With no better options amid Trump's border crackdown, migrants are taking their chances

with Arizona ’s perilous Sonoran Desert

Jose felt exhilaration and dread as he trailed the coyote. He had just reached the United States, but in the blacked-out night he had to double-time his footsteps to keep up with his guide, navigating cactus spines that sliced his arms and ankles. They were at the beginning of an 80-mile journey through Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, a vast and unrelenting wilderness, and it would take at least a week of hard trekking before they walked out.

Shortly after they ducked under the post-and-rail barrier at the border, one of the most desolate stretches of the U.S.’s 2,000-mile southern frontier, the coyote stopped and turned back, promising Jose that another guide would be waiting for him on the far side of the valley ahead. The pair had struck a deal to make the entire journey together, but now Jose walked alone in the darkness. The provisions the coyote had given him were pitiful: two gallons of water, some beans, and a sleeve of saltine crackers. His adrenaline surged; he was determined to cover a lot of open ground before daybreak, when the desert became a furnace.

In his wildest dreams, Donald Trump could not build a wall more effective than the Sonoran Desert — 100,000 square miles of rugged mountain ranges and wide, bone-dry valleys straddling the Mexico border from southeastern California to eastern Arizona. Summer temperatures can exceed 120 degrees, and surface heat on the rocky floor soars a third higher. Committed to reaching the U.S. at any cost — and fearful of the increasingly hostile U.S. authorities at the border — migrants who have given up on the asylum process are detouring into this remote, scarcely policed stretch of desert, gambling their lives on a journey through hellfire. Nearly 9,000 people are believed to have perished crossing here since the 1990s, but the number is likely much higher than that, as only a fraction of the dead are found due to the vastness of the terrain and scant government resources for search-and-rescue operations. It’s a microcosm of migration at its most brutal extreme, and the ranks of the missing continue to multiply.

Jose, a stocky 22-year-old with wide brown eyes and a faint mustache, had come a long way from the poor and violent highlands of Guatemala. Gang members extorted half of his store-clerk salary each week, making it almost impossible to raise his two children. “It didn’t matter how hard I worked,” he says. “There was no future.” He saved what he could, took out a loan, and headed north for the U.S. At the border, he considered crossing alone. But the killer heat and harrowing stories about what could happen if he entered the desert without the cartels’ permission made him think twice. He paid a Mexican smuggler everything he had left to take him across, almost $4,000.

Over the next three days and nights, Jose scrambled up and down mountain ridges searching for help. The second coyote who was supposed to meet him never showed up. “Everything looked the same,” Jose says. After four days of wandering, he ran out of water, which he’d stored in matte black jugs to avoid giving off a reflection that could betray his location to border agents. By day five, his feet bled through his shredded sneakers. Vultures began to circle overhead “waiting for me to die,” he says. “I was totally lost, losing my mind.” The next day, he drank his urine.

At some point on day six, Jose staggered into an irrigation pipeline and wrenched the valve open. He drank himself full and then cut the water off completely, hoping someone would come to turn it back on and find him. A man in a pickup truck finally arrived to check on the water and offered, in Spanish, to drive Jose to the nearest town. He had walked in a circle. He was back in Mexico.

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Despite all the risks of crossing, the hopefuls keep coming. More than 144,000 undocumented immigrants were encountered by Border Patrol officers along the Southwest frontier in May, the largest monthly total in 13 years and the third month in a row that more than 100,000 were taken into custody at the border. Alone or with family in tow, they took flight north as a last-ditch effort to escape dire poverty, climate-crisis-driven drought, and a plague of criminal gangs that have made life back home unbearable. While intensified anti-migrant measures by the Trump administration and the Mexican government have since led to a drop in arrivals, the flow has not been stopped.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/border-crisis-arizona-sonoran-desert-882613/

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