Gate 18C
Gate 18C
Mikal Jakubal
September 11, 2024
Caution! The following post contains some images showing injuries, minor blood and IV needles.
“He said it was last night around midnight or so. He slipped from the top. He fell, heard the crack, saw the bone sticking out, and then he went unconscious. He woke up this morning and the rest of the group was gone.”
—Juanita Cerca, Tucson Samaritans visiting volunteer, translating for the injured man.
Sometime around midnight on Tuesday, August 27th, “Alberto” (a pseudonym to protect his privacy) and four others were attempting to climb over the 30-foot high U.S.-Mexico border wall east of Sasabe, Arizona. Alberto, age 60, fell during the climb, suffered a violent leg fracture, passed out and awoke before dawn, alone, bleeding and in pain, on the Mexican side of the wall. It would be 24 hours before he was rescued by volunteers in a dramatic act of defiance of U.S. federal law.
After regaining consciousness, Alberto was able to get the attention of a nearby crew from Spencer Construction (“Spencer”) taking advantage of the cool, pre-dawn temperatures to conduct a concrete pour. Workers told Alberto they couldn’t help him there, but he should go to the gate, marked 18C, a couple hundred yards away. With little choice and no pain killers, Alberto dragged himself down the steep, loose, rocky slope to the gate, the lower two inches of his tibia protruding through torn and bleeding flesh.
The gate was welded shut. Alberto would remain there in pain until almost midnight as rescuers tried to find someone with the tools and authority to cut the gate open.
Few outside of southern Arizona have heard of Sasabe or the Port of Entry there. It provides cross-border access between the rural hamlet of Sasabe, Arizona and the small town of Sásabe, Sonora. And not much else. There are no tourist destinations in this part of Sonora. The mountainous borderlands in either direction have become a major drug smuggling and human trafficking corridor due to the remote, rugged topography and relative ease of circumventing the border wall.
From Sasabe, the Trump-era border wall runs west about 3.5 miles to the Tohono-O’odham Reservation boundary. To the east, it extends about 20 miles to the Pajarita Wilderness, where it abruptly stops. Some human smugglers choose this end-run, while others climb over or cut through the wall elsewhere. Alberto’s group was led to a spot about 6-1/2 miles from the wall’s end, where they would attempt to climb over.
Juanita Cerca is a bilingual, visiting humanitarian volunteer from Philadelphia where she works as a veterinary nurse. Her ability to translate would be invaluable as the day’s events unfolded. She originally came out to help Humane Borders and then continued to volunteer with Tucson Samaritans. This was her first day at the wall.
Juanita describes finding Alberto:
We got there … I don’t know the exact time. [Likely between 11 a.m. and noon.] And we were … driving down the road and I saw him sitting on the rocks and I was like “yo there’s a person there!”
There was a Samaritan group that had passed earlier and they said “Oh my god we didn’t even see him when we drove by here earlier.” I was looking and spotted him. He was pretty easy to miss, so I’m glad we were able to spot him out.
Her team had been out at the east end of the line, where the wall stops, at a makeshift camp where asylum seekers congregate in the morning to await being taken into Border Patrol custody. Humanitarian volunteers observe the custody process, provide food and water and provide a welcoming first contact for people who often have endured extreme hardship to get to the U.S.
Juanita:
When we first got there we had these little wooden bracelets with a little cross on it. We tied one to a little rock and we threw it at him so he can grab it. The first thing he did, you know, he did the sign of the cross three times. He kissed it up to heaven and he literally just started crying. And he mentioned it several times, you know, he was mentioning God and how he wanted him to just take him home. Not like dying-wise, but like going back to Mexico. He was like “I just don’t want to die out here.” He had a lot of faith. Before I left I prayed with him because I wanted to let him know that he wasn’t alone.
People migrate across the border and into the U.S. through this region daily; sometimes by the dozens, sometimes by the hundreds. These people travel to Magdalena de Kino or other northern Sonora towns where they arrange mandatory payment to the local cartel for a coyote — a guide employed by the cartels — to take them over, around or through the border fence.
Some will attempt to navigate the United States’ increasingly arduous asylum process. Once across the border and on U.S. soil, they freely surrender themselves to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“Border Patrol” or “BP”) agents in order to begin their asylum case.
Others, either those ineligible for asylum or who merely want to come into the U.S. temporarily to work — this had been Alberto’s intention — pay coyotes to get them across and then lead them north on remote trails, sometimes hiking for days with little food or water. The terrain is rugged, the environment merciless. Many die or go missing. Hundreds of human remains are found every year in this region and in the lower desert to the west.
Stand down.
Juanita:
[It was] literally just a waiting game. I was just sitting there with him. Just doing basic chit chat. I asked him where he was from. He told me he was from Oaxaca. I asked him if he had a wife or kids. He mentioned that he had custody of his granddaughters and the main reason he was trying to come over was because he wanted to build a bigger room for them because the one granddaughter had just turned 17 and he wanted to give her more space.
Juanita:
Gail [Tucson Samaritans volunteer] was able to call the [Arivaca Fire Department] and we were waiting there because [the Fire Chief] is like “I’m on my way.” But then we waited and waited and there was still nothing and we didn’t know why they weren’t coming.
Arivaca Fire Department Chief and Paramedic Tangye Beckham got the original call from the Samaritans at scene at 1:30 p.m. and set out immediately toward the site in the department’s ambulance. While en route, she called Border Patrol but was told to stand down.
Chief Beckham:
I called the [BP] Duty Chief and he said that [Alberto] was a Mexican, that it was the Mexican side, and he would contact Mexico and they would have to respond. And I was to stand down.
At that point she headed back to the station, but later turned around and continued in to the scene.
Chief Beckham:
Gayle called me back [at 4:30 p.m.] and said he was experiencing a lot of pain and she said he was bleeding. And I said “well I can go out there and assess the situation,” which is what I did. And then make a determination from there, which I did.
I turned around because this is such an interesting and unique situation that nobody I talked to has ever run into. And I was naive too. [Border Patrol] did contact Mexico. There’s no denying that. Multiple times. But Mexico didn’t see it as an issue. Then come to find out the individual was not in Mexico. The individual was actually on U.S. soil.
The reason Chief Beckham called Border Patrol in the first place, and temporarily returned to the station, has to do with legal technicalities that enable the fire department to cover their costs when patients are undocumented. The Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) (Section 1011) provided federal funds to cover costs associated with providing emergency health services to undocumented people. That program had provided reimbursement for the department’s costs until it sunsetted in 2016.
Ever since, in order to get reimbursed, the U.S. government requires that the patient be in Border Patrol custody, which requires notifying BP. This has been a sticking point at times with humanitarian aid activists but Chief Beckham sees it as a necessary tradeoff for the Fire Department to maintain the funding that allows them to be available when needed.
This being a unique and uncertain situation, Chief Beckham later chose to not notify BP that she was transporting Alberto after his eventual rescue, meaning her small department will absorb the entire cost of rescue and transport to a Tucson hospital. BP would eventually track down Alberto’s location and place him in official custody at the hospital.
"This guy needs to be transported."
Acting as translator, Juanita asks Alberto to crawl to the fence from where he lay on the rocks, in the shade of the small mesquite tree, so Arivaca Fire EMTs can conduct a standard patient assessment.
They request he extend his arm through the fence and they start an IV, but this is only for rehydration. He is given Tylenol and ibuprofen to swallow for pain, but nothing stronger despite his ghastly injury.
Chief Beckham:
I can provide care through the wall, but if I give a narcotic, I have to transport. And I have to explain that to the DEA.
After assessing Alberto’s medical status, Chief Beckham asks Sally, a member of Green Valley Samaritans to use the satellite phone to call the Border Patrol Duty Officer:
Call [Duty Officer] Navatny and tell him that this guy needs to be transported. Tell him that I’m telling you that. Obvious fracture to the right ankle. CSM is decreased. He’s hypertensive and tachycardic. He’s got 8/10 pain and I can not give any pain meds unless I can transport.
After relaying the patient’s condition, Sally then gets transferred to a supervisor who hijacks the conversation from Alberto’s injuries, his need for rescue, and authorization to cut the wall to whether or not he is in Mexico or the U.S.
Inside the line.
Sally, speaking to Border Patrol via satellite phone:
No, he’s never been outside of the line. He’s right at the wall, but he’s inside the barbed wire. No, but he’s still in the U.S. inside the line. No, he’s not on the north side of the wall, but he’s on the north side of the line. The actual line…
Since the early 1900s, the border here has been marked by a 4′ high, barbed wire livestock fence, visible now about 20 feet behind Alberto. The recently-built “wall” is far enough inside the surveyed international boundary line that U.S. construction and maintenance crews can access the south side without illegally crossing into Mexico’s territory.
By questioning whether Alberto was actually on U.S. soil, the Border Patrol official was making a disingenuously thin justification for abdicating moral responsibility and failing to take action. They knew exactly what they were doing as much as they knew exactly which country’s soil Alberto was on. They were making a conscious and cruel choice to not help a man with threats to life and limb.
Rescue: no easy options.
There were three ways to rescue Alberto: medevac helicopter; sending a rescue crew on foot; or cutting the gate open.
Chief Beckham had called for a medevac, but had been denied.
A ground-based rescue was an actual, if difficult, possibility because access through the fence was available a mile and a half to the east where smugglers had cut through one of the bollards with a cordless angle grinder.
Each bollard is set into concrete and welded to the plate at the top of the fence. Once cut, the bollards can easily be pivoted aside by hand, creating a 16″ gap, wide enough for a person to slip through. Cutting and repairing bollards is a constant cat-and-mouse game between smugglers and BP.
Getting from the cut bollard to Alberto’s location would first require assembling a team and then scrambling up and down seven steep ridges over the intervening mile and a half. Alberto is a big man, but with a team of eight strong people and a backboard, it would be possible to hike him out, though arduous and time consuming.
By this point it was after 5 p.m., approximately 17 hours since the fall. Every additional hour without definitive medical care — in this case surgery and antibiotics — increased Alberto’s risk of permanent loss of function in his left foot, a life-threatening infection, or amputation.
With medevac denied and ground rescue a time-consuming prospect, it had become obvious to everyone by this point that the gate would need to be cut open. The only question was by whom and under what circumstances.
If Alberto’s injuries had been more severe, we would’ve been watching a man die, as much of callous bureaucratic indifference as of the wounds sustained in the fall.
"We are not going to be cutting the fence."
According to the Samaritans who first encountered Alberto, Spencer workers indicated to them that they would have been willing to cut the welds earlier in the morning, but Border Patrol refused to authorize it. The word about the incident got to Spencer higher-ups who also quashed the idea. Most BP field agents would show little interest.
Juanita:
We had one set of Border Patrol people that had come earlier in the day and when we tried to stop them the first time, they were like “we gotta go somewhere. We gotta go. We gotta go. We gotta go!” and they completely ignored us and just drove. So, when they were driving back, we stopped them again and they were just like “well, there’s nothing we can do” and they just kept going and we’re like, “Great. Thanks.”
By early evening, with a different shift, a recently arrived BP agent with flaming red hair spoke to someone on her radio. She ended the call and announced to everyone on site, “We are not going to be cutting the fence.” She left shortly after.
There were indeed agents who recognized the need to cut the gate, felt empathy for the man on the other side, recognized the stonewalling of their bosses as reprehensible; but it was always a decision that had to be made by higher-ups, none of whom ever seemed to have a name or a way to be contacted directly.
Gates are built to be opened.
The heavy steel gates that break up the border wall’s rusty stockade are mostly located in drainages, seasonally opened to allow debris flows from flash floods to pass harmlessly. Originally designed with complex lock systems, most of these have been abandoned after smugglers easily drilled out or picked them.
Instead of locks, the gates are now temporarily welded shut with scraps of heavy-gauge steel or chunks of 6″ x 6″ steel bollard material from the wall. The welds can be cut through with a torch or any type of metal cutting saw in minutes to free up the gate for maintenance access or flood passage. Or rescue. Re-welding them is equally routine.
While cutting a hole in the border wall might appear to be an extreme action that would cause expensive damage, cutting open a gate is a routine practice. They are gates. They are designed to be opened.
There was a kerfuffle last year when right-wing social media accounts posted videos of flood gates welded in the open position, portraying it as the Biden Administration purposely letting undocumented migrants cross the border. An unabashed lie for propaganda purposes, it was the subject of numerous news stories and was thoroughly debunked.
The takeaway is that these gates are routinely cut and re-welded as needed by the Border Patrol as a matter of policy. This was the obvious and necessary way to rescue Alberto, but someone had to authorize it and show up with the tools.
Or, someone had to just show up with the tools, authorization be damned.
As frustration built, discussion between everyone at scene openly turned to ways to cut through the welds holding the gate in place, who had cutting tools, and how and when they could be obtained. Committed to trying everything, one volunteer drove out to the end of the wall, hailed the coyotes over at their camp in Mexico and asked if they had a torch or grinder to cut the gate open. They said that they couldn’t help. That area was the other cartel’s territory.
Read that again: humanitarian aid volunteers had to request help from employees of the human smuggling cartel in Mexico since the Border Patrol wouldn’t act, but that group of coyotes couldn’t assist because Alberto was over the line between competing cartel factions. This is how complex day to day life and politics on the border is. Things work differently here.
Mexican army no-show
Spencer security had called Mexican officials at 5 a.m and Border Patrol had also contacted them multiple times during the day. Earlier, BP had told a Samaritan that the Mexican military claimed that they had come out but couldn’t find Alberto, likely a lie because BP and Spencer had relayed exact coordinates. Finally, in late afternoon, word came down that the Mexican military was en route, with a 2-3 hour ETA. By that point, I’m not sure anyone believed it.
Meanwhile, Alberto continued to wait in pain.
The lack of Mexican response could have been the result of many factors: general incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, inter-agency turf disputes, communication breakdowns, or maybe fear of confrontations with cartels.
It could also be a direct byproduct of the Biden administration’s current policy of putting political pressure on Mexico to stop migrants and would-be asylees well south of the border to avoid the hot-potato optics of migrants crossing into the U.S. If so, it might be the Mexican authorities’ way of sending a message to would-be migrants: if you try to cross, you are on your own.
The binational indifference to the suffering of this man reminds me of the grisly old West tradition where ranchers would shoot coyotes and hang their corpses over barbed wire, a supposed warning to others to stay away.
Personal voice memo, recorded on site:
7:20 p.m. It’s so hard to just watch this cruelty, feeling powerless. When we all know what need to be done. The sunset is pretty. It’ll be dark soon, adding another layer of complication. Cartels don’t care about us, but they do get into shootouts in Mexico sometimes. It’s always sketchier here at night. There is a big storm cell west of here, moving north, another to the east. Hopefully they won’t hit us. If lightning starts we’ll need to stay away from the wall and get Alberto to move away. Samaritans have given Alberto mylar blankets to cover himself with and keep rain off.
Personal voice memo:
8:25 p.m. I just returned from a 6-mile drive west to cell service at Fresnal Hill to send updates. On the way out, I dodged a giant rattlesnake in the road and two javelinas. I drove straight through the storm cell, with blasting wind gusts, rain and way-too-close lightning strikes. Once in cell service, I sent a few updates and hightailed it back. That is a wicked storm, but it looks like it’s going to miss us.
The Samaritans had left by the time I returned. Two volunteers from No More Deaths arrived shortly to provide support. I’d already committed myself to staying with Alberto until he was rescued. There was one BP agent still there, plus one parked up on the hill with lights on to help the Mexican rescuers find our location.
We waited, chatting in English, watching the storms roll by to the east and west. Alberto was there, three feet away, right across the fence, bundled up in mylar blankest, quiet.
Personal voice memo:
We’re all just waiting to see what’s next. It’s starting to spit rain. Not heavy, but a big storm would be bad. It could be a long night. Alberto doesn’t speak English, so it feels strange speaking about him right in front of him but not including him, as if he were already dead, invisible. I’d try, but my Spanish is very basic. Maybe he’s sleeping.
After a radio call, the BP agent at the gate informed us that the Mexicans wouldn’t be coming until morning. The truck on the hill left. Then we got word the fire department was on their way back. This time we knew they’d come with tools. The last agent left.
"This is done."
Chief Beckham: The last I’d heard and I can’t remember the time, was [the Mexicans] were not gonna come till morning. That’s when I said “Nope. We’re done. This is done.”
The ambulance with Chief Beckham and the EMT arrived, followed by two uniformed firefighters in a pickup truck. They began a quick assessment of the gate. The No More Deaths volunteers, who speak Spanish, explained to Alberto what is going to happen, asking him to crawl west along the wall, out of the way.
When loading up at the station, the fire crew had realized they were out of 2-stroke mix gas, the fuel that the saws run on, though each saw was fueled up. They began cutting at the gate’s top rail, then switched to the welds when the blades proved too small to completely sever the rail, being conscious to maximize efficiency of scarce fuel. First one saw ran out, then the second one, with the gate not yet free.
They tried the pneumatic spreader, built for tasks like prying open jammed car doors, but the gate didn’t budge.
A pneumatic cutter was brought out and after a few minutes of cutting, twisting and deforming, the last piece of metal on the gate’s left side gave way. The gate was still attached on the right by two large pieces of angle iron and two hunks of 6×6 wall tubing bonding the gate frame to the main fence.
A heavy duty tow-rope was attached to the top left corner of the gate and hooked to a vehicle’s tow hitch. Creeping forward in low 4WD, pulling on the upper corner of the freed side of the gate, the metal holding the gate in place bent and distorted. Welds began to fail. The gate opened, then opened more, finally succumbing to the force of the tow rope and the gate’s own massive steel weight. The remaining welds snapped violently. The gate slammed into the dirt.
Firefighters semi-carried Alberto upright, limping, to the ambulance, placing him onto the wheeled stretcher, loaded the stretcher in the ambulance and locked it in place.
"Let's get the hell out of here!"
Personal voice memo:
It’s a little after 11pm. We’re waiting for the ambulance crew to prepare Alberto for transport. We’ll be caravanning out, ambulance in the lead. I’m suddenly feeling mildly apprehensive.
Now that the focus and intensity of the crime-in-progress has waned, it is striking me how extremely illegal this is. I’m not relishing the idea of a truckload of federal agents descending on us, however unlikely that is. Still, let’s get the hell out of here!
Not that I would renounce or regret assisting one bit! Providing humanitarian aid to prevent loss of life or limb is an absolutely justifiable reason for minor, temporary property damage and I don’t believe any jury anywhere would convict any of us, even the firefighters who did the actual cutting.
No one else seems concerned. I let it go.
The drive out went without incident. At Sasabe, the others peeled off, leaving me following the ambulance north toward Tucson. The Border Patrol checkpoint north of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge boundary was in a shift change. We didn’t stop.
"My job is to rescue."
The next day, Border Patrol called Chief Beckham.
TB: They called me the next day and asked if it was me or the humanitarian group. I said it was me.
Me: What did they say in response?
TB: “Okay.”
Me: That was it, “okay”?
TB: That was it.
Me: Do you expect any repercussions?
TB: I would expect that they would have already occurred.
I did my job. My job, although this is a unique situation, my job is to rescue. And this individual required rescue.
The individual was determined to be on U.S. soil and required rescue so we cut the barrier keeping us from rescuing the individual. Same as if it had been a car. We can cut into cars. We can cut into buildings. Take whatever steps are necessary for rescue.
Regarding Border Patrol conveniently leaving when they heard the fire department was coming back:
TB: I believe they knew I was going to cut it. It was not discussed. I believe they did know that that’s what my plan was.
The coolest story I'll never get to tell.
It was killing me to not be photographing the wall being cut, but it seemed far too legally risky and I figured I’d never be able to tell that part of the story anyway. Another volunteer and I each did sneak a quick phone snap of the firefighters at work for posterity (theirs is the one that got published widely). Before leaving I said to one of the volunteers at scene that, “this is the coolest story that I’ll never be able to tell. Maybe in ten years or something.”
Two days later, while Alberto is in formal custody in the hospital awaiting a second surgery, the Arizona Luminaria published an article where Chief Beckham states that she ordered the wall cut.
I can tell the story now.
Everything to do with the U.S.-Mexico border, the borderlands, the wall and the people who try to cross it has become hyper politicized. Basic humanity and real-world practicality are sacrificed for politics, money, bureaucracy and PR.
In an acute, on-the-ground emergency, this forces the people with the least power and the most to lose to make the hardest decisions. The Border Patrol agents on the ground, whatever their individual views, should not be in the position of taking the heat for the cold bureaucratic indifference of their agency; humanitarian aid volunteers and construction workers should not have to helplessly watch a man with a grave injury bleed and suffer; small town firefighters should not be required to make decisions involving damage to an international boundary wall to provide basic medical care.
All walls fall in the end.
Addendum, November 7th, 2024
We can expect the border situation to only get crueler, meaner, less humane. It has been bad under every administration and will be bad under this new one. Billions more dollars will be wasted and more people will suffer and die. The USA will be a worse place for all this, but those of us who volunteer here will continue to provide humanitarian aid as best we can. Gates are meant to be open. All walls are destined to fall.
The work done by humanitarian aid groups and the Arivaca Fire Department or various humanitarian aid groups is rarely this dramatic or newsworthy, but is essential and largely runs on volunteer work and donations. Here are the websites if any readers are so inclined to send donations or want more information (links open in new tabs):
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