I live on US/Mexico border & 500k migrants have been caught or died on my land – it’s a joke the wall is not finished
IN the shadow of the US’s 30ft border wall, John Ladd gestures at a white helicopter coming fast and low over his ranch’s terrain.
“It’s Border Patrol,” the cattleman in a straw cowboy hat and denims declared. “They’re on to something.”
Firing up his Ford pick-up, we soon come across two officers detaining a migrant who had apparently breached the imposing fence separating the US from Mexico.
“It’s a daily occurrence,” the fourth- generation rancher says.
“The only time it wasn’t daily was during Trump’s four years as President because far fewer were coming over.
“We’d go two or three days without them catching anyone then. Under Joe Biden it’s around the clock.”
The daily battle played out between law enforcement and the smuggling cartels has political ramifications far beyond this remote corner of Arizona.
For the mayhem on this southern border, America’s version of our small boats crisis, is a key election issue which may decide who is the next incumbent of the Oval Office.
The border will be sealed. The invasion will be stopped
Donald Trump
Donald Trump has placed his border policy front and centre of his latest campaign for the White House.
The former President promised last week: “The border will be sealed. The invasion will be stopped.”
Democrat rival Kamala Harris, who once called the border wall “un- American”, has pledged millions to fill gaps in the fence.
John’s 16,000-acre spread close to the one-horse border town of Naco has been labelled the Ground Zero of America’s migrant crisis.
The rancher with a droopy, grey handlebar moustache estimates at least 500,000 migrants have tried to pass through his ranch in the last three decades.
‘No money to pay cartel’
As John gives us a tour of his land, abutting the giant border fence, he gestures to a spot where a young migrant recently breathed his last.
As the sun beat down, the cattleman told me: “They found him there on Tuesday. He was just 21. He’d climbed the border wall, walked two miles then keeled over.
“That makes 18 who have been found dead on my ranch in the last 30 years. That’s unheard of.”
John says the smuggling route over his land is favoured by “getaways” who want to sneak into America illegally rather than claim asylum.
Detection technology that would not be out of place on a modern battlefield is in place to stop them.
As well as helicopters and drones, getaways have to run the gauntlet of radar ground sensors that can detect their movements, and infrared cameras dotted around the ranch.
Giving The Sun a tour of the smuggling zone, John discovers what he calls a “carpet shoe booty”.
It is a padded slipper pulled over footwear that ensures migrants do not leave tracks for Border Patrol to follow.
As well as the booties, John says the getaways wear full camouflage gear and balaclavas.
The cross-border trade in humanity is controlled by Mexican cartels, with the going rate to be smuggled into America around £6,000.
“The majority don’t have the money to pay the cartel for trafficking them,” Trump supporter John, 70, explained.
“So they basically become indentured servants, working for the cartel the rest of their life.”
John, whose family have farmed this land for 128 years, shows me photos he has taken of how the smugglers traffic their human cargo through or over the wall.
One showed how sections of the giant steel fence — started here by President George W Bush and updated by first Barack Obama and then Trump — are sometimes cut away by the cartels with acetylene torches.
“It takes about ten minutes,” says John.
Another features a 30ft ladder leant against the Mexico side of the fence for migrants to climb before shimmying down a rope on to US territory.
The gangs also reach through the wall’s steel beams to cut barbed wire.
Another image reveals a migrant with torn clothes clambering over the wall and through the wire in daylight.
As we reached a bridge over the dried-up San Pedro river on publicly owned land, the floodgates in the border wall were wide open.
Visible footprints
The authorities had unlocked them to prevent seasonal flash floods damaging the wall, a policy that predates the Biden administration, and no one had yet closed them.
Just four strands of barbed wire now stood between Mexico and a new life in the US.
Footprints were visible in the sand passing through the wire and along a dried-up river bed into the US.
Shaking his head in disgust, dad-of-three John said: “It’s just a joke. We’re in a drought, there’s no reason the gates should be open.”
Drugs, including fentanyl and crystal meth, are shipped through the sieve-like border to US cities.
A record haul of four million blue fentanyl pills were seized at Arizona’s Lukeville border crossing in July.
Townsfolk in border town Naco have their own stories of drug smuggling in the locality.
At the Gay 90s bar a few strides from Naco’s legal border, many remember when a “marijuana missile” bounced off its corrugated-iron roof.
Bartender Theras Avant, 65, said: “This huge package of marijuana had been fired from Mexico from a pumpkin cannon.”
Retired travel agent Ron Krinker tells how law enforcement found a drug tunnel dug beneath the border by smugglers, emerging in the US inside an outhouse.
Sitting on his porch beneath a Stars and Stripes flag, Ron, 69, said: “I try to keep my mouth shut because you don’t know what side people are on.”
‘Huge gap’
Just west of John’s ranch, the wall climbs a steep boulder-strewn hill towards the Huachuca Mountains then stops midway up the slope.
Migrants can walk to the end of the wall and stroll into the US.
Steel girders that should have finished the job lie rusting as a stark and expensive monument to the Biden policy of halting border wall construction.
A lot of people don’t realise that President Obama built the wall
Captain Tim Williams
The site has proved irresistible to Trump and running mate JD Vance, who have both visited the spot in the election campaign.
Captain Tim Williams, who oversees border operations for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, escorts me and Sun photographer Paul Edwards to where the girders are stacked up.
Tim, 46, says: “What you’re looking at right here is millions of dollars sitting on the ground. It was purchased during the Trump administration but the Biden administration decided not to put it up.”
But he dispels suggestions that the fence that slices through the desert landscape is “Trump’s Wall”.
“A lot of people don’t realise that President Obama built the wall,” he added.
The captain said the sector was currently experiencing “a very high influx of illegal crossings from not only Mexico but Guatemala, El Salvador and Venezuela”.
We have a lot of fatalities, people die in the desert from exposure or snake bites
Rancher John Ladd
An officer with the Sheriff’s Office for 21 years, he said of the border fence petering out: “The wall doesn’t start again for 40 to 50 miles. So there’s a huge gap in this corridor.
“We do have a lot of fatalities, people that die in the desert from exposure or get bitten by snakes.”
With the US entering the final weeks of the election race, the southern border chaos could tip the balance.
Arizona itself is one of seven swing states which will decide who takes the White House.
Since January 2021, when Biden came to office with Harris as his Vice President, there have been around eight million migrant “encounters” on the southwest land border with Mexico.
Numbers have dropped significantly this year. Under the Trump administration, there were 2.4million encounters there.
Last month Harris visited the border wall at Douglas, Cochise County.
She has used her time as California’s Attorney General to bolster her border security credentials.
“I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally,” she said.
Trump is promising mass deportation of undocumented migrants.
Back at the border fence, Captain Williams implores whoever wins to complete the wall.
“If your house has been burglarized, you’re going to put up a fence to give another layer of protection for you and law enforcement,” he insisted.
“That’s exactly what the wall is.
“It’s not going to stop everybody, but it’s going to give another barrier of protection to help us do our job.”