New tech drives economic growth for two border 'neighbor' states

we're taking these winding dirt roads 19 miles or so from the house to the Border out here it's both ways there are 10 bunkers over there Jim says he's seen people perched on top of the mountains to alert groups trying to sneak through the property we know we're always being watched and so you kind of get used to it it became dangerous for me to be out there by myself I have a a little gun but yeah I'm also 80. Jim has even seen some people armed on his property yet he still pipes water to 29 drinking fountains on the ranch nobody needs to die in the desert even if they're a drug Packer it's awful I've had probably 35 people die on The Ranch it's a humanitarian crisis a crisis the children's believe can be solved how it can be done is to finish the wall put in the sensors the fiber optic Communications and the electricity finish the wall and then put the border patrol at the wall but what Jim and Sue hope for is much different than the reality they've had to accept they live with the idea that their cartel Scouts on our mountains that hundreds of people are coming through my Ranch and that's just the way it is at the border Ryan fish kga 9 on your side migrants are being picked up in places like this just off the side of the road and Sheriff Daniels tells me this has become The New Normal how often do you see that if people on the side of the road more than none it's an average day for the Cochise County Sheriff Mark Daniels on this ride along with kega9 seeing two migrants waiting for their promise to a new life you look at twenty five hundred dollars a person from my County to Maricopa County to drive what that's per person so get three or four see how lucrative that is to a young mind drivers ages can be anywhere from their 70s to as young as 13 with social media being the latest way to Target teens online we know social media is the main platform to recruit especially our young juveniles all the way into our adults we know that these are real examples from the sheriff showing us Snapchats with offers to earn quick cash promising the drivers a safe route Sheriff Daniels says the posts are made by cartels with many young people biting the bait we have a 16 year old in my jail right now for murder one incident that crosses his mind a 16 year old kid smugged the driver fled from a deputy the speeds are so reckless he disengaged because of community risk 30 miles later he went through a red light at deadly speeds and he killed her we had killed a mom that was going to her birthday party off like this driving too slow you're driving certainly under the speed limit in a fast lane or too fast that's why these cars pull in boom boom out of there last year out of more than 1300 human smuggling incidents in Cochise County 89 of those drivers were younger than 18 years old I've seen The Good the Bad and the Ugly this is the ugliest and that's defined by the magnitude of the problem we're seeing it's every time he opens up a trunk there's the anticipation that someone's inside they're treating people like cargo the tragedies we see I mean seven-year-old stuck in the back of a car at 100 cars go 100 some miles an hour and she's crying come see that a couple times and see what you so every stop matters it's tough it is it's really tough to watch these young people lives change over one bad decision it is and if I can stop that before they even pick up I will in Cochise County Faith Abercrombie k-gun 9 on your side narcotics and opioid seizures uh were way up there were very very busy the cartels stick through their area cartel south of here is very very active at this time yeah and a lot of Fentanyl fentanyl has really really increased especially in the last year uh I believe we're up over 168 percent and take the last 24 hours we had a uh a large large seizure and and a passenger car we had a good seizure and a commercial truck at the cargo dock here and we also had a seizure in the rail environment in a train car the other thing we're seeing a lot is uh is body carrier so both on the body and within the body you have an idea of how it's going down exactly yeah I think they're recruiting people up in Tucson Phoenix to come down and and take back uh you know a load and most of the time on the internal body carriers some mess some heroin but most of it is fentanyl tablets and we're talking uh anywhere from 1200 to 2000 2200 uh uh pills uh at a time in in a body cavity or or on the body we've gotten up to eight nine ten pounds here in Pinal County we're dozens of miles away from the U.S Mexico border but I spoke with Sheriff Mark Lamb who says that they're still dealing with those issues here they do that they've got electrolyte we are the last pass through County before they make it into Maricopa County Phoenix and then who knows where from there one thing that makes this different from let's say the board or actually on the border is we're 50 60 70 miles into the country already Sheriff Mark Lamb and his Department protect over 5 000 miles of Arizona we feel a strong responsibility to be that last line of defense to stop humans from being trafficked especially humans being trafficked into slavery by the cartels my photographer Jim falzer and I went to Pinal County to meet Sheriff Lam he showed me something called a Loadout spot so we wake up every morning we come out to areas like this where we early in the morning you might have a group of 10 20 30 people here waiting to be picked up these are areas tucked away in Pinal County where migrants get picked up and we're pulling traffic stop after traffic stop after traffic stop every day of vehicles that they've hired like I was mentioning to you children are teenagers from the valley American citizens 16 17 years old people from out of state being paid by the cartels to come here and transport those people who came in illegally and what we've seen last over the last two years is an exponential increase in the amount of human trafficking and drug trafficking into this country into our community into Arizona and into America he believes that many people don't know exactly what's happening at the border well I think in the political Arena they downplay it if your party is for open borders you don't want to expose with the reality of what it is I hear politicians talking about you know us separating the kids from the parents but the reality is they've caught over a hundred and thirty thousand unaccompanied minors last year when it comes to securing Arizona Sheriff land believes there needs to be more support from the government I'll always take more people but I'll be honest with you when it relates to border security what you need is the federal government to do do their job federal government congress senate they've failed to pass Common Sense immigration laws so it is broken it is broken and and people are taking advantage of it as the cartels are taking advantage of it but in the end the main factor the feedback that we get from people that are trying to come into this country illegally is the number one answer is because Joe Biden said I could come Sheriff lamb created the Ghost Squad it's a specially trained unit tasked with searching the desert for violent offenders there are really bad people out there too and it's their job to make sure that those people are not taking advantage of other people hurting other people and that's my job I may have to stop nine good people to stop one bad person and that's what my job that's what the people elected me to do and I'm sorry for the good people that get hung up in that we have a process in place for them Sheriff lamb strongly believes the last administration had policies in place to reduce the number of migrants crossing the border I hope that we can work together bipartisan to come up with some solutions and then also give our border patrol and CBP the ability to actually take care of the issue and protect our borders we're out there every day trying to do the best we can to help border patrol and to stop humans from being trafficked and to stop drugs from being trafficked especially Fentanyl and hopefully will save somebody's loved one tomorrow because we stopped that from getting in today Sheriff lammon has four saw 450 percent increase in Pursuits involving human smuggling molding Pinal County into a difficult hurdle for migrants to overcome in Pinal County Tina Juliano kega 9 on your side everyone's asking you to process faster we need to stop just processing faster and we need to have serious consequences for people breaking our law art Del Cueto is Vice President of the national border patrol Council a labor union that represents U.S border Patrol agents he hears the frustration from Agents being pulled from patrolling the border to instead process migrants as the number of border crossings continue to rise Del Cueto believes there are solutions that need to come from Washington you have to detain them you have to have immigration judges and Asylum officers down on the line you need to look at these cases and the individuals that do not qualify you have to immediately expel them and send them back to their country the national border patrol Council has been highly critical of the Biden Administration pointing to the record number of Migrant encounters at the Southwest border since President Biden took office in January of 2021 but in April Del Cueto welcomed a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Washington led by Senator Kirsten Cinema and Congressman Juan ciscomani to see the Border firsthand the drug drug cartels the people that are bringing drugs into the country they don't care what side of the aisle you are on they just want to sell their product and make money Del Cueto believes the cartels take advantage of gaps along the border left vacant as border patrol agents do administrative work he says cartels use those gaps to smuggling drugs and individuals looking to avoid detection those are all things that are going to continue to affect this country for many many years there's a proper way to come in there's an improper way to come in but right now the only individuals that are taking advantage are the criminal element the drug cartels because they know where the gaps are being created the national border patrol Council represents some 18 000 border patrol agents and support Personnel assigned to the U.S border Patrol I asked Del Cueto what's the biggest frustration he hears from agents in the field they're out there in the middle of nowhere they're putting their lives on the line they're going through you know tough terrain you know they're going through the mountains climbing and then they apprehend a group that is trying to evade apprehension and once they're apprehended the first thing they say to you is Asylum well then why were you evading apprehension so that you know when you see that the big picture from being around sometime you know a lot of that is a distraction by the drug cartels because they're trying to get their product across and they know this preoccupies the agents on the on the desert foreign the U.S Mexico border is nearly 2 000

miles long with much of the land having an existing border wall or having a contract in place to build one but it wasn't always that way the first reported barrier was built in the early 1900s in between Nogales and Nogales Sonora the six foot tall wire fence was built by the U.S to deter cattle from crossing the border there was a plant strand barbed wire fence that's all it was like a cattle cattle fence all the way up and and actually we used to go across that fence because we used to go pick acorns when we were little and then we would come back across the fence sometimes you wouldn't even recognize that there was a cattle a cattle transfer for a ranch or was the Border we did that as kids all the time everybody did that fast forward to today for several long stretches of land you'll see steel fencing 30 feet tall installed during the Trump Administration so how do we get from blocking cattle to blocking out people border barriers started to become common in Border towns throughout this Century during the George H bush Administration several miles of fencing was installed in 1993 along the San Diego Tijuana border and while Republicans have historically encouraged a border wall Democratic leaders have also helped build the wall President Bill Clinton even using vietnam-era Landing mat in the 90s used during the war to help helicopters land and the border wall would only expand with President Trump securing 1.6 billion from Congress in 2018 with plans to build and replace around 100 miles of border wall of course over the next few years that initiative to build a wall will become a legal battle and become highly politicized ultimately leaving Crews who were working along the border to Halt work as millions of dollars of equipment sits along Southern Arizona but that wouldn't stop local leaders from stepping in then Arizona governor Doug Ducey getting creative in 2022 using shipping containers to fill the gaps left at the border only to be torn down in early 2023 as the government plans to contract new existing fencing along the border I think what we're going to see is more and more technology associated with the law so when we say the law I think of it more as a system it's a system of a physical barrier but a camera system a sensor system and then a response system and I think those last three items are really where the focus is going to be because the physical barriers there for now the state's taxpayers will spend about 76 million dollars to remove the containers Danelle confer kega 9 on your side when you look at national news and what what some like to report one side uh makes it seem like it's the end of the world another side may make it seem like there's nothing going on and everything's business as usual the reality is that we live here we're all seeing it and we're all seeing different parts of it it's nuanced it's it's some it's complex it you you can't have a border policy without security but you can't have a border policy without humanitarian support you can't have a border policy that just talks about sealing the Border but doesn't talk about fully Staffing the Border as it should be uh and uh so yeah there's subtleties and complexities all the way through it but it's it's easier to do uh a tweet it's easier to do uh Instagram the congressional districts of Raul Grijalva and Juan ciscomani cover all of Arizona's border with Mexico grijalvas District reaches from Central Tucson west across Pima County to Yuma it includes all of the ports of entry and a large share of tribal land siskomani's District includes Eastern Pima County and runs across Cochise County towards New Mexico it includes ranchers who feel especially hard-pressed by trespassers on their land they're seeing firsthand high-speed chases they're seeing firsthand the the the cartel members that are crossing people and people are literally suffering and dying in these regions and we see it here in Pima County when you look at Fentanyl and now being the leading cause of death among young people both men worry about fentanyl but say more of it is found at ports of Entry than in backpacks in illegal desert Crossings the Republican and the Democrat both say President Biden should handle the Border better from what I've seen from this Administration and the Biden team that they they haven't acknowledged the seriousness at the border right now I think a lot of pressure on the Biden administration because they also display this kind of schizophrenic response to the border and you know enforcement and then uh humanitarian support back and forth uh and and that that schizophrenia which is which is plagued Democrat and Republican presidencies and administrations Grijalva wants to see Biden send more Customs inspectors to the porch where they could stop drugs but also provide more immigration officers to handle Asylum claims both men say the border is such a huge complex mix of people policy and politics that you'll never get agreement if you try to pass too much at once that when Solutions have been stalled for so long smaller nudges have a better chance to get the ball rolling if we can do some pragmatic Solutions break the ice and no action and then perhaps move toward a more comprehensive approach to deal with the budgets essentially a broken law and and and a broken strategy On the Border whenever you try to tackle this issue in a large comprehensive way you're going to peel off support and it's going to be pretty hard to get through especially as you mentioned a second ago with the politics of the day so getting one bite at the Apple at a time I think it's a winning strategy one piece of the Border issue both Congressman mentioned was the value of a guest worker program to allow workers to cross the border in a legal way to fill hard to fill jobs and help U.S companies Craig Smith KGUN9 on your side me Andrea Cordova and Julia washer I've had some of the best for years of my life here both are seniors at Nogales High School except Andrea has a much longer commute to school I live in Mexico I have to cross the border every day for the past four years her mornings have started early my alarm goes off at 5am I shower 5 30 and I have to be out of the house at six and I make it here like at 7 20. her afternoons aren't much different the way back is way shorter I feel like like 30 minutes 40 maybe all to get an education on this side of the border the majority of our students are our U.S residents if they do commute you

know they do have to pay tuition to come over it's a commitment that comes with the price we received money from from the federal government from the state for each student and really what this does is it it mirrors that some of the students pay the fee for their education according to Andrea her parents are paying 780 a month for her to attend school here in the U.S to feel like the education is way better here think that they're families too are really you know really stressed the importance of of getting an education in the United States because they know how valuable it is especially at a school like Nogales High when we look at our graduation rate of every year being at 95 or higher the fact that we're in a school and we continue to push limits in our our all of our academic programs where students are are pushed to new heights I'll be attending Stanford University on a full ride and dreams are achieved I'm planning on going to U of A so when I asked Andrea if the commute was worth it she said yes well I really am grateful for the opportunity to like live in a border state and be able to like attend school here and when I asked if the money was worth it she also said yes anyone who wants to like pursue it should definitely go for it like it is worth it it's like a lot of work but it is definitely worth it so again meet Andrea Cordova and Julia washer both are seniors at Nogales High I can't thank the school enough for other opportunities I've gotten here with two very different experiences in getting a diploma on this side of the Border in Nogales Heidi alaga keiga 9 on your side a shared past does not guarantee a shared future while a map may tell the story of two states divided by an international border political leaders in Business Leaders in Arizona and in Sonora Mexico say there is room to grow together by investing in new technologies I'm sharing several conversations I've had with some influential figures who themselves are watching two Governors navigate a regional economy I'm really really proud of the work that the Arizona Mexico commission has done you know for 64 years back in March businessman Jaime Chamberlain says he didn't take the news he'd been removed from the commission's board personally Arizona governor Katie Hobbs cleaned the Slate Chamberlain says he's optimistic Hobbs can reassemble a board to leverage their rapport with Sonoran leaders many who themselves have some kind of connection to current governor Romero and that goes on whatever Administration that is and I think that's the that's the value of the Arizona Mexico commission 64 years through many many different administrations going forward and looking at at that continuity of relationships from Chamberlain's home base and warehouses in Nogales to a Convention Center room in Tucson Business Leaders see a future that grows both Arizona and Sonora's economies the key will be smoother trading so both slides can each invest in new technologies maintaining a Good Neighbor policy is essential for the prosperity for both States working together increase the opportunities for trade investment and infrastructure it also strengthens the cultural and friendship ties that give our region its identity David Figueroa Works in Phoenix as governor durazo and Sonora's representative he says leaders look forward to putting the new Sonora State sustainable energy plan into a higher gear already there's a solar energy Park in Puerto Penasco a rocky point that figured up says can generate a gigawatt one thousand megawatts of energy and their plan he says doesn't stop there installations Figueroa says for the long term the Sonora plan wants to Spur electric vehicle production and keep supply lines with the US strong on the Arizona side we're seeing the next stages of companies already investing billions of dollars to make critical semiconductor chips Chamberlain for his part sees that wave of reinvesting manufacturing in North America and even if they're relocating in the United States there are some parts and some things that they do make in Mexico so their proximity to the border is important you see an explosion in Tucson uh manufacturing and and companies coming in and headquartering whether it's in Chandler or Casa Grande Tucson and Nogales may offer a model for other border cities to follow Chamberlain tells us with border patrol as partners in this project Distributors want to test an EV program where the trucks and qualified drivers can cross between checkpoints every day several times a day without unnecessary delays while also reducing their dependence on ever increasing fossil fuel prices there are lots of drivers in Mexico that bring products to nogal Sonora who don't have a Visa so they drop them off with certain carriers that come back and forth multiple times during the day to bring in already completed manufactured goods or coming in to drop off produce on your side [Music] foreign for the arriving migrants at Casa Elites it's the sound of relief and Hope with a wide range of migrants from all over the world the shelters looking to expand about 85 percent of these folks are hailing from from points within Asia you know particularly the region of India so that's a that's a dramatic shift for us away from a Latin based countries for folks with Pima County leasing half of a former call Center for Casa elitist's shelter it's still may not be enough about 150 men are there but shelter director Teresa Cavendish tells me that Tucson does not have the capacity to offer overnight shelter at the rate of migrants coming in each day we are helping them review their documents making sure that they have all that they need from immigration then assigning them to the right type of shelter based on their their family demographic once they finally get cleared to enter their automatically welcomed by these signs right here and just across this wall is where they finally get to rest for one migrant named Nelson he fled his home country of Ecuador because he didn't feel safe when asked what the month-long Journey was like to get to Tucson Nelson says he went four days without food or water English he tells me his main goal is to learn English and get a job Cavendish says most people in the shelter don't stay too long it can be hours it can be as many as two or three days then sponsor families that are approved by federal immigration officials will act as temporary hosts ahead of Asylum requests Cavendish also says their goal is to help them meet their needs immediately with the help of local volunteers because for some this is the first time they could be away from violence and insecurity in Tucson Brook ciao kega 9 on your side so if we take a look at the number of immigration cases that the executive office for immigration finished over the past few years per month there was actually a huge Spike from fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2022. so let's take a look at how many cases they finished in fiscal year 2021. you'll see that they only finished about 9 600 cases per month on average but in fiscal year 2022 a very big jump they finished just over 26 000 per month on average but here's the surprise already in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 they finished more cases per month than each of the previous two fiscal years with just over 33 500 cases and this is the graph that shows just how many cases they finished in each of the fiscal years so you'll see that there's a very big jump from fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2022 with that line trending up and that's a difference of almost 200 000 cases in many of those cases are being taken on by immigration lawyers a local lawyer telling me he's been taking on more clients lately I did also speak with a local migrant who came into the country legally and he tells me the process can actually take a pretty long time Jorge Rivas always put special attention to each of his dishes for Revis today is just another day he's glad he's working and living in America being able to uh have a nice comfortable home is so rewarding growing up in El Salvador he immigrated to the U.S in 1984. at that time the United States was

giving political Asylum to people that came from El Salvador because of the Civil War it was a civil war that made becoming a U.S citizen easier for Rivas you have to file applications you have to file forms you have to pay fees fees adding up to about 500 but Rivas saying they were worth it what you can achieve being in the United States is so much more than what it cost and that cost paying

2023-05-07 04:13

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