Jan 27, 2019 8 min read

Geography may not be your strong suit, but consider the size of Pennsylvania: 46,055 square miles.

Double that, add several thousand square miles, and you have the expanse of the Sonoran Desert, an arid mass that covers the southeastern corner of California, one-third of Arizona and portions of three states in Mexico.

Despite its seemingly inhospitable environment, the region boasts a vast array of fauna and flora, including hundreds of bird species and thousands of native plant species, providing a worthy location for biology studies. And so Washington & Jefferson College associate professor Jason Kilgore developed Ecology of the American Southwest, a two-week course he began to offer each January for students to travel to the desert.

“After doing that course for a number of years, I realized that we need to be addressing the bigger issues at hand,” he said. “I saw more and more of how people are being affected there, how people in the Northeast don’t know much about what’s happening down there, and that we need to get down there.”

Engaging the border

Last January, Kilgore launched a new sociology course, Engaging the Sonoran Border, “designed to increase your knowledge and experience of U.S. immigration policy on humans (and other animals) living near or crossing the Sonoran border in Arizona.”

Earlier this month, he accompanied 10 students to the Southwest for the course’s second session, which happened to occur during the longest partial government shutdown in American history, with funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall serving as the focal point for the impasse.

“The border looks different in different places, and the use of the term ‘wall’ is misleading,” Kilgore explained. “I think ‘barrier’ is becoming a better term, because some of these barriers are more permeable to water. Some are more permeable to certain kinds of wildlife, and some are more permeable to people.”

As his students viewed at a port of entry in the border city of Nogales, Ariz., the barrier largely is built of iron slats with rolls of barbed wire at the top.

Further into the desert, they saw something as simple as fence posts with a few strands of wire separating the two nations.

“You go these vehicle barriers and look across, and that’s Mexico,” W&J student Margaret McQuaid said following the group’s return to campus. “Unless you saw a sign, you would not know the difference between a cattle ranch and Mexico. It is as simple as that.”

The Gadsden Purchase was the action in which the United States paid the Mexican government $10 million for 29,670 square miles of what in the 1850s basically was wasteland. The result created an arbitrary line on the map, as junior Megan Bollman observed.

“Because you’re on the wrong side of the neighborhood, you’re automatically an enemy,” Bollman said.

And anything involving enemies has its victims, as the students were reminded by memorial crosses placed at the border in honor of those who didn’t make it.

Los Samaritanos

About 70 miles from the border at Nogales is Tucson, the second-largest city in Arizona and an epicenter for immigration-related activities on several fronts, from adjudicating the cases of migrants to providing humanitarian aid for people attempting to navigate the conditions of the Sonoran Desert.

Regarding the latter, the city’s Southside Presbyterian Church is the home of the Tucson Samaritans, or Los Samaritanos, self-described as “a healing presence along the border.” At the church, the students received training, complete with a 12-page manual and field guide, in part from the Rev. John Fife, a 1962 graduate of Washington & Jefferson.

As far as learning about immigration policy, Fife would seem to be an ideal mentor: In the 1980s, he was at the forefront of the Sanctuary movement to provide support for Latin American refugees fleeing death squads in their home countries, and in 2004, he co-founded No More Deaths as an organization with a name that signifies its mission.

“We spent three days with different groups in the field, legally leaving water, first aid, food packs, sockets and blankets in geocached drop-off locations,” Kilgore said about the Los Samaritanos experience, during which students found numerous migrant-related items to bring back to Washington.

Those included water jugs that had been damaged – some are marked as poison, according to Kilgore – and footwear known as carpet shoes that help avoid detection.

Operation Streamline

Back in Tucson, the W&J group sat in on federal court proceedings related to Operation Streamline, a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice now in its 14th year. In another case of the name stating the purpose, the initiative seeks to try as many defendants as possible in a short period of time.

“It is when a group of migrants who were captured are brought in and put forth in front of a judge, and they are tried in a criminal proceeding instead of more of a civil one,” sophomore Kailee Havdra explained. “They are basically asked if they plead not guilty or guilty to entering the U.S. illegally, and most of the time they plead guilt and take whatever punishment is given.”

The students learned that defendants are able to wear headphones for translation services, but those often are ineffective.

“One big thing that I really was not aware of, and I don’t think many of us were, is the issue of indigenous languages and the language barrier in the court system,” said Sofia Carrasco, a W&J sophomore and Carlynton High School graduate. “You have a judge who speaks English, and then you have a translator who in the headsets will speak Spanish. And the lawyers all speak Spanish. But when it comes to indigenous languages that are not Latin-based, aren’t similar to Spanish at all, it does create an issue for the defendant.”

Being better informed

With roots in Ecuador, the South American nation from which her father’s family hails, Carrasco said she enrolled in Engaging the Sonoran Border to have a more informed opinion when discussing issues pertaining to immigration.

“I’m looking at possible careers in politics or immigration law,” she said, “and with today’s political climate of everybody really having the platform to be able to put out their opinion – regardless of whether or not they’re informed about certain issues – I wanted to go down there and see for myself so when I do speak, I can have that background.”

So did sophomore Kenneth Jimenez, whose mother was born in Central America’s El Salvador and now has a Green Card as a permanent resident. Growing up in a Houston, Texas, community with a substantial number of migrants, where he often was exposed to the ramifications of immigration laws.

“A very close friend of mine, his dad got arrested from a work raid, unfairly,” he recalled. “So I saw how that affected him. I see how a lot of these cases affect other families.”

His experience in Arizona allowed him to see how a substantially greater number of families are affected.

“It’s heartbreaking hearing these stories, that people would give up everything to cross and just be caught right on the spot,” Jimenez said.

As an Upper St. Clair High School senior at this time last year, Lily Bonasso heard similar stories in a documentary shown during a unit about immigration policy in her Spanish class.

“It really affected me,” she said. “I mean, everyone in the class was upset. They were sad. But I would go home and talk to my mom every day, because it took us three days to get through it, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know what to do. I want to know more.'”

Then she learned about Engaging the Sonoran Border.

“I was scared to do it,” she admitted, “because I’m a freshman and I didn’t know the professor, and I didn’t know anyone else going on it. But I thought to myself, if I don’t take this opportunity, then who am I?”

Beyond immigration

Hearkening back to Kilgore’s original purpose for taking students to Arizona, this year’s course members learned about the environmental impacts of constructing physical barriers in the desert.

“You’re also talking to people who are showing you that if the wall goes up, it’s not just going to keep people out,” Havdra said. “It’s going to ruin 93 to 95 endangered species, and it’s going to go through Native American land and split their land up, which is rightfully theirs.”

Then there’s the financial aspect.

“It’s not just that you spend all this chunk of money to put up a wall. You spend it and then you have to spend more and more and more because it’s going to need to be renovated or fixed.”

While the students had opportunities to talk with people who have differing points of view about immigration, one afforded by a meeting with U.S. Border Patrol representatives was not available.

“We did that last year, but we could not do that this year due to the partial government shutdown,” Kilgore said. “We were considered a non-essential function.”