A Pastor’s Team Picking Up The Broken Pieces Of The Conflict Between The Mexican Cartel And U.S. Border Policies
Almost every weekend before dawn, the Desert Chaplains travel to the Arizona-
Sonora Desert in search for migrants who have been abandoned along the way,
hoping to find them alive. U.S. border policies, Mexican organized crime, and the
unforgiving environment have made their journey one of the most dangerous in
the world.
Óscar Andrade, the pastor-leader of the Desert Chaplains, is on a quest for a Honduran migrant who went missing in the desert lands of the Sierrita Mountains near Arivaca, Ariz., carrying a cross almost the size of his upper body in respect for all the migrant lives that have come to an end in the Arizona-Sonora Desert. Photo by Natasha Cortinovis
BY NATASHA CORTINOVIS
On a warm Saturday morning in early October, the Desert Chaplains’ team is praying under the shade of a tall tree in the desert basins of Arivaca, about 11 miles or two days’ walk north of Arizona’s U.S.-Mexico border.
They are invoking God's help in finding a young Honduran migrant whose last traces of vitality got lost somewhere among the hills unfolding past the edges of the small town.
Beyond their sight, the desert spreads out in all its beauty: hills, valleys, and dry streams sprinkled with irregular patches of greenery, but without a drop of water. The only exception is the one stored inside the cacti plants, and their trail-rated truck.
After climbing inside heavy boots, knee-high snake protections, thick pants and long-sleeve fluorescent shirts, the Desert Chaplains march into the unforgiving environment with one goal in mind: finding the remnants of the missing man, and by therein, relieving his family’s suffering.
“He’s been missing for over a month,” says Óscar Andrade, their pastor-leader. They have looked for him several times already, he says, but have not been able to find him.
Determined to succeed this time, Andrade walks off with a three-foot long wooden cross hanging from the right side of his backpack. It swings solidly in a last sign of respect for all those who took their last breaths in the Arizona-Sonora Desert trying to fulfill their dreams.
In the past three years of doing search and rescue in Southern Arizona, the Mexican-American pastor and his wife, Lupita Andrade, have received a total of 2,079 calls from families in Mexico, Central America, and the United States asking for help finding relatives abandoned by their human smugglers in the wilds of the borderlands.
Since their inception in 2021, countless of their weekends have been dedicated to 4 a.m. rises, long drives across desolate landscapes, and restless days hiking in unrelenting climates to rescue or recover migrants on one of the deadliest north-bound migration routes in the world.
“The desert has become such an important part of my life that if there is a weekend in which we don’t go out, I miss it,” the pastor said in Spanish.
As of today, the Desert Chaplains’ team of 24 volunteers has contributed to the recovery of 43 bodies from Southern Arizona’s desert lands.
“This desert is a performance-tuned killer”, says Guillermo Jones, a Pascua Yaqui volunteer with Humane Borders, a Tucson non-profit dedicated to maintaining the water stations scattered along the high-risk routes used by migrants crossing into the United States on foot.
“Nearly everything in it is razor sharp, poisonous or otherwise lethal.”
Roughly 3,300 migrants have been found dead along the Southern Border since 2017, with almost half of them perished in the Arizona-Sonora desert alone, according to the United States Border Patrol Missing Migrant Program (MMP).
Since 1994, nearly 10,000 migrants have died in this desert, according to the Humane Borders Death Map, created in partnership with the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office.
These numbers indicate that for the past 29 years an average of one person per day has lost their life along the 1,300-mile stretch of wall-less wilderness that separates the United States and Mexico.
These statistics do not include the numbers of migrants who are missing, but never found, including the Honduran man that the Desert Chaplains, or Capellanes del Desierto in Spanish, have been searching for since September 2023.
Jildo Davila, a Desert Chaplains’ volunteer, scrutinizes the vastness of this no-man’s-desert-land that has pitilessly claimed thousands of lives. Photo by Colton Allder
Border crossing shouldn’t be a death sentence
After more than a year, Óscar and Lupita Andrade still recall with pain the dramatic moment in which, not far from a ranch house, they stumbled upon the decomposing bodies of three migrant children aged 3-12, two of them locked in an eternal embrace.
The infant’s head and the little girl’s ribs had already been chewed off by the roaming wildlife.
“This touches one deeply,” Óscar Andrade said. “Even though they are not your family, you can’t help the feeling of sadness, pain, and bewilderment.”
Another memory Óscar will never be able to get out of his mind is assisting at the desperation of a man crying over the stiff body of his younger brother lying lifeless on the desert floor.
The pastor said they had been looking for the man’s brother for more than a week.
“We saw how the older brother was touching his younger brother’s feet, frantically asking him for forgiveness,” he said. “It moved me profoundly.”
The pastor also reminisces about feeling tremendously powerless when he did not make it in time to save a young Guatemalan girl whose last cry for help was heard by her mother over the phone just five hours earlier.
The Desert Chaplains found her at 8 a.m., frozen and shriveled on the cold ground, hardened by the low temperatures of the night.
She had been abandoned by the smuggler who was furtively guiding her across the U.S.’ no-man’s-borderland.
“Border crossing may be illegal, but it shouldn’t be a death sentence”, says Stephen Saltonstall, one of the main volunteers with Humane Borders.
According to the National Immigration Forum, 85% of the 21,370 U.S. Border Patrol Agents are currently controlling the Southwest Border with the aid of sensors, lights, drones, planes, air balloons, cameras, and other technologies.
This relentless patrol since the application of the U.S. Southern Border strategy “Prevention Through Deterrence” in 1994, has not only pushed irregular migrants to cross in the most remote terrains along the border, such as rivers, mountains, canyons, and deserts, but has also resulted in the growth of the cartels’ human smuggling operations.
“The mafiosos in Mexico were not involved in human smuggling until the United States made it even more difficult to cross,” says Ernesto Portillo Jr., ex columnist with the Arizona Daily Star, and now spokesman for the City of Tucson’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
“The harder it is for migrants to enter the United States, the more profitable it becomes for the organized crime,” says Pedro De Velasco, the Director of Education and Advocacy at Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, AZ, and Nogales, Sonora, offering humanitarian assistance and legal advice to migrants applying for admission into the country.
Nowadays, this dynamic of conflict between the Mexican cartel and U.S. border policies continues to force migrants who cannot fit the requirements for legal entry into the United States into the dangerous underworld of human smuggling.
“Gone are the days when somebody could come from Guatemala to the U.S. Border and cross by themselves,” says Tucson CBP Agent Gustavo Soto. “Who wants to cross now has to pay for a human smuggling infrastructure to support that request, or otherwise they will be killed.”
This criminal infrastructure is intercepting South and Central American migrants long before they reach Mexico, and charges them up to $28,000 per person with the promise that they will arrive safely in the United States, reveals De Velasco.
“The cartel realized that the exploitation of migrants’ desperation was another very productive source of revenue,” he says. “It is now making the deal of a lifetime.”
An investigation released in 2022 by The New York Times National Immigration Correspondent Miriam Jordan reveals that the cartel is making roughly $13 billion a year through migrants’ smuggling across the Southwest Border.
“There are constant fights for territory between the various cartel groups in Mexico right now, and it’s not for the drugs anymore,” says Óscar Andrade, the Desert Chaplains’ leader. “It’s for the migrants: they are now the largest flow of money in Mexico and Central America.”
The Andrades blame the cartels’ smugglers for demanding these staggering amounts of money from them - from $15,000 to $30,000 per person, for lying to them about the real struggles of crossing the treacherous landscapes on foot, and for often abusing, selling, kidnapping, abandoning, or even killing them along the way.
Many smugglers are regrettably indifferent to migrants’ lives once they have been paid at least half of their promised sum.
“Most smugglers don’t care to leave someone behind,” says CBP agent Soto. “They have already been paid at least half or more.”
Many, therefore, abandon the migrants when their health worsens, and continue the journey with the ones who can make it.
“The people that make it to the end will have their families in the United States pay the rest of the sum they owe to the smuggler,” says Jildo Davila, a Desert Chaplains’ volunteer. “If any of them dies, the ‘coyotes’ don’t care, as they only care about bringing the rest of the group to the point where they can get paid.”
Essentially, north-bound migrants are sadly only worth the resources they can contribute to the criminal organizations.
“No matter if the migrants pay them more, or less, the smugglers still cross them through the desert: no sum of money will guarantee them that they will arrive safely at their destination,” says the Desert Chaplains’ pastor.
The migrants who cannot afford to pay the cartels’ smugglers are often forced into transporting drugs across the border, explained the leader of the Chaplains.
“After the drugs get picked up on the north side of the border, the smugglers will either kill the migrants or leave them at their fate into the desert,” says Óscar Andrade. “For them, there was neither a reward for transporting the drugs, and neither the American dream.”
These are all the reasons for the Desert Chaplains’ bushwhacking through the Mesquites, Chollas, Ocotillos, and Creosote bushes that sprawl in the Sonoran desert.
Lupita Andrade, the love of Óscar Andrade’s life, holds a piece of clothing timeworn by exposure to the extreme temperature swings that are so distinctive of desert environments. Scattered across the wilderness, Items like this ragged cloth lie as immortal footprints of human migration between Mexico and the United States. Photo by Florence G. Tomasi
“We always hope to find the people still alive”
Families who lose virtual communication with their migrating loved-ones often call the Desert Chaplains, among other search and rescue groups such as the Armadillos Búsqueda y Rescate, No More Deaths, or the Consulate of Mexico in Tucson, for help in finding them.
Upon call, the Andrades’ Desert Chaplains drive off from South Tucson by night’s end and wind-up waist-deep into the vegetation by dawn.
When they are lucky, they are guided by more than just the picture of the missing migrant and the vague description of their route.
“When we go out into the desert, we always hope to find the people still alive, even if they are not the ones we had set out for,” says the pastor.
Since 2021, the Desert Chaplains have been able to rescue 92 migrants from an otherwise agonizing death in the Sonoran desert.
According to federal law, it is prohibited to smuggle or transport undocumented aliens in the United States. The Desert Chaplains provide first aid assistance to irregular migrants in need, but do not transport them to the hospital.
Óscar and Lupita Andrade’s team is made up of volunteers trained in first aid, orientation, social service, U.S. law, hiking techniques, environmental hazards, among others.
“As volunteers, we don’t expect any payment for what we do,” says Óscar Andrade. “We do it willingly, and we do it passionately.”
As far as the migrants’ death crisis at the Southern Border goes, Andrade is sure of one thing: if there were more just governments in each country, people would not risk their lives and dreams to perish on such deadly journeys.
“We all have to demand a radical change from our governments,” he says. “It’s the only solution.”
Natasha Cortinovis is a multilingual graduate student in the Bilingual Journalism Master’s Program at University of Arizona’s School of Journalism. She is a languages’ teacher, outdoor enthusiast, and aspiring journalist for underserved communities, the environment, and wildlife.