When Puerto Peñasco restauranteur Mickey Medina heard the shuttered Lukeville port of entry would reopen Thursday, Jan. 4, he didn’t believe it at first.
Rumors of a reopening date have been swirling throughout the four-week closure of the Lukeville-Sonoyta border crossing — the main route for Arizonans headed to the Mexican beach town known as Rocky Point — even as the beaches emptied, and as businesses shut down or cut staff to compensate for the drop in tourism, he said.
Medina, owner and head chef at Chef Mickey’s Place, only started to celebrate when he heard the news came directly from U.S. officials.
Now, the fine dining restaurant is stocking up on fresh steaks and seafood, and preparing for an expected boom in business in the tourism-dependent town.
“We’re ready and we’re waiting,” Medina said Wednesday. “Our employees will go back to a full schedule of working, and maybe some overtime.”
Unlike many other restaurants, Medina said he was determined to keep his workers on the job throughout the holidays, albeit with reduced hours.
“Thank God it was only a month. It’s been pretty tough down here,” Medina said. “I just took it one day at a time and hoped for the best every day.”
The Lukeville closure was one of a number of port closures along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent weeks, as U.S. border agents struggled to process a high volume of migrant arrivals. CBP said officers assigned to port duties were needed in the field to assist agents with processing migrants.
On Tuesday CBP announced the reopening of the Lukeville crossing, about 150 miles southwest of Tucson, as well as the reopening of the Morely Gate pedestrian crossing in Nogales, which has been closed since late September for improvements. CBP will also reopen border crossings Thursday in Eagle Pass, Texas, and San Diego that it closed along with Lukeville to help with the surge in migrant arrivals at the southern border.
The reopening comes a week after top U.S. officials met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to discuss strategies to slow the high volume of migrant arrivals at the U.S. border.
On Tuesday, Sonora Gov. Alfonso Durazo credited state and federal actions with the reopening of the Lukeville port.
“I’m pleased that the efforts of the government of Mexico with that of the United States, led by our president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have led to the reopening of this border,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I reaffirm my commitment to work hand in hand with the government of Mexico and Arizona, with actions and programs that provide humanitarian attention to the immigration issue, so that the different border ports of our state remain open for the benefit of all, mainly Sonorans.”
Businesses in Puerto Peñasco depend almost entirely on tourism, and Christmastime and New Year’s Eve are typically great for business at local restaurants, Medina said.
The Lukeville closure “came at the worst time of year,” he said.
Fortunately Chef Mickey Place’s had a decent turnout from locals on Christmas Eve, Medina said, and a smattering of tables throughout the last month kept his business in the black.
Beach lovers in Arizona celebrated the impending Lukeville reopening by making travel plans.
“I’m just absolutely delighted, and surprised and blindsided,” said Jane Simmers of South Phoenix, who owns a beachfront property in Rocky Point.
The Dec. 4 port closure was a shock, and Thursday’s reopening was similarly unexpected, said Simmers, who has been traveling to Rocky Point multiple times a year since the 1990s and is now a legal permanent resident of Mexico.
“I consider it home,” she said. Simmers said she’d intended to return this month to Rocky Point using the San Luis port of entry, but she’s thrilled to be able to take the quicker, more familiar route through Lukeville as soon as she can.
“Right now, I’m getting ready to talk to my husband about when we’re going to go next,” she said.
Rocky Point suffering
Ruben Cordova, who studied in Tucson before moving to Rocky Point five years ago, said it will take a while for Rocky Point to bounce back.
“Just because the border opens doesn’t mean everything is back to normal,” he said Wednesday. “We’ll probably get a rush this weekend. ... But there’s a lot of people who got laid off and who knows if they’re going to get rehired or not.”
A Nogales, Arizona native, Cordova runs a tour guide service and massage studio in Rocky Point. He said he lost about $8,000 in revenue in December, due to cancelations following the Lukeville port closure.
Cordova has been working with his friend, Rocky Point property owner Edie Stevenson, to raise money to help struggling workers and their families in the small resort town. Using donations made to a Go Fund Me account, Cordova hired 10 local families to make “Peñasco Strong” bracelets, which they’ve been selling for $10, $5 of which goes to the families and $5 to the local food bank, he said.
Stevenson — who divides her time between Rocky Point and Tucson, where she works as a registered nurse — said she offered up a stay at her family’s beach-front estate as part of a fundraising raffle, which ended up bringing in $12,000.
The first raffle was so successful that others with property in Rocky Point have offered up their places for the next round of raffles, she said.
Cordova said so far, the raffle funds have allowed him to distribute more than 800 food baskets, with enough supplies like beans, lentils, rice, tortillas and tuna to provide a week’s worth of meals, he said.
The community of Puerto Peñasco is tight-knit and eager to help one another through hard times, Stevenson said.
“Mom-and-Pop restaurants are taking meals out to locations where they know people are starving,” she said. “Pretty much everybody has stepped up so we can all go back to life as usual.”
Dangerous travel
The Lukeville closure also forced travelers to take different, and sometimes unsafe, routes to get to Rocky Point, amid conflicting messages from U.S. agencies.
CBP initially advised travelers to use the Nogales or San Luis ports of entry, instead of Lukeville.
But multiple areas in northwest Sonora have been beset by violence in recent months and on Dec. 20, the U.S. Consulate warned Americans against travel to Rocky Point while the Lukeville port was closed, as the alternative routes were not safe.
The updated guidance came a day after the Arizona Daily Star reported on three U.S. residents, including one American citizen, who were fired on while traveling at 2 a.m. on the highway between Altar and Santa Ana, in northwest Sonora, part of one of the recommended alternative routes to Rocky Point.
Cordova created a Facebook page, called “Caravan Rocky Point,” to help prospective tourists coordinate ride-shares or multi-vehicle caravans to travel the new routes together. In December, he escorted more than a dozen caravans of vehicles from the border to Rocky Point, before stepping back and letting travelers organize their own caravans through the page, he said.
Travelers should be aware of their surroundings and only travel by day in Sonora, particularly as violence between criminal groups has escalated in recent weeks, even in Sonoyta, directly across the border from Lukeville.
On Dec. 29, local media in Sonora warned against travel on Highway 2 between San Luis and Sonoyta — one of the recommended routes for travelers seeking to reach Rocky Point while Lukeville was closed — due to gang violence.
The Sonoran public security office said later that day that five criminals had been detained, and 13 vehicles with weapons inside had been seized, as a result of their security response.
“An operation coordinated by SEDENA (the Secretary of National Defense), National Guard, state police, AMIC (the state’s criminal investigative unit) and municipal police is active to preserve the tranquility of the inhabitants of the area,” the state public security office wrote on X.
The border town of Sásabe, Sonora has largely emptied in recent weeks due to criminal groups fighting for control of human smuggling routes in the area, the Star has reported.
Online GPS navigators have continued to direct unsuspecting travelers to dangerous or impossible alternatives to the Lukeville port of entry, including through unofficial crossings on the Tohono O’odham Nation and through the small Sásabe port of entry, where travel is not recommended at this time.
On Christmas Eve, an American traveling to Arizona from his home in Puerto Libertad, Sonora was wounded by gunfire, just north of Altar on Route 43. Craig Ricketts’ daughter, Brittany Sastrawidjaya, said her father normally enters Arizona through the Lukeville port of entry but as it was closed, his GPS device directed him to cross the border through Sásabe.
Ricketts, driving midday in a Chevy Suburban vehicle, told his family he didn’t see the shooters on the desert road where he was fired on, about 90 minutes south of Sásabe, and he sped away when he realized his vehicle was under fire. He was picked up by the Mexican National Guard before he was transported to the border and from there, flown to Banner University Medical Center in Tucson, his daughter said.
Ricketts is recovering from a graze wound on his arm and a more serious wound to one of his lower legs, which resulted in a broken tibia and muscle damage, his daughter said. After three surgeries at Banner, her father is still facing a year-long road to recovery, she said.
The shooting is under investigation, according to a spokesman for the Sonoran Attorney General’s office.
