Smugglers, illegal immigrants make
Arizona public lands a dangerous place

By Mitch Tobin
for Headwaters News

When ranger Kris Eggle was shot dead in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on Aug. 9, it was the latest wound for a fragile piece of Sonoran Desert that’s caught between the world’s rich and poor.

Eggle’s death showed just how dangerous southern Arizona’s public lands have become for workers, hikers, hunters and researchers.

From the lava flows and creosote flats of the west, to the oak-studded grasslands and pine-covered mountains of the east, the entire region is also getting ecologically hammered by the unrelenting flow of illegal border crossers. As they head north seeking a better life, the migrants dump trash, cut new roads and spook wildlife.

Nationally, Park Service law enforcement rangers had the highest rate of assaults per 1,000 officers of any federal agency, according to a 2001 Justice Department study.

The illegal entrants -- funneled to remote areas by the Border Patrol's heightened enforcement in cities -- are also suspected of starting eight wildfires in southern Arizona in 2002 that burned 68,413 acres and cost taxpayers $5.1 million.

Just about everyone who works along the border -- with the exception of the Border Patrol -- agrees that something needs to change.

Some demand a massive increase in law enforcement along the border -- most of which is federal land -– to keep out migrants, smugglers and terrorists. In response to my recent stories on the issue, one reader even suggested we line the border with anti-personnel mines; others offered more reasonable steps, like hiring more rangers for borderland national parks.

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Interior's agents lack training, supervision

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Nov. 13, 2002

National Park Service and BLM agents are part of the Interior Department's police force, the third-largest federal law-enforcement agency and one of its most dysfunctional.

There have been decades of critical reports, the most recent one last July, which said Interior's 4,300 personnel in seven agencies were so poorly managed that officials couldn't even provide the number or location of agents who could assist with the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to a Nov. 3 New York Times article.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton formed another panel to conduct another study and appointed a former FBI official, Larry R. Parkinson, to the newly created director of law enforcement and security.

Parkinson was to implement the recommendations of the panel, but seemingly true to form, has a tiny staff and few resources, and any by agency heads, the article said.

A study last year by the independent National Academy of Public Administration found problems in management, leadership, accountability and communications.

A 2000 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police found a "glaring absence of field training," according to the Washington Post.

The Park Service solves about 14 percent of reported crimes, that report said, half the national average.

Last May, U.S. attorneys complained they were having trouble prosecuting agencies' cases, and an inspector general's report said half the agencies' supervisors had no law enforcement training.

Last year, authorities intercepted 200,000 illegal immigrants and 700,000 pounds of drugs, just in Arizona's Organ Pipe National Monument.

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Headwaters News is a project of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.