Cartel violence empties border town, sends residents fleeing to Arizona

The Mexican border town of Sásabe, Sonora is becoming a ghost town as gunfights between criminal factions have forced desperate residents, who never intended to leave their homes, to flee to Arizona, migrant-aid workers say.

Less than 100 people remain in the small border town, about 75 miles from Tucson, as organized crime groups battle for control of the region, said Dora Rodriguez, a migrant-rights advocate in Tucson. She’s co-founder of Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant resource center in Sásabe, Sonora, which previously had a population of about 2,500.

The resource center has closed due to the extreme violence, but opened its doors in a few emergency situations last week, she said.

Sásabe residents report being trapped, unable to escape to the south, as the roads to Saric and Caborca are surveilled by criminal groups who have kidnapped people traveling there.

The arrival in Arizona of hundreds fleeing Sásabe coincides with a much larger surge in migrants traveling mostly from Central America and southern Mexico, whom human smugglers have increasingly channeled to the Tucson sector of the U.S.-Mexico border, aid workers and immigration experts say.

That includes thousands of recent arrivals at the normally quiet San Miguel gate, on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Over the weekend, hundreds of families huddled together near a remote opening in the border fence, about 15 miles east of Sásabe, Arizona, where aid workers have been focusing their efforts recently, Rodriguez said.

"I called Border Patrol at least six times yesterday (Sunday) and all I got was, 'We’re overwhelmed. We’re busy. We’re doing what we can,'" Rodriguez said Monday.

As previously open gaps in the border wall near Sásabe, Arizona have been closed by construction crews, asylum seekers have been funneled eastward, to the closest remaining opening in the border fence, about an hour’s drive from Sásabe, over rough terrain.

Agents did make a couple of small transports of migrants on Sunday, but the larger transport vans struggled to make it over the steep and rugged roads, Rodriguez said.

"By closing those three gaps, they’ve pushed these people toward death pretty much," she said.

On Sunday, Rodriguez and volunteers with the Tucson Samaritans spent 12 hours with about 400 migrants at that remote location, offering food, water, blankets and other supplies as migrants waited in increasingly chilly temperatures.

About 200 of the asylum seekers were children, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez recounted migrants asking, "'Are they coming? Did you call? We need food, do you have a bottle for my baby?'"

"I’ve never experienced that before, not in that area, and not with so much desperation," she said. "It was one of the worst days of my life."

Some Guatemalan women, with infants strapped to their chests and backs, opted to try to walk west to Sásabe, Arizona, instead of waiting anxiously for border agents to arrive, she said.

"I kept telling them it will take you two days to get there walking," she said.

One unaccompanied minor was an 8-year-old girl with Down syndrome. Like many of the arrivals, now traveling in chilly temperatures, the girl was sick with flu symptoms, Rodriguez said.

"She had fever, she was coughing and we had nothing to give her," she said.

After 12 hours, Rodriguez and her two fellow volunteers had to leave, but she made a final call to the Border Patrol at 6:30 p.m.

"I was pleading with them, pleading. The agent said, 'I am so sorry. We know they are there, but we have no resources at this moment,'" she said.

Under dark skies, "we just left these people behind," Rodriguez said. "It was an experience I had never had before."

Tucson sector agents continue to respond to migrants surrendering at multiple points on the border, according to an emailed statement Monday from CBP.

"Many of these locations are not easily accessible and require the use of smaller rough terrain vehicles for transportation," the statement said. "CBP officers and agents prioritize the health and safety of all those they encounter by providing appropriate medical care and humanitarian assistance as needed and by routinely coordinating with emergency medical services to assist individuals in need."

Fear in Sásabe

Warring criminal groups have unleashed violence in northern Sonora and the residents there face gunfire and kidnappings, and are low on food and supplies, aid workers say.

Insight Crime reported the recent violence stems from conflict between two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, which has long dominated the area: In October, a criminal cell with ties to the Chapitos — a faction led by sons of former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as "El Chapo" — moved into the region amid internal conflicts over drug trafficking. But Insight Crime reported the recent violence has centered on control of migrant smuggling routes.

Residents of Sásabe have reported being turned away when they sought protection at the Sásabe port of entry, said Gail Kocourek of the nonprofit Salvavision and the Tucson Samaritans.

Two weeks ago a large group of Sásabe residents were refused the opportunity to request asylum at the Sásabe port of entry, she said. Desperate, they used a $50 saw to cut a hole through the border fence and cross as a group, in order to present themselves to border agents, she said.

Kocourek said she and other aid workers sat with the families near the wall until the Border Patrol picked them up. The agents were kind, she said.

“They had empathy. They understood these people were caught in the crossfire,” she said. “Most are in Tucson now. At least they’re alive and we’re helping them as much as we can.”

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Rodriguez and her team have been able to secure humanitarian parole for some Sásabe families.

Among them is a 19-year-old woman who arrived in Tucson on Nov. 19, with her mother, two sisters and a brother. She asked that her name not be used because she fears for her and her family’s safety.

The week of Oct. 20, everything changed in the quiet town of Sásabe, she said.

“Our lives were in danger,” the woman said, in text messages written in Spanish. “There was not a day when shots were not heard. You no longer slept comfortably, thinking that at any moment a bullet could hit us.”

For days residents were on their own, without Mexican security forces to protect them. But even after military units arrived, residents didn’t feel protected from the heavily armed criminal groups, she said.

“There really is no authority,” she said. The soldiers “are really of no use, because they don’t do anything. They are only for decoration in the town. (The violence) is something that not even the government can control.”

The woman said she was devastated to leave the previously tranquil town where she grew up. Coming to Tucson, she had to leave behind a 26-year-old cousin, whom CBP officers wouldn’t allow to join her family’s humanitarian aid petition, and their three dogs.

“It’s difficult to leave your home, in which you have lived all your life,” she said. “Leaving your house, leaving pets, separating yourself from people we did not want to leave. This whole situation is very sad.”

Surge in Tucson sector

The Tucson sector has been the busiest of the nine southern border sectors since July, according to CBP data.

In October, agents encountered 55,000 migrants between ports of entry in the Tucson sector, even as the number of encounters border-wide fell by 14%, CBP data show.

Over the weekend the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector Chief John R. Modlin posted on X, formerly Twitter, that the sector would pause social media updates so all staff can focus on operational support.

“In light of the ongoing migration surge, all Tucson Sector Border Patrol social media accounts will be temporarily reduced to maximize our available staffing in support of our current operational challenges,” he wrote. “At this time, all available personnel are needed to address the unprecedented flow.”

On Monday, CBP reduced vehicle processing at the Lukeville, Arizona, port of entry, and suspended vehicle entry entirely at a port in Eagle Pass, Texas, “in order to redirect personnel to assist the U.S. Border Patrol with taking migrants into custody,” a Monday statement from CBP said. “In response to this influx in encounters, we will continue to surge all available resources to expeditiously and safely process migrants. We will maximize consequences against those without a legal basis to remain in the United States.”

Crime groups profit from the U.S government’s efforts to limit legitimate ways to enter the country, advocates say.

The criminal groups who control the lucrative human-smuggling routes in northern Mexico often charge between $3,000 and $7,000 per person, said Randy Mayer, pastor and co-founder of the Green Valley Samaritans.

The CBP One app, which the Biden administration describes as the only legitimate way to request asylum, has too few appointments for the sheer number of people seeking asylum, Mayer said.

“They’re desperate to get out of their situation,” he said. “There’s too much of a need.”

Mayer said he’s at the border weekly, providing aid to migrants. Until recently, he never saw the criminal groups who lead migrants to the border, he said.

But lately, they’ve been driving pickup trucks right up to the border, with military-style weapons visible, to unload migrants, he said.

“It just seems like they’re more brazen now,” he said.

“Humanitarian crisis”

To return an individual seeking asylum to their country of persecution is known as refoulement, a practice that asylum laws are meant to protect against, said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico program director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a D.C.-based research and advocacy group that promotes human rights and social justice.

The principle of non-refoulement is an “essential protection under international human rights law,” according to the United Nations.

Brewer said her organization has heard concerns from aid workers in Arizona about Mexican nationals being sent back to Mexico without having the opportunity to request asylum, even in the face of imminent danger.

“Here we have this concrete, extreme example of violence in Sásabe, and people who are trapped with nowhere to go,” she said. “Unlike all other nationalities, if the U.S. pushes Mexicans back into Mexico without giving them the chance to request asylum, what they could be doing is taking people who could have a protection claim and pushing them back into their country of persecution. That’s the biggest red line in domestic and international asylum law.”

Rodriguez said she knows the Border Patrol is overwhelmed and she believes other agencies must step in to aid vulnerable migrants waiting at the border.

“This is a humanitarian crisis,” she said. “Our governor needs to come up to the plate and say, ‘We are calling the National Guard, we are calling the Red Cross, we are calling FEMA.’”

Politics are irrelevant now, she said.

“At this point, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to have a massive graveyard in those areas if you don’t attend to those people,” she said.