Tim Steller's opinion: Sheriff from the borderland stood against border alarmism

You would be excused if you forgot about Arizona’s longest-serving border sheriff in recent years.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada was born in Nogales, Sonora, grew up in Nogales, Arizona and served in law enforcement on the U.S. side of the line for more than 50 years.

Estrada worked for 25 years in the Nogales Police Department before retiring and running for sheriff in 1992. He won seven consecutive terms before deciding not to run for reelection last year, leaving office at the end of 2020.

In recent years, the people in political power and in some national news media preferred to ignore him. When Vice President Mike Pence went to Nogales to talk about the new border wall in April 2019, the Cochise County sheriff was invited, not Estrada, the local sheriff.

Estrada has been an outlier among border sheriffs — he refused to portray the borderlands as an out-of-control area requiring a drastic federal crackdown.

For him, more than any of the others, the border is home. His experience as part of an immigrant family growing up poor in Nogales formed him.

And in recent years, that perspective has hardened his resistance to the dominant narrative about the border and the migrants who pass through.()

Here is an abridged transcript of an interview with Estrada conducted on Dec. 21.

Q: How did you end up in Nogales, Arizona, as a child?

A: I was born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, immigrated in December of 1944 when I was about a year and a half old. It was my mother, my three brothers and myself. I was the youngest. A fifth brother was born here. He was the only U.S. citizen. My dad was already here. He was immigrated, he was working.

This is the contrast between immigration then and immigration now. All my father needed was — and he was a laborer like a carpenter — a letter of employment. And my mom paid pennies and dimes and nickels in order to pay the fees. But with that letter of employment, we were able to get immigrated. It was so simple, so easy compared to how it is daunting now.

Q: What was your life like growing up in Nogales?

A: I lived about three blocks away from the Dennis DeConcini port of entry, 309 Terrace Avenue. We lived in a three-room house, no indoor plumbing. My dad was paying $10 a month for rent.

We were, I guess you’d consider us poor. But we didn’t really realize that because a lot of people in the neighborhood were like that as well. We were lucky that we had a roof over our head and we had three meals, whatever they were. You know, maybe meat was scarce. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We had an ice box. Rarely did we ever have anything to put in there, so rarely did we put in any ice.

Obviously we didn’t have a TV. We didn’t have a phone. Later on when we moved out of there, we managed to have that. But at that time we didn’t have any of those amenities. We played all day. We built kites. We spun tops, we played marbles and we played baseball and football, basketball, hide-and-go-seek, everything that we could do to fill in that day. And we were happy.

Q: How was it growing up as a Spanish speaker in those days?

A: I went to the Elm Street School, which was just up the hill from me. At that time, you know, they didn’t want you to speak Spanish. None of my family spoke English. So when I went into kindergarten, I got into an immersion program. I mean, I had to learn. By the second or third grade, I was reading and writing, but I had nobody to talk English with around my family, and probably not too many people around the neighborhood either. Everybody spoke Spanish.

You were not supposed to be speaking Spanish because it was an ‘inferior’ language in the United States. And now look at it. It’s so important. Now, you know, all of the kids here are bilingual practically, and they’re marketable because they know Spanish.

Q: What was the crime like when you were with the Police Department from the 1960s through the 1980s?

A: We had what we call cross-border crime, because there were gaps in the fence. They would just come literally walk through, and a lot of these people would come in or burglarize at night at buildings and homes, mostly the downtown stores.

The majority of the people that were in the city and county jail were Mexican nationals who crossed over legally or illegally. A lot of them were shoplifting, a lot of burglaries. Some of them for drugs but not large quantities.

Fifty-, 60-, up to 80% of the prisoners in the city and county jails were Mexican nationals. It’s probably 5%, 1% right now.

Q: How and when did that change?

A: In the mid-’90s, there was an influx of people, and that is when the federal government came up, put up the ugly helicopter landing mats (as a border barrier) in the downtown area. You know, they never consulted with the leaders here or on the Mexican side. Typical of the U.S. government. Of course, there was an uproar. Eventually they got rid of it.

But let me tell you what happened as a result of what they put down there. With more boots on the ground, with more Border Patrol agents coming in, and what I call that Iron Curtain, the cross-border crime almost disappeared.

Why? Because they couldn’t afford to jump over that wall. It wasn’t worth it anymore. That wall, the boots on the ground, the technology, the lights, the sensors, the bicycle patrol —everything that kicked in in the mid-’90s, it stopped all of that cross-border crime.

Q: What do you think about the border walls that went up outside the urban area?

A. The wall and the fence and the extension of it — what it has done is send these people through these rough, dangerous terrains where they’re getting sick and dying, or being victimized.

It took care of the urban problem we had, but it created a new style of crime, much more vicious and much more serious, by pushing these people out in the desert.

They started doing all of the things to curtail immigration, make it more difficult, make it more dangerous, more expensive. Then people were having more of a problem coming across on their own like they used to before. (Before), they didn’t need a mule, I mean guides or anything like that.

Well, the cartels said, you know what, this is another business opportunity for us. So now they’re involved in human smuggling.

Q: What is responsible for the escalation of drug trafficking, supply from Mexico or demand from the United States?

A: As far as I can tell, as a country, we are responsible for the cartels. We created the cartels. When I got started, it was individuals who came over here, made contact with somebody on the Mexican side and picked up a small load or whatever and headed out.

When the United States started clamping down on it and the demand continued to grow, the cartels came into existence. The cartels would not have existed if it hadn’t been for the demand. So as a country, we are responsible.

Q: Why get involved in these issues if they are not most of what the Sheriff’s Department handles anyway?

A: One of the things that I think makes me unique is the fact that, like I said, I’m the only Hispanic sheriff. I’ve been adamant about some of the policies and the cruelty of administrations past and present, and outspoken.

I’ve had the opportunity to have a voice and kind of speak for these people that don’t have a voice.