The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

Immigration, the drive northward, is a white phenomenon.

The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese.

Responsibility for these people can stretch from San Diego to Calexico to Tucson and finally to Phoenix. It only adds to the general chaos that rules the border, a chaos that the Tucson consul calls “the politics of stupidity.”

time. It is not always easy to leap from bed and go hunt people.

The old boys there are plain-spoken and politically incorrect.

Agents will tell you that the only way to get a clear picture of the real border world is to find someone who has been in service over four years.

A great compliment in the Border Patrol is: “He’s a good guy.”

You go out there four-wheeling in an SUV that has been retrofitted by felons in a Texas prison.

The death packets are known as “archives,” and harvest season—May through July—is known as “death season.” It is then that lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, strawberries are all ready to be picked.

Reportedly, the largest al Qaeda training ground in the New World is in Brazil.

(A Mexican worker said: “If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?”)

There are two fairly common jokes told about America among “undocumented entrants”—A) Don’t drink the water, and B) For good American food, go to Taco Bell.

What do Mexican soldiers care if alambristas (wire-crossers) walk into Arizona? Any one of the soldiers might very well head north himself at some point.

For a while, the Mexican government offered the walkers survival kits with water and snacks, but the uproar from the United States put a stop to that.

American pundits regularly insist that the border needs to be militarized. In a very real way, much of the Devil’s Highway region is militarized.

A border cop confessed: “I have a rule now. If it don’t speak English, shoot it.”

In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained, and paid for out-of-pocket by those bleeding-heart liberals, the Border Patrol agents themselves.

In the year after the Wellton 26 lost their way, Tucson sector racked up deaths in the hundreds. Yuma sector managed to reduce the season’s death rate to nine.

“What kills the people,” he says, “is the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border.”

Our border policies are the direct cause of those fourteen deaths.”

During this whole event, the rescue, the trials, and the aftermath, an average of one person a day died somewhere on the border, trying to get those last few miles toward the big American lights.

Interestingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Satistics has reported that by 2008, there will be five million more jobs in the United States than people to do them.

“undocumented immigrants” contributed “at least $300 billion per year to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).”

You can’t see it’s a bad concept if you don’t find it offensive.

Once a Tea Party maven demanded to see my papers or they wouldn’t pay me for my lecture.

Now the only place a real Mexi-hater can really speak his mind anymore is on Facebook or Wikipedia. Or a national radio show. It hardly seems fair.

I wonder, if we in the U.S. stopped buying cocaine and stopped selling heavy weapons across the border, what would happen then?

but since the book appeared, illegal immigration has fallen by over 70 percent.

Radio talkers still bellow that the invasion threatens everything that we hold dear while decrying the unsecured U.S. border,

The USBP station made infamous by my book, Wellton Station, had about thirty-two agents during the period I was visiting them. Since then, they have closer to three hundred agents. The station had to be demolished and a huge new station built in its place to house these warriors. But there was a precipitous drop-off in clients to inhabit their suites.

Their nemesis is often the Christian rescuer, out there doing a little bleeding-heart civil disobedience.

Who ever imagined the question of border security was a problem in practical theology? How does one parse out what is Caesar’s and what is the Lord’s? How does one render, and to whom?

Everybody loves Jesus Christ, they just don’t know what to do with Jesus Garcia.

Item: the first sections of the Border Fence went up in San Diego sector—the contractor used undocumented workers to build it.

Hunger is a phenomenal travel agent.

(Among female immigrants entering Mexico from the south, there are reports that over one third are raped or sexually assaulted.)

Every week, in some motel, in the back of some burger joint, in some brothel or in some field, a woman is weeping in a horror we cannot comprehend because we aren’t listening.

Imagine: Mexican right-wing talk radio wants a fence built on their southern border to keep out those damned Hondurans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans.

Who Would Jesus Deport?

Audiences for ten years have been startled to learn that the federal law that makes these humans illegal isn’t even on the criminal books.

President George W. Bush came under fire for saying it was nothing more than a speeding ticket infraction. But he was telling you the truth.

information in place of inflammation.

God bless him. And God bless the dead. And God bless those who rescue the living—be it with water, a blanket, or a truck. Have mercy, all of you.

Neither government has any idea what to do about this empire, and would love to find some way to shut the whole thing down and stop these natives from ignoring the fabulous fences as they drive north and south to see their grandmothers.

Not far from the stretches of desert where good Christian patriots were cutting open rescue bottles of water other good Christians were leaving for these same walkers.

“And Unrighteousness went out from her chambers: whom she sought not she found, and dwelt with them as rain in a desert and dew on a thirsty land.”