Surge in NM border crossings fuels demands for border wall

ANIMAS – Residents in this remote ranching town in southern New Mexico complain they’ve been forgotten and left out as Washington and Santa Fe debate border issues. “It’s just kind of a slap in our face, because our government doesn’t want to do anything, doesn’t want to protect their citizens here on the border,” rancher and business owner Tricia Elbrock told the Journal in an interview. She and other ranchers in New Mexico’s Bootheel say they need a border wall and more security as the region, long a drug smuggling corridor, has also become a hot spot for guides leading large groups of Central American migrants to Antelope Wells. “We need more boots on the ground, more resources. Build the wall and quit fighting in Washington, D.C.,” Elbrock said. In the last two weeks alone, Border Patrol agents have taken three large groups of migrants into custody at Antelope Wells. The largest group, 306 people, crossed Thursday just after midnight. Residents in the Bootheel have been coping with drug smugglers who cut through remote ranchland for years. One of Elbrock’s employees was kidnapped in 2015 while working on a wastewater system on a ranch near the border. Drug smugglers wanted his truck, after their vehicle got stuck, and they abducted him. He was released across the state line in Arizona. Dawnella Jones, between taking orders at PW’s restaurant in Animas, said her family has a ranch about 30 miles from the border. “I think the wall’s a good thing. There’s been times when there’s been dope on the ranch in bundles,” she said. “A guy tried to steal a four-wheeler five days ago,” Jones’ son and business owner Wade McClain chimed in. “People who don’t believe we got a problem, need to come down here, maybe buy a house down there and maybe they live down there with maybe just a regular driveway, no big wall around their property,” McClain, too, wants a barrier along strategic stretches of border to “filter” smugglers and illegal border crossers to areas where Border Patrol agents can apprehend them. He is also concerned that Border Patrol agents are stretched thin by the large groups of migrants arriving at the New Mexico border. “They’re processing so many people in Lordsburg right now that they’ve got every single agent doing paperwork,” McClain said. The Border Patrol says drug traffickers are now taking advantage of the recent surge in migration by making smuggling runs at the same time large groups of Central Americans cross the border and turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents...MORE