Violence in Sonora, border wall fortifications funnel migrants to tribal lands

Thousands of migrants have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border onto Tohono O'odham Nation land since Saturday, near the San Miguel gate — a volume of arrivals that's extremely rare in this remote region of the borderlands, tribal officials said Monday.

Migrant aid workers told the Arizona Daily Star that some of the migrants were likely residents of Sasabe, Sonora, fleeing terrifying levels of violence resulting from armed conflict between warring criminal groups in northern Sonora.

But most of the arrivals were asylum seekers shepherded by smugglers who were funneled further west than usual, as U.S. construction teams sealed previously open gaps in the border wall closer to Sasabe, aid workers said.

Since Saturday, more than 2,500 migrants have been apprehended near the San Miguel gate, a traditional tribal crossing used by Tohono O'odham members to access ancestral lands in Mexico, tribal Chairman Verlon Jose said in a statement to the Star on Monday.

"This latest humanitarian crisis is the result of failed strategies like the disastrous border wall that have distracted from real solutions," Jose said. 

Workers at Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant-resource facility near the border in Sasabe, Sonora, started contacting the center’s co-founder, Dora Rodriguez of Tucson, when violence broke out about 10 days ago.

“I started getting all these messages of desperation,” Rodriguez said on Monday. The messages said that trucks loaded with armed men were arriving and that criminal groups had taken over the main route out of Sasabe that heads south, she said.

"That town was pretty much alone with the presence of the cartels. They didn’t get any enforcement of the (Mexican) government until this past Saturday," Rodriguez said. "For a week all these people have been terrified by the gunfire, with no help."

One family told Rodriguez they tried to escape Sasabe by heading south toward Altar, Sonora, but they were stopped by cartel members and the father was tortured while being questioned, before he was released, Rodriguez said. The family's 10-year-old son sustained a stab wound to the chin and the mother was beaten by the gang members, Rodriguez said.

The Star reviewed photos of the wounded mother and son that the family shared with Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said last week she was able to secure humanitarian parole for her nurse-in-training at Casa de la Esperanza, allowing the young woman to stay in the U.S. for 30 days. 

With her medical training, the woman was a target for kidnapping by criminal groups who need people with medical skills to tend to their wounded, Rodriguez said.

Sasabe's only medical doctor — who had a U.S. visa — already fled to the U.S. last week, after being contacted repeatedly by cartel members, Rodriguez said. 

The resource center, which provides meals, showers and clothing to migrants, has closed its doors in light of the violence.

“We’re praying it will open again one day,” said Gail Kocourek of the nonprofit Salvavision and the Tucson Samaritans. She said she visited the resource center’s workers on Saturday, only traveling far enough into Sasabe to give a tearful hug to the workers, remaining within sight of the Mexican National Guard.

“We can’t risk our people’s lives to go there. They’re safer in their homes,” she told the Star on Monday.

Aid workers preparing

Migrant-aid workers in Tucson are bracing for the high volume of asylum seekers to be released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in light of the latest surge in arrivals.

Migrants released to aid groups in the U.S. are present in the country legally, officials say. They have been processed by border agents as asylum seekers and released to await their asylum hearings. Most leave Southern Arizona within one to two days to join family or sponsors in the interior of the country, advocates say.

The Border Patrol advised Pima County officials that agents apprehended about 2,600 migrants over the weekend, bringing the number of people in custody to 3,200 in the Tucson sector, Mark Evans, Pima County spokesman, said on Monday.

The number of asylum seekers CBP releases in the southern Arizona communities will depend on how many migrants they’re able to transfer laterally to Border Patrol stations in other sectors, from California to Texas, to alleviate the burden here, Evans said. 

“But we’re gearing up for another 800, 900 or more (migrant releases) a day,” Evans said. “Those are the kind of numbers we were seeing at end of September and early October when we were in crisis.”

In September Tucson came close to having uncoordinated street releases of asylum seekers, as shelters in the region hit capacity, Evans said.

From January through September, 133,000 migrants were processed through Casa Alitas in Tucson, which was more than the shelter’s volume for the entirety of 2022, Evans said. The figures include migrants received at Phoenix migrant-aid shelters whose arrivals were coordinated by Casa Alitas.

A CBP spokesman told the Star he could not confirm the number of apprehensions in the Tucson sector over the weekend.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

"Callous smugglers continue to move migrants through some of the more inaccessible and arduous terrain along the southern border, migrants will be forced to walk for miles, often with little or no water," the spokesman said in a Monday statement.

"We remain vigilant and continue to adjust our operational plans to maximize enforcement efforts against those noncitizens who do not use lawful pathways or processes. Those who fail to use one of the many lawful pathways we have expanded will be presumed ineligible for asylum and, if they do not have a basis to remain, will be subject to prompt removal, a minimum five-year bar on admission, and potential criminal prosecution for unlawful reentry."

Shifting migration patterns

Migration patterns are constantly evolving as human smugglers respond to changing border-enforcement patterns and policies, as well as violence on the ground in Mexico, immigration experts say.

Border Patrol sectors in Texas were previously the most heavily trafficked of the nine southern border sectors, in terms of border agent encounters with migrants between ports of entry.

But in July, August and September, the busiest sector was the Tucson sector, which runs from the Yuma County line to the New Mexico border. That will likely hold true for October, when CBP's monthly statistics are released in a few weeks.

In addition to Sasabe residents fleeing violence, smugglers working for criminal groups were likely responsible for the bulk of the migrant crossings on tribal land last weekend.

Even in the midst of conflict, smugglers continued their lucrative business of ferrying migrants across the border, both those who planned to request asylum from border agents and those seeking to evade detection, Rodriguez said. 

Smugglers had been using gaps in the border wall near Sasabe to cross migrants into Arizona, but CBP has been closing those gaps in the wall lately, she said. Smugglers couldn't take the migrants in their charge further east, as that area closer to Nogales is controlled by another criminal faction, she said. 

So many headed further west, to cross on tribal land where the border fence is just a low vehicle barrier, she said.

"The new cartel is probably moving people in that area (near San Miguel) because right now they don't have any choice," she said.

A CBP spokesman confirmed Monday that construction to close gaps in Arizona's border wall is ongoing.

"The gap locations in Tucson Sector, near Sasabe, have been closed with temporary barrier where possible and where active construction is not occurring," the spokesman said. "The permanent gap closures are underway and will all be closed by late December 2023 as part of the make-safe activities. This work is part of the make-safe and close out activities DHS authorized CBP to complete in December 2021 at the former Department of Defense border barrier projects."

Two weekends ago, the municipality of Altar, Sonora experienced shootouts between criminal groups, and on Oct. 23 a confrontation between criminals and authorities resulted in four military agents wounded, Sonoran Secretary of Security María Dolores Del Río Sánchez told local media last week.  

 The violence in the region put a damper on many migrant crossings into Arizona in recent weeks, said Natalia Mendoza, an anthropologist based out of Sonora's capitol of Hermosillo and her hometown of Altar. Mendoza has done ethnographic studies of drug- and migrant-smuggling patterns in the region.

Altar, located 70 miles south of Sasabe, Ariz., is a common way-station for migrants seeking to cross the border in the region of San Miguel and Sasabe, said Mendoza, co-founder of the nonprofit Altar Desert Research Center, which documents violence, ecological damage and the overall impact of border militarization.

Migrants crossing in this region have to pay not only smugglers for their journey; in addition, they must pay a fee, about $200, to the criminal group in charge of that territory, known as a "plaza," Mendoza said.

But a break in the violence this past weekend gave smugglers an opportunity to move large numbers of people northward, which could explain the recent surge in Tucson sector arrivals, she said.

That aligns with what Tucson aid groups have been experiencing in recent weeks: Diego Piña Lopez, agency director of Casa Alitas in Tucson, said over the past two weeks there was a dip in arrivals at Casa Alitas.

“It gave us a little bit of a reprieve," he said. "We had been the busiest we’ve been in our history the month and a half prior."

But Piña Lopez compared the reprieve to the tide going out before a larger wave arrives.

“We’re experiencing a surge again and it feels as though the surge is going to get much greater,” he said.

Tribal leaders have been on site at the San Miguel gate in recent days to witness the environmental damage taking place as a result of the sheer number of people there and the equipment in place to manage them, a tribal spokesman said.

"In order to stop these situations from happening again, we need comprehensive immigration reform that address the root causes of migration and border security challenges," Jose said. "The environmental and related impacts of these events to the Nation are extraordinary. Until federal leaders get their act together, the Nation and other border communities will continue to pay the price."