Many people charged with trafficking in Tucson are U.S. citizens, suffering from the same problems of poverty and addiction that plague the rest of the country.
This fall, I visited the U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona, to observe proceedings in several cases involving U.S. citizens who had smuggled immigrants, drugs, or weapons across the border. One defendant was arrested when Customs and Border Protection officers spotted her stopping along a desert road to let a migrant into her car. A woman had tried to enter the United States with fentanyl stuffed in her clothing; others hid it in the crevices of their bodies. In one case, fentanyl was stitched into the lining of a purse. Some were caught trying to enter Mexico with AK-47 rifles, magazines, or rounds of ammunition stashed under their cars’ hoods or floorboards.
The defendants, who pleaded guilty to these crimes, ranged in age from their twenties to sixties. They were men and women, Black, Latino, and white. One woman said that a man had approached her about smuggling in Tucson, Arizona. Another said she had been visiting friends in Mexico when a stranger asked whether she wanted to smuggle pills. When one man was asked whether he knew he was carrying weapons in his vehicle, he responded, “I never really know what it’s going to be.” He continued, “Today, I didn’t know what I had in the truck. It just got loaded and I just drove.”
The stories told by several defendants and their attorneys fit a pattern. The citizen smugglers had difficult family lives, had experienced physical and emotional trauma, endured periods of unemployment, or were addicted to the same drugs they were asked to smuggle. They don’t fit the image of the typical borderlands criminal, but their cases fill the dockets of district courts in the border region. As Francisco Cantú, a former Border Patrol agent and the author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border,” told me, “We’re talking about people struggling with issues seen in communities all across America—poverty, a lack of viable job opportunities, addiction. But because they find themselves, through an accident of geography, living in proximity to the border, their actions are refracted through a rhetorical lens that has long posited the borderlands as a terrain of inherent violence and criminality.”
Americans have, in fact, helped make the borderlands the terrain of violence and criminality that Cantú described. The historian Brian DeLay has shown how U.S. arms dealers have sold guns to Mexicans for two centuries: during Mexico’s independence war against Spain, in the eighteen-tens; during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, which spanned the turn of the twentieth century; and in the Mexican Revolution, which concluded in 1920. Sometimes U.S. arms manufacturers sold weapons directly to the Mexican government, but the trade also often involved American merchants and “hustlers,” as DeLay calls them, selling guns to the government’s enemies. Louisiana merchants sold guns to Texas rebels during the eighteen-thirties, and New Mexicans sold guns to Pancho Villa in the nineteen-tens. In many ways, fiction has represented these historical realities better than politicians. More than thirty years ago, the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko, in her novel “Almanac of the Dead,” wrote about Tucson’s black-market trade in drugs and weapons, in which many Americans played a part.
Today, many Arizonans find themselves in situations dire enough that smuggling becomes an appealing option. Like many other states, Arizona was hit hard by the pandemic. Also like other states, Arizona’s economy has rebounded somewhat. But its poverty and unemployment rates remain higher, and the median income lower, than national averages. In this context, the border presents citizen smugglers with an opportunity to make money when other chances may not exist. “The border economy thrives on the asymmetries between the United States and Mexico—what is readily available on one side of the border but difficult to procure on the other,” Ieva Jusionyte, a professor at Brown University with a forthcoming book about the trafficking of guns from the United States to Mexico, said. “Which creates opportunities for desperate Americans.”
Victoria Brambl, a federal public defender in Tucson, has been representing clients accused of trafficking for the past three decades. “Over the last several years there has been a real sea change in the kinds of clients we see in these border cases,” she said. Before that, she explained, roughly three-quarters of her clients caught driving cars with undocumented immigrants, or arrested at the border with drugs, were Spanish-speaking defendants, largely from the northern states of Mexico. They told her heartbreaking stories about homelessness, difficult family circumstances, and needing money to pay for medical care for their parents or children.
But then, Brambl continued, “I noticed a lot of our clients all of a sudden were U.S. citizens. Their stories were also heartbreaking, but very different. There are a lot more women than we used to have.” Many of them, she said, were severely addicted to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is both cheaper and deadlier than heroin. Others were young people, some of them still in high school, responding to solicitations on social media offering quick cash for unspecified errands in Mexico. Brambl described an older woman who went to Mexico to visit a dentist but was turned away because she didn’t have enough money to pay for the procedure. As she sat on a bench, crying, a man approached her, asked her what was wrong, and told her he could help. She ended up getting arrested for attempting to smuggle fentanyl.
Brambl noted that the stories she was telling me were just anecdotes, but they’re backed up by data produced by the United States Sentencing Commission. It reports that in 2018 fentanyl accounted for less than one per cent of all drug cases in Arizona. By 2022, fentanyl accounted for 33.4 per cent of all drug cases in the state. During the same period, the percentage of individuals sentenced for the trafficking or possession of fentanyl who were U.S. citizens increased from 57.1 per cent to 94.1 per cent. Forty-six per cent hadn’t received a high school degree, and less than three per cent held a college degree.
Brambl’s colleague, Eric Rau, added that Mexicans were still involved in smuggling activity, but their profile, too, had changed. It used to be the case, he said, that cartels forced undocumented immigrants to carry backpacks stuffed with marijuana. Migrants were also forced to cross the border with bricks of cocaine. Now, many of the Mexicans involved in smuggling have visas or border-crossing cards that allow them to enter the United States legally, to shop, work, visit family, or attend school. They’ve told Rau that they come from stable, middle-class families. They’re targeted by cartels precisely because they can cross the border legally, and they often needed the money because they had taken thousands of dollars in loans to pay for college and living expenses. Yet American politicians, Rau said, still “lay the blame at the feet of undocumented immigrants and gang members.”
Gary Restaino, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, told me that, in the past several years, his office has taken on thousands of human-, drug-, and weapons-trafficking cases referred to him by Border Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security. These cases are a priority, he explained, because of the severity of the harm they cause, their increased incidence, and the fact that they may involve high-level actors. Like Brambl and Rau, Restaino said that one of the biggest changes he has seen is that the percentage of human-smuggling and drug-trafficking crimes committed by undocumented immigrants has gone down, whereas the number committed by U.S. citizens or others with lawful status has gone up.
The fact that many Americans stubbornly point to forces beyond our borders as the source of our troubles is a symptom of our unwillingness to believe that many such problems are born at home. Elected leaders—Republicans, in particular—stand before crowds often hundreds or thousands of miles away from the border and direct fury at Mexico and Mexicans. But Democrats play into their hands by accepting the terms of the debate as Republicans have framed them: that the problems of the border are the problems of undocumented immigrants. (A bill introduced earlier this month by Senator Elizabeth Warren may signal the forging of a new path. It aims to address the “epidemic of gun violence,” including the foreign trafficking of guns manufactured here.) We don’t have to deny the significance of the immigration crisis to acknowledge that the border isn’t defined only by it. The cases of the citizen smugglers tried in Tucson suggest that we shouldn’t blame others for the wounds we inflict on ourselves. ♦
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