The Immigration Debate

SUBTERRANEAN TERROR

NOGALES, Mexico - One mile deep into the drafty tunnel under this
hilly frontier city, a flashlight beam cuts through the pitch-black
darkness and illuminates a yellow line painted on the concrete wall:
the U.S.-Mexico border.

Just beyond the boundary a graffiti-message thought to have been
scrawled by U.S. law enforcement warns intruders: "USA Tunnel Rats.
Este lugar es de nosotros" -- This place is ours.

Not exactly.

Inside the largest known tunnels on the border -- two passages that
make up an enormous drainage system linking Nogales, Mexico, with
Nogales, Ariz. -- migrants stumble blindly through toxic puddles and
duck low-flying bats. Methamphetamine-addicted assailants lurk. Young
men working as drug mules lug burlap sacks filled with contraband.

There are shootouts and rapes. Rising floodwaters sweep people to
their deaths. U.S. Border Patrol agents pursue smugglers in frenzied
chases, insults and threats echoing as they go. Tangles of rebar metal
- -- points sharpened by smugglers -- gouge people who get too close to
some walls.

"It's another world down there," said Pat Thompson, a police
detective in Nogales, Ariz. "You don't know what to expect."

As the United States prepares to fence much of the border above
ground, the situation below ground could grow increasingly chaotic.
Authorities have discovered dozens of illegal tunnels in recent years,
including a nearly half-mile passage connecting Tijuana with San Diego.

Illegal immigrants have breached drainage systems all along the
border, from El Paso, Texas, to San Diego. Most of them are of the
claustrophobic, crawl-through variety that prevents large-scale incursions.

The Nogales tunnels, by comparison, are superhighways.

Once open waterways, today they stretch for miles under the
traffic-clogged downtown streets of both cities, bending and
zigzagging roughly parallel to each other.

In the smaller one, called the Morley Tunnel, an ankle-high stream of
raw sewage and chemical runoff from factories in Mexico usually flows.
The neighboring Grand Tunnel is up to 15 feet high and wide enough to
fit a Humvee. Dozens of illegal immigrants can travel through it at
one time.

Above ground, fences, sensors and stadium lighting clearly separate
the two cities. Underground, they remain linked of necessity by the
system built decades ago to channel torrential rains.

The tunnels doubled as smuggling routes from the beginning. For many
years, gangs of children took control of the passages. Nogales police
once encountered Mexican soldiers on the U.S. side, prompting a brief
but tense standoff.

In recent years, the U.S. Border Patrol has had some success stemming
the underground flow of illegal immigrants and drugs by installing
heavy steel doors, surveillance cameras and sensors. But when heavy
rains this summer triggered floodwaters that tore down the gates,
smugglers ripped down the cameras and shattered the lights and siren
used to discourage incursions -- and the chaotic human flow resumed.

From July to October, agents apprehended 1,704 illegal immigrants in
the tunnels, a nearly fivefold increase from the previous six months.
Agents seized more than a ton of marijuana from tunnel arrests during
the same period. In July, bandits raped two women from Oaxaca, Mexico,
in the tunnels on the Mexican side.

This summer, five people are thought to have drowned after being
caught in floodwaters. Two others fell into a sewage drain branching
off one tunnel and were carried nine miles before being discovered
alive in a shaft near a sewage treatment plant.

Imelda Guevara Lopez, 17, said she survived by never letting go of her
friend's hand as she struggled to keep her head above the flow of raw
sewage. Lopez, whose backside was shredded by the concrete walls, told
workers at a migrant shelter in Mexico that she would never again
enter the underground.

"I prefer working in the fields and being poor but alive," said
Lopez, who went home to Hidalgo, according to an account in a Mexican
newspaper.

Patrolling the tunnels is a tactical nightmare for law enforcement on
both sides of the border, mainly Border Patrol agents and Grupo Beta,
Mexico's migrant safety force.

U.S. agents often cannot go into the Morley Tunnel because
overpowering ammonia and chlorine smells leave them nauseated and
dizzy. On the Mexican side, some stretches of the tunnel are so low
that Grupo Beta agents ride their all-terrain vehicles lying on their
stomachs.

Teams of U.S. agents enter the Grand Tunnel daily, sometimes toting
M-4 assault rifles. But their high-tech night vision goggles are
rendered almost useless in the tunnel's black-hole-like reaches.

"It's so dark, you feel vertigo -- like the walls are coming in on
you," said Agent Scott Wencel.

A distant flicker of flashlights -- sometimes half a mile away --
usually signals an approaching group. They could be drug traffickers
or bandits or illegal immigrants. Some have walked one mile already
after descending from Avenida Reforma in Nogales, Mexico, taking
advantage of the cracked grate in front of Elvira's Bar.

"They climb down every day . . . people from all over Mexico," said
62-year-old Sebastian Flores, an auxiliary traffic police officer in
Nogales, Mexico.

The groups cross the yellow line in complete silence -- the only
sounds are the distant hum of traffic, the chirping of crickets, the
scurrying of rats. Sometimes the tunnel seems to be alive as the
humming and air flows generate a pulsing, low groan.

The darkness is so thick that migrants sometimes cross within an arm's
length of U.S. agents without noticing. That is the agents' preferred
tactic: lying in wait, pressed against the walls, letting groups pass
before pouncing and cutting off any escape back to Mexico.

Some illegal immigrants are so startled that they run smack into the
walls, agents say. During a sweep last December, when smugglers heard
them coming, agents yelled out: "Somos migra!" -- Border Patrol.
They ordered the group to stop.

"Migra go home!" came the shouted reply as the people ran back into
Mexico.

If the migrants manage to evade agents in the tunnels, another huge
challenge remains: getting out. People pop up from manholes into the
middle of busy streets, sometimes stopping traffic. Curb storm drains
are often too small, so smugglers use 20-ton hydraulic jacks to pry
them open so people can squeeze through.

Some grates have been opened so often that Nogales city workers have
placed huge boulders and concrete blocks on top of them. At a park,
one manhole was covered with a steel plate and a bench to prevent
repeated breaches. One curb storm drain downtown was pried open so
often that the sidewalk buckled, leaving a telephone pole listing over
parked cars.

Now many migrants walk a mile past where the border is marked
underground to reach the open end of the drainage tunnels. Outside
again, they climb an embankment to waiting cars.

Border Patrol agents hope to regain control of the tunnels after the
rains stop and they are able to repair the gates and cameras at the
border. But Mexican authorities doubt that it will make much of a
long-term difference.

The migrants, they say, are willing to brave anything to get through.
Every day, they see the evidence of the risks the illegal immigrants
take: the scattered clothing, letters and family pictures left behind
by bandits rummaging through migrants' stolen backpacks; the prayer
books and offerings left behind by illegal immigrants in a tunnel
nookfashioned into a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Enrique Palafox, the Nogales director of Grupo Beta, was shot in the
chest by bandits years ago in a tunnel battle. He still patrols the
passages every day. "I like it down here. It's so quiet, and I know
that when I'm here, the migrants are safe," he said.

But Palafox's force can't patrol the tunnels 24 hours a day. A message
for migrants has been spray-painted on the wall just before the yellow
line marking the frontier.

Thought to have been written by Beta agents, it reads: "Cuidense" --
Be careful.