TUCSON, Ariz. (CN) – When Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada became a Nogales, Arizona, police patrolman in 1966, about 80% of the people in the county jail on any given day were Mexican.
Most had simply walked through gaps in the border fence from Nogales, Mexico, a city 10 times the size of its U.S. namesake to shoplift from stores or burglarize homes. Then in the 1990s, the U.S. government blocked the border in the town with metal – surplus helicopter landing pad sections from Vietnam, Estrada said.
The barrier dramatically cut down cross-border traffic.
After that, the Mexican population in the jail plummeted to maybe 1%, where it stands now. Contrary to rhetoric from the Trump administration, Estrada says there is no invasion of criminals along the border in Arizona.
“All of those things – the rape, the home invasion, the robberies – that you say, ‘Well, you must be going through that all the time?’ Those things are rare,” said the seven-term sheriff, who was first elected in 1993 after retiring from the Nogales Police Department.
Estrada, 76, has lived and worked in the small Arizona border town his entire life. He came with his mother and three brothers from Nogales, Mexico, when he was a toddler. He became a U.S. citizen at age 21 and a law enforcement officer shortly thereafter. Nogales, Arizona, is a safe place to live, he said.
In 2018 there were three homicides in the county of 45,000 people – a Nogales police officer killed while responding to a carjacking, a man who stabbed his brother, and an unsolved killing of a man in his rural home. Americans were arrested in the first two slayings, said Estrada.
Before that the last homicide occurred in 2012.
Estrada, the only Hispanic sheriff among 15 Arizona counties, doesn’t think a taller or more extensive border wall will stop people or drugs. Most of both come through ports of entry, where Border Patrol agents are overwhelmed by hundreds of cars and trucks daily, he said.
More agents at the ports and more technology, such as cameras and motion sensors, are the answer, he said – not a wall and demonization of immigrants. Estrada called the Trump administration’s policy of separating families criminal.
“That’s child abuse,” he said.
Cartel territory
Keoki Skinner first went to Agua Prieta, Mexico, in 1986, when the Arizona Republic sent him to cover unrest that erupted as the conservative political party Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) was rising to power. Protesters torched City Hall during his first week there, forcing Skinner to file one story from a telephone in the burning building.
One day he went looking for a juice bar, and discovered the city of about 80,000 across the border wall from Douglas, Arizona, didn’t have one. He told a friend he had met there.
“He said, ‘If you want a juice bar, why don’t you open one? I’ve got the perfect building,’” said Skinner, 69, who has lived south of the border ever since.
He married a Mexican woman and settled down, running the now-closed juice bar and reporting for the Republic and The New York Times on drug smuggling, politics and anything else that came up.
