The town of Sunland Park is small but it has plenty of traffic rumbling through. Lying just on New Mexico's border with Texas, trucks and cars pass to and from El Paso or head over the border to Ciudad Juárez. And overlooking the dusty roads and sunbaked houses is a craggy peak, Mount Cristo Rey, which straddles the border.
"It's a very treacherous mountain, there are steep cliffs on it. It's very dangerous," said Javier Perea, mayor of Sunland Park. "So we've had several bodies out there. People come from other places of the world who are not acclimated to the climate in this area. It's a very dry heat."
His town has long been a crossing point for people trying to enter the United States, but he said the number of people trying, and sometimes meeting a terrible fate, has increased lately. The sound of Customs and Border Protection forces in vehicles or helicopters, rescuing or detaining people, is part of daily life.
"After a while you sort of get numb to it because it just happens on a regular occurrence," he said.
All along the border with Mexico, Customs and Border Protection reports its officers are apprehending soaring numbers of migrants. In fiscal year 2021, ending in September, the agency reported more than 1.7 million encounters with people trying to cross the border. That number is higher than any reported in previous years. Along the New Mexico border, there were nearly five times as many encounters in fiscal year 2021 than in the year before.
The vast majority of those detained crossing the border are immediately expelled under the rule known as Title 42, designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The high number of encounters could be partly explained by people trying again.
“In El Paso, for example, about 40 percent of the numbers are the same individual trying multiple times,” Representative Veronica Escobar told the website Border Report.
Still, in the town of Sunland Park, life is disrupted both by the flow of migrants and by the activities of Border Patrol agents. Perea, the mayor, said people passing through town are trying to get out as fast as possible, and don't commit crimes, but they do have an impact on daily life. Sometimes they end up in a schoolyard, right on the border, and the school is locked down. Once, two people dressed in school uniforms to blend in with the students.
"Obviously," Perea said, "at night, if there's someone lurking around your trash bins or…people are hiding under your trailer. Obviously, that is a concern."
The town's tiny fire and police departments are also strained. Perea emphasized that they "don't do immigration enforcement," but police respond when residents complain about trespassing and the fire department answers calls when people fall off the nearby stretches of border wall, some of which was built by the privately-funded We Build The Wallorganization.
"They get up to the very top and they jump down and don't realize it's a pretty high wall," he said. "And they end up with broken legs, broken necks, broken just about everything at this point."
In town, residents said they are used to migrants passing through, and enforcement agencies, but have noticed an uptick in activity. One man asked not to give his name to discuss a security agency, but then said the border agents are great for business in the deli where he works. He sells them spicy tortas and fresh donuts.
In a nearby supermarket, owner Gloria Ramírez said she sees, "more and more people every day" coming over the border. She said she doesn't judge people trying to get to the US and that they don't generally cause any trouble.
"If they stop by my house, and say, 'Can I have some water?' I'll give him water,'" she said. But she does find the agents heavy-handed sometimes, saying they stop a lot of people, including legal residents like herself, and she thinks that's wrong.
Generally, when going to work, Ramírez does not carry an ID. "What if they stop me," she said. "What are they going to do? They're going to take me in." Like many people here, she is originally from Mexico. "You see, they see your color," she says, "they see your dress, and they think…" She tailed off.
The Border Network for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in El Paso, produced a report this week including allegations that agents wrongfully enter homes in Sunland Park
A representative of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Landon R. Hutchens, wrote in an email that Sunland Park is one of the top five illegal human smuggling areas on the border and that agents have legal authority under the Immigration Nationality Act to conduct searches.
Hutchens also said that in fiscal year 2021, Border Patrol rescued 12,833 migrants along the border. He wrote, "CBP places great emphasis on the professionalism and integrity of its workforce," and said that its website provided means for people to complain about unprofessional behavior.
The director of the Border Network for Human Rights, Fernando Garcia, said, "we are spending a lot of money to seal the border, I mean, to militarize the border," but that the push factors driving people from Latin America and beyond are getting stronger
"Violence and impunity and corruption and the other one, economic depression," he said. "But there's one factor that we're paying more attention to, which is climate change. I mean, people are losing their crops, that didn't happen in the last 50, 100 years."
He attributes an increase in the number of Mexicans trying to cross to drought in parts of that country.
In the city of Las Cruces, north of Sunland Park, a shelter at El Calvario church helps some of the few people who are allowed to stay in the U.S. and seek asylum. Shelter director Susana Torres said they now see people coming from all over the world.
"Before, in 2019, we see a lot of families from Guatemala, from El Salvador," she said. "But now we have families from Haiti, Turkey, from Eritrea. I mean, from very far places."
When I visit, a young man from Cuba was passing through on his way to join friends and family in Miami. He had questions about the eggs and pancakes served for breakfast. Should he put syrup on the eggs as well as the pancakes? In Cuba, they never do this.
He asked not to give his name as his asylum case is active, but said the journey to the US was more dangerous than he expected.
"They told me the level of danger there was, but it was much more," he said. "In Mexico, we were thirty-something people, locked in a garage for three days, with a padlock, without heat, without ventilation."
He could hear gunshots, dreamed about the bullets when he slept.
Still, he said in Cuba, the economy is depressed and popular demonstrations have been met with violent repression. Despite the perilous journey, he sees no reason the flow of people arriving at the border would slow down.
"If things keep on as they are," he said, "and Cubans get the opportunity to enter [the U.S.], Cuba will be empty."
