Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of articles related to the recent conference held in Arizona by Witness at the Border. The People’s Tribune and our bilingual sister publication, El Tribuno del Pueblo, were among the participants and partner organizations at the conference. A lot of information was shared, and those attending seemed to leave with a renewed determination to pressure the government to craft a humane immigration policy. This article will focus on two people who shared their perspectives with conference participants. Other articles to come will amplify some of the many other voices raised there.
Among the conference participants were people who had been migrants themselves, including one who had fled civil war and come close to dying in the Arizona desert as she crossed. Other participants included journalists, doctors, lawyers, humanitarian aid workers and immigration activists. The meeting explored a variety of themes, including putting the U.S. immigration system in a historical context; the brutality of deterrence policies; the history of land tenure and land use in southern Arizona and how the border has shaped the region; hemispheric and global perspectives on immigration; visions of what open borders might look like; immigration activism in the context of the 2024 elections; how activists can communicate their message more effectively; and what the future holds for Witness at the Border.
The group held the conference, in partnership with more than a dozen other organizations, in Ajo, Arizona, in mid-January. About 80 people from various parts of the country and from various organizations attended. The location, in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert not far from the Mexican border, was significant. This is in part because of the history of the Ajo area itself as a crossroads of cultures and conflict, and in part because of the thousands of migrants and refugees who have died in the unforgiving desert over the years while trying to cross into the U.S., especially after they were channeled into a deadly environment by the government’s “prevention through deterrence” policy.
Prevention through deterrence – the policy of trying to deter immigrants from even trying to enter the U.S. – was a recurring topic at the conference. A key impact of the policy, begun in 1994, has been to effectively funnel migrants into the most dangerous regions for crossing by making it much harder for them to get into the U.S. at legal ports of entry. The brutal results of this policy were graphically brought home to some of the conference attendees by Dr. Greg Hess, the Pima County Medical Examiner. The day before the gathering formally began, a number of the conference participants had a chance to meet with Dr. Hess at his Tucson office, where he described his office’s efforts to identify the remains – often not more than scattered bones – of those who have died in the desert.
At least 4,200 people have died in the Sonoran Desert since 2000, and it’s estimated the actual number may be several times higher. Hess showed heart-wrenching photos of some of the remains brought to his office, which ranged from collections of bones to corpses covered with leathery skin mummified by the sun to people who had died just a day or two before being found. There were also photos of the sorts of things that people were carrying when they died – ID cards; prayer cards; a plastic baggy, tied to a bra, containing phone numbers; pouches sown into clothing where money was hidden.
Hess said they have identified about 60 to 65% of the migrant remains they have received, and about 1,500 to 1,600 people are still unidentified. He said most of the people they find are from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Most of the people they identify are in their 20s and 30s, and 83% are male.
Migrant deaths reported to the medical examiner shot up after the deterrence policy began, said Hess. His office recorded 20 migrant deaths in 1999, and this figure went up to over 200 for the year by 2021. “So people just used to kind of walk across the street [in a populated area] if they wanted to come into the United States,” said Hess, “and that [deterrence policy] started to prevent people from doing so. . . And that’s really when we started to have a problem in the Tucson sector.” By 2005, his office ran out of space to store unidentified remains in its indoor cooler. They first brought in refrigerated trucks to hold the excess bodies, and then built another cooler outdoors in 2006.
Hess told the story of two people his office was able to identify, Maria and Omar, whose remains were found together. “Maria was 57,” he said. “She was Guatemalan. Omar was 14 [also from Guatemala]. What happened was, Omar’s mother had left Guatemala and she’d been in Phoenix since like 2009 or something. And she had left him back in Guatemala. Some extended relatives were caring for him. And as he got older, he continued to be more vocal about how he wanted to come to the United States to join his mother in Phoenix. So eventually she agreed to get him set up with a group that was going to come. They were going to cross through Arizona, clearly, because mom’s in Arizona, and meet up with her in Phoenix. His neighbor Maria agreed to accompany him. They were crossing with a group of people. Maria fell behind, she could not keep up. She got too hot. Omar decided to stay back with her and did not continue with the group [and they died there huddled together]. Somebody in the group called the mom [when they got to Phoenix]. So the mom called a journalist, who called us.” Hess said they were eventually able to identify both Omar and Maria using their DNA.
The opening day of the conference, Dr. Scott Warren of the migrant humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths gave the keynote address as a presentation on the history of the Ajo region in terms of the land tenure of the various cultures and social forces there, the area’s history of copper mining, and the impact of the border. He is an Ajo resident.
The region is historically the land of the Tohono O’odham and Hia-Ced O’odham people, said Warren. The area’s history has been marked by racism, segregation, violence and the impact on land and people of both the extractive industries and the government’s efforts to control the border.
“Where we’re sitting is, of course, inseparable from the mining history of this place, and the fact that mountains were literally moved, processed,. . . turned into copper, turned into profit so that this town, as you see it could be built and it could come to be,” said Warren. He noted that the town was segregated into separate districts for Anglos, Mexicans and Indigenous people, while the mine managers lived in stately houses on a ridge above the town.
“Ajo [in the early 20th century] was part of the larger, so-called copper borderlands, in which largely U.S.-led companies and firms had developed copper mines in Arizona, Sonora and New Mexico and Chihuahua State,” said Warren. “And regardless of whether that mine was on the U.S. side or the Mexico side, if you were white American, Anglo, you got paid more for the same type of work than if you were Mexican or if you were native. . . .This was the so-called dual wage system that predominated across the copper borderlands that paid people based on their racial citizenship identity and category created through this complicated process of labor and management and the copper corporations and the copper mines sort of deeming who belonged and who did not in this landscape that really those mine owners saw as their fiefdom on both sides of the border.”
Warren said there were “massive labor movements and strikes that happened in Arizona” during this period, and “people were rounded up and deported” if the mine owners deemed them a problem. He said that the Phelps Dodge corporation “really dominated Arizona politics and society in the early 20th century in a big way, and the copper mining company would eventually own this town as well.”
He added, “Ajo and many other copper mining towns came into their existence in this period of intense labor-management strife in which categories of race and class and citizenship were being created in the early 20th century. And Ajo’s mining history went out arguably in the same way. So in the 1980s, there were enormous strikes in various copper mining towns in southern Arizona, Ajo included. The company was pretty successful in breaking that strike, hiring replacement workers, and breaking the union, and then fairly promptly afterwards closed down the mine.” He said though the mine is inactive now, the copper company, now called Freeport-McMoRan, still has a presence in the community and is the owner of the town’s water supply.
He noted that, in addition to the mine in the early 20th century, “all around Ajo you would’ve found several other outlying ranches, where cattle ranching was happening, other prospecting, smaller mines, and the folks who were involved in that were very much a sort of cross-border society. . . .There was no border fence. The cows tended to go back and forth. I’m not implying that this world was free of racism and discrimination and violence and domination, not in the least bit, but just to underscore that major economic transformation that’s happened over the course of the 20th century here in Ajo, and in the surrounding desert.”
“Land tenure,” said Warren, is not only “who owns the land and what’s the land use map, but also the kind of underlying ethos and vision and ideology that guides how we think about the land and what we think are appropriate uses for the land. And here in Ajo is an example of these different land management units. You have the Tohono O’odham Reservation, you have Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Barry Goldwater bombing range. And even those lands right around Ajo, they’re not private lands, it’s Bureau of Land Management land within the public domain. . . .And it’s a really fascinating project that we’re still undertaking here. You know, imagining the kind of economy and society, the kind of cross-border economy in society, across Tohono O’odham, Sonora, Arizona, Hia-Ced O’odham, united around conservation and the arts and culture and that sort of thing.”
Warren said that, “Hia-Ced O’odham folks, Tohono O’odham folks, are actively engaged in trying to regain access and sovereignty to these lands lost under the kind of land use management system that we have today,” and that the “land tenure question of Ajo is still very much in the making,” with new debates and conflicts erupting each time new proposals are made for changing land use.
Regarding the border, Warren said, “If you needed another piece of evidence of the impacts of prevention through deterrence, of pushing people from the urban crossings into the rural crossings that we have here in Ajo — apprehensions [of migrants] in 1994, that was 900, and in 1996 it was 9,000 here in Ajo.” He said that “what happened with prevention through deterrence was that something that was small scale became large scale. Many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, no doubt millions of people at this point, have come across the border and come through this desert. And many thousands have have died.”
He compared the border-industrial complex to the extractive industries. “Like the mining industry, it absolutely comes with its social relations based on violence and domination and profit motive and generating funding and all of this kind of stuff. Destruction of the land, of the animals, a heavy burden on local communities, being surveilled, being faced with all kinds of stuff. The profits mostly flow outside the borderland. Ajo remains a poor community. Tohono O’odham Nation, probably the places that you’re from, have not gotten billions of dollars in investments the way that the border itself has. So the profits, the funding, flow to outside entities who aren’t here. The costs accrue to the border region itself – classic extractive industry. And yet it does provide jobs. It does provide some employment, it does provide some funding. . . . When the National Guard comes here, all the hotel rooms are full and restaurants have people in them. And it has sort of worked its way in to being an important shaper of social relations here, and I would argue much the same way as like the copper industry did a hundred years ago. And just like people’s very complicated relationship with the copper industry,. . . it was brutal and extractive in what it did, and it also provided housing here, provided healthcare here, provided pensions, jobs, salaries. So this is just how imbricated it’s become, this extractive industry. And probably this should be just a note of awareness for any of us as we’re thinking about pulling those threads out — you know, disassembling the border industrial complex — what that really means in any particular place, and what kind of resistance any one of us might find or what we might experience with our community and our local community members.”
Groups that partnered with Witness at the Border for the conference
A Break for Impact
Afghan Allies Advocacy
Ajo Samaritans
Backbone Campaign
Battalion Search and Rescue
CA Central Valley Journey for Justice
Grannies Respond / Abuelas Responden
Human Security Initiative
Humane Borders
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center
Leaving Home Retreat: Immigration Through the Eyes of Children
Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center
People’s Tribune/Tribuno del Pueblo
Reunite Migrant Families
Salvavision
Voices from the Border
Welcome Home Quilts
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
