largely vanished within the last decade, finding the right places to leave water has become increasingly difficult.
No one is sure why indicators of activity have disappeared so suddenly. Many volunteers don’t think it’s because fewer people are traveling, but rather that the strategies of desert guides, those that lead migrants through the desert, have changed — more traveling at night, more discipline about hiding their trash. But this is all speculation, the ideas that emerge and circulate at volunteer meetings.
Still, there are indicators that fewer people are traveling through the desert. Compared to the over 300,000 apprehensions of the late 1990s, the numbers in the Tucson Sector for fiscal year 2018 are significantly lower, at around 52,000 apprehensions. However, this Border Patrol data is unable to account for all the people who pass through, undetected.
On the side of the road, we pass by a wooden cross draped in rosaries. A water jug sits next to it. Barry brakes. This is the place where a migrant woman was found with her stillborn child.
“We may not know exactly where everybody is, and which trails they are walking on, but the objective is to get water out there, hoping that people will find it. Because if they don’t, things get really bad. A lot of times they will drink out of cattle tanks,” Barry says. The polluted water can be lethal.
Barry tells the story of a man that another volunteer encountered in the desert. His group was surprised by Border Patrol. As people started to scatter, he ran across the desert and fell down a hill, appearing to have broken his knee. The night before, a snake had bitten him. He was dehydrated.
The man was in a life-threatening situation and the Samaritans provided aid. But none of them know if he made it through the desert.
If a migrant has spent a single day in the desert, the Samaritans presume that they are medically compromised. Often, at the very least, they have severely blistered feet from walking.
In response to changing activity, Barry placed two jugs at a spot in Chimney Canyon by a wash where he had seen debris. It wasn’t an official water drop point, and he didn’t record it in the Samaritans’ notes because he didn’t want other volunteers to drop water at an inactive spot. For a year, he checked now and again to see if this water might get used by a migrant — nothing. Then, a month ago, they were gone.
“We don’t know if they’re all going through using the trails that we’re putting water on. And that’s a difficult situation because we can never quite know,” says Barry. He jokes that the Samaritans use the SWAG method.
“It’s the scientific wild-ass guess,” he explains.
“The traffic’s always in flux, it’s always moving. So you can have a trail that’s been active for months, and then you go back, and nothing,” says Kee. The unpredictability of migrants’ movement is an unavoidable part of providing aid to those who are trying to avoid discovery.
While volunteers agree that activity across Samaritans’ trails is down, they say it’s difficult to measure water use at their drop points, the only indicator of trail activity. These changing trails require frequent attendance to see if migrants have been through the area.
“If a lot of water has been consumed, more than a year ago at this time, for example, then it looks like more people came through that area. So it’s pretty simple. It’s not rocket science,” says Barry. They need enough volunteers and time to compile the data.
What might be “enough” isn’t clear, though. And in the summer months, when it’s the hottest in the desert, many volunteers leave for more temperate locales. Those volunteers are a part of a broader population of seasonal Southwest residents called “‘snowbirds.”’
The Samaritans don’t keep a single list of active members, but Kee estimates that in the summer season, there are around 20–25 volunteers going out on the trails weekly. That number is twice as large in all other seasons.
The last report compiled by the Samaritans tracked their Chimney Canyon water drops from January 2018 to June 2018. For the eight water drop points, every waypoint was visited by a volunteer less than half of the 23 possible weeks. The report shows 140 gallons of water were used out of 308 gallons dropped.
It can also be discouraging to volunteers to never encounter the people they hope to help. Compared to walking through the seemingly endless swaths of Southern Arizona, often without having encounters with people, shelter volunteering offers volunteers direct contact with the people they seek to help.
Jim Marx is a volunteer with No More Deaths, also known as No Mas Muertes, another humanitarian group that places water in the desert. He described to me the work he did at a migrant shelter a month ago: he made a salad and served food to families.
“It’s just direct as you can get. Now, let’s jump here,” he says, pointing at a map of the desert. “I don’t know how many lives get saved. I have no clue. You know? I mean, I think we get enough feedback to know that it’s very important.”
For some volunteers like Barry, it’s anecdotal evidence that affirms their work.
Barry encountered a woman who told him her story of traveling through the desert. She was separated from her group, desperate for water and food. She told him that she found gallons in the desert. At first, Barry concluded that it could’ve been other groups’ water. But, among her belongings, he spotted a white plastic razor that one Samaritan would leave at water drop sites. She had found it with the water.
WAYPOINT MYSTERIES
We turn off the road. Group members begin packing backpacks with jugs of water for the first drop point. Barry leads the way over the maroon dirt and under the twisted, low-hanging branches of trees.
On the path, there are some signs of foot traffic, forming a barely discernible line of wear that stretches in front of us. Aside from the powerful heat, the plant life of the desert itself makes movement difficult: I step into sharp bushes, pulling the thorns from my leggings and duck as those walking in front of me let go of the branches they had pushed out of their path.
Gallon jugs are clustered around the base of a tree at Waypoint 3859. “We haven’t had the man and woman power to get out here every week,” says Barry.
We gather around and inspect the jugs, each marked with the waypoint number and the date it was left. For some of them, the water level is lowered. Was the water used or was the jug destroyed? With a click, a volunteer breaks the jug’s seal. An unbroken seal means the jug hadn’t been used.
We scrutinize the jug and find a small hole on the side. Water had leaked from it, creating the appearance of use. Barry and Kee conclude that this is evidence of animal damage. The water seeker? Maybe a bird, but not a migrant.
Five years ago, volunteers would leave 14–15 jugs every week at this waypoint, and every week, those jugs would be empty or gone, signs of a highly active trail. Kee opens up a trash bag and starts collecting the destroyed jugs.
Thirteen new jugs are placed alongside the two old jugs that were previously left a month ago. Barry scribbles a note for the Samaritans’ records, kept in blue binders filled with charts for each waypoint: the number of jugs unused, newly added, vandalized, environmentally damaged, emptied. There’s another line to mark the condition of a bucket used to hold food and socks, which are at some of the waypoints.
These binders hold the only metrics the Samaritans have to measure their impact in the desert.
“Is this a popular migrant trail?” another group member asks.
“We don’t know. That’s why you have to come back and visit all the time because they don’t file a trip report or itinerary,” Barry replies.
We move waypoint to waypoint, marking and placing jugs by trees and along rocky washes. Many jugs with the appearance of human usage are damaged by animals. Other jugs have “timed out.” Their water has long since evaporated and their sun-cracked plastic is brittle. We drop food bags with canned sausage and applesauce. We step cautiously down hillsides, collecting and discarding the only evidence of travelers: some fruit snack wrappers and cans.
I spot a sweater caught in a bush. A migrant might have been through this way months ago — or just last night, Barry tells me.
Finally, a waypoint with a telltale sign: a jug with a broken seal and water gone.
The next waypoint: a single puncture, at the bottom of a jug, a place presumably inaccessible to an animal. I pick up the jug and the warm water runs down my arm.
On these trails, both animals and people are vandals of humanitarian supplies. From January 2018 to June 2018, the Samaritans recorded 27 incidents of vandalized gallons at their eight Chimney Canyon water drop sites.
From 2010 to 2017, No More Deaths, another humanitarian aid group, captured video of Border Patrol agents kicking and emptying water jugs. The volunteers call the vandalism “slashing.” Sometimes it’s a single hole, other times the jug is sliced, almost in half.
We ask the same questions at every waypoint: did a human or an animal drink this water? Was this a migrant, a Border Patrol agent, a hiker, a hunter, or someone else entirely? We record our uncertain answers.
Probing for clues, Barry picks up a sausage can on the trail. The lid is gone, but there are also holes on the side, like someone drove a screwdriver into it.
“It was like somebody was shooting them, but there weren’t exit holes,” he wonders aloud.
“Maybe they didn’t want [the can] to explode, who knows,” Kee says, speculating on the thought process of the individual, possibly a migrant, who opened the can.
“Who knows,” Barry echoes, his words trailing off. “That’s the thing. You don’t know what’s going on here.”
Of all the water drop points we encountered on the trails that day, only one showed evidence of migrant use.
BORDER INSECURITY
At the Tucson Border Patrol Station, Border Patrol Agent Daniel Hernandez stands in front of a model version of the rescue beacon. It looks a bit like a cell phone tower, but with red button and a bright yellow phone box that calls the Border Patrol dispatch. There are 34 of these beacons spread throughout the Tucson Sector.
The sign on the beacon says, “If you need help push the red button. Rescue personnel will arrive shortly to help you. Do not leave this area.” Nothing on the sign indicates that the structure is operated by Border Patrol or explains that it is federal immigration enforcement officers who will come to you. Once Border Patrol finds a migrant at this beacon, they are offered care and then are processed as an unauthorized border crosser, an individual prosecutable under immigration law.
I ask Hernandez about Border Patrol agents and the vandalism of humanitarian aid groups’ water jugs.
“We wish they wouldn’t have done that. Everybody has been instructed and reiterated since that point, not to touch anything in the desert. And we say if you see an agent destroying something, let us know,” he responds.
To Hernandez, Border Patrol’s disagreement with these humanitarian groups lies in their method of trying to save migrant lives. He believes the water left in the desert tells migrants: “‘Drink water, keep going.’” They act as encouragement for migrants to continue on a dangerous journey, one in which it is hard to carry enough water for a single day. As those who are exerting themselves in heat over 100 degrees, migrants need to drink around a gallon of water every four hours.
“You get a false sense of security,” adds Jacob Stukenberg, another Border Patrol agent.
Still, Hernandez says he wouldn’t tamper with jugs.
They emphasize that oftentimes migrants don’t know, or have been misled about how far or how difficult the hike to their final destination will be. The Border Patrol prefers that migrants in distress, who need medical attention, food, or water, activate one of these rescue beacons Border Patrol has used for nearly 30 years.
In May 2018, eight out of 130 rescues conducted by Border Patrol agents were prompted by a rescue beacon activation. In fiscal year 2018, the beacons were activated 93 times total.
Stukenberg motions toward the beacon. “This means stop. This means you’re not going to make this desert, you’re not going to continue because your chances are very low. So quit while you’re ahead, press that button and have somebody help you out,” he says.
NEW STRATEGIES
Mike Krechye is working backwards to map new trails. Instead of first mapping in the desert and then tracing it to the roads, he’s starting at milepost 27 on highway 286 and driving north until milepost 45. At each milepost, he gets out of the car — often with his wife, sometimes in a group — looking for anything possibly left by a migrant: backpacks, baseball hats, camouflage shirts and pants, and phone chargers.
Kreyche has been a Samaritans volunteer since 2012. In addition to this work, he updates the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants online map with the monthly data on the remains of undocumented border crossers provided by the Pima County Medical Examiner office.
He was drawn to this area, one farther north and closer to Tucson than the Samaritans’ routine aid region, because he noticed increasing deaths.
The old mapping strategy — looking for debris and easy paths through the desert — wasn’t working anymore, and this region is much flatter, without obviously easier paths. So, he decided to try a different strategy. Mileposts seemed like easy places for migrants to arrange to get picked up. Migrants often hike to roadside “pick up” points. From those points, they’ll get a ride to their final destination.
He’s been finding almost-empty backpacks at the mileposts, filled with camouflage clothing and sometimes socks. According to Kreyche, this is evidence of what happens when migrants get picked up: they change their clothing to remove the traces of the desert that might attract attention as they continue to travel.
Over the past two years, he’s amassed around 120 samples, each representing what was found on one side of the road at a milepost. Toward the end of the year, he hopes to compile the data.
He’s not sure what conclusions the compiled data might bring.
“I don’t really know, specifically, but it would probably guide where I would explore. It will probably send me to certain places sooner than others,” he says. He might use other geographic features to find trails — the landmarks people might use to find their way to a milepost.
“I’d like to figure out a pattern that would help me save lives, you know, maybe that’s hopeless. But I’d like to try at least,” he tells me. Although he’d like to retire, he doesn’t see an end to his work.
“I think people are going to keep dying in the desert.”
I’m taken aback. “Why?” I ask.
“People are powerfully motivated, you don’t leave behind your home and your family and all the places you grew up just for the heck of it. Things have to be really bad, I think, for people to come. By the time they get to the desert, to the border, you know, they pretty much burned their bridges. They’ve got no choice but to go ahead with it,” Kreyche says.
Migrants will continue to travel through the night. Volunteers will continue to leave water under trees in the day. As much as they are walked, mapped, and explored, the paths through the deadly Sonoran Desert are ever-changing, and safe passage is never guaranteed.
*This individual’s last name has been omitted for privacy purposes.
