Legislators get a look at border and its gaps

Sierra Vista, Ariz. • The rusty row of X’s stretches for about a third of a mile along this surprisingly green stretch of land in the desert, each linked by a common, rust-colored metal beam no higher than an average man’s chest.

It troubles Glenn Spencer, who, upon walking west alongside it for a few paces, suddenly finds himself in the shadow of an 18-foot fence.

Between its slits, the Mexican desert sprawls low and then rises up into a trio of knobbed hills called The Three Sisters.

He looks back at the short part of the fence and follows it with his eyes as it dips into a ravine, disappears into a thicket of shrubby trees and re-emerges on the other side as a 13-foot fence separating the United States and Mexico.

“They cross there,” Spencer said, pointing at the ravine made green by sucking groundwater from the San Pedro River. “Our cameras can’t always see them.”

The 73-year-old dedicated border watcher with the beige baseball cap, cargo pants and button down shirt smiles. “But they still cross.”

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Fact-finding trip » They do still cross, as Utah Senate President Michael Waddoups saw Tuesday in Nogales.

Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, traveled with 11 other lawmakers and Lt. Gov. Greg Bell to the border to tour the area, see the latest tools being used by U.S. Border Patrol agents and watch undocumented immigrants being processed and sent back to Mexico.

He said while he was impressed by how hard the Border Patrol agents worked, it was clear the scope of illegal immigration was far wider than the resources that were available to them.

“There is so much to see and so much area to cover, it’s almost impossible for them to keep up,” Waddoups said. “The federal government needs to be doing more and step up and fund the Border Patrol and a wall and get the technology to allow them to do enforcement through night vision, sensors and cameras.”

The problem is bigger than that, according to Spencer, who has spent the better part of two decades immersed in the issue of illegal immigration.

He sees the patchwork approach to fence-building by the federal government — and the resulting competition for dwindling smuggling routes — as the reason Mexican drug cartels are ramping up the violence in an escalating drug war claiming thousands of lives.

He has told anyone who will listen — whether it be confronting U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at a town-hall meeting in Sierra Vista or talking to local television stations in Arizona. Spencer said as the government has built tall, impenetrable sections of the nearly 2,000-mile fence, it has created fewer unimpeded avenues for drugs to cross.

“You plug up the holes, you stop the drug war violence,” he said.

“Until they finish the fence, it will just continue.”

The sponsor » Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Maricopa, has been fighting illegal immigration in earnest for almost a decade.

The former captain with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has battled most of his life — losing a finger in a shooting early in his career, suffering a heart attack and stroke and dealing with the shooting of his son by an undocumented immigrant.

Since he introduced the Arizona law — SB1070 — that set off a national debate on illegal immigration, he has been blasted by opponents for being racist and praised by supporters as a defender of the nation. He bristles when he is labeled as a racist and when he is questioned about how his Mormon faith allows him to author legislation some consider inhumane.

“I was raised from a very young age to believe in the rule of law,” Pearce said flatly.

The lawmaker, dressed in jeans and ensconced in a chair behind a dark wooden desk inside his office at the Capitol, called illegal immigration the “most pressing issue of our time.” He said he is being asked to speak on the issue all around the country in presentations such as the one he made to Utah lawmakers on Monday.

“I applaud them for coming and trying to do something that the federal government has failed to do: protect our citizens.”

The Utah delegation is facing a robust debate when lawmakers tackle illegal-immigration bills in the legislative session in January, including a bill authored by Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, that, in many ways, mirrors the Arizona law.

This trip south yielded a lot of closed-door meetings but apparently no consensus.

“I don’t agree with about three-fourths of what [Pearce] said,” remarked Sen. Luz Robles, D-Salt Lake City. “I don’t think his bill was a solution for Arizona. It didn’t fix anything.”

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The lonely sentinel » Spencer sits in his command center surrounded by his seven German shepherds. With a few swift keystrokes, he pulls up aerial surveillance on a large computer screen that shows people crossing the border in the dead of night — their bodies illuminated in eerie white through the help of his $65,000 infrared camera.

With ominous music he added, the video shows them being rounded up after his nonprofit group American Border Patrol alerted the U.S. Border Patrol about the breach.

The vigilance displayed by Spencer is almost all-consuming. He acknowledges his wife of more than 45 years chose to stay in California and divorce him instead of following him out to the border and his ranch, accessible only by dirt roads that draw little traffic, save for a few large tarantulas crossing in the late afternoon. He seldom sees his three grandchildren and he doesn’t want to draw his two daughters — 48 and 50, respectively — into his world of monitoring illegal border-crossing.

“You know, we could’ve paid for an entire fence with the amount of money we spent on that war,” he said of Iraq. “And we’d have had money left over to help Mexico. They’d be happy, we’d be happy and 30,000 people wouldn’t be dead.”

Spencer paused and got onto his four-wheel ATV and gunned it up a small embankment back to his double-wide trailer as the sun started to settle behind the craggy hills to the west.

Outside Spencer’s hanger — where a drone plane and an experimental aircraft were parked — the eye of a white camera on top of a tall post moved slightly as it scanned the ravine.

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