Following his visit to the Arizona-Mexico border last week, Sheriff Barry Virts stressed the importance of treating border security and immigration as separate issues.

Virts was invited by Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels to tour the border, where he visited a number of ranches to learn more about border security.

“Immigration is about economic migrants, political asylees and refugees,” Virts said on Thursday. “We see [migrants] as farm workers here, but an economic migrant in this country could be a computer software designer, an engineer, someone in the healthcare field or anything else.
“Border security is about criminal activity coming into this country from another, especially drugs.”

During his four-night visit to Arizona, Virts said that he stayed at a ranch 250 yards from the border with Mexico, which is about the same distance from his office to Route 31 in Lyons. He talked to four different ranchers, including one who owned 24,000 acres on a 10-mile stretch along the border.

“These ranchers were telling me what was going on down there,” Virts said. “They talked about how Border Patrol kind of disregarded their property, cut their fences, left gates open, and how the smuggling was happening.”

Virts was shown security footage from the ranches that he said showed groups of six to 23 people crossing their property dressed in desert camo with handguns and radios, some of whom he said were carrying 70 to 80-pound vacuum sealed packages of drugs on their backs.

A fifth-generation rancher told Virts that, in the past, it wasn’t a big deal. He said that from the late 1950s to the 80s, about once a week someone would cross the border on his property. The rancher would invite them in for a sandwich, some water and then let them stay the night in his bunkhouse. In the morning, Virts said that the migrant would feel obligated to do some work on the ranch before heading north.

From 1995 to 2010, the rancher told Virts that up to 300 people per day would come across his property and that the drug smuggling started in 2010.

“If our farmers or our residents had to endure what those ranchers and residents who live on the border endure, my phone would be ringing off the hook,” Virts said. “People would want that taken care of and resolved.”

Virts noted that securing the border isn’t about breaking up families and deporting all undocumented immigrants. He said that economic migrants are important and that people also need to be allowed to come to the country as political asylees and refugees.

“Being in this country undocumented is a civil violation, which is Border Patrol and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] work,” Virts acknowleged. “But if someone commits a crime in Wayne County - I don’t care what their race, creed, color, religion is - if we have probable cause, we’re going to engage that person and arrest them.”

When an undocumented immigrant is stopped for a traffic violation, Virts said that they forward their information to Border Patrol and then it’s Border Patrol’s decision whether or not they want to go pick them up.

If an undocumented immigrant is arrested and admitted to the Wayne County jail, Border Patrol can file a detainer which requires the jail to turn that person over to ICE when they’re released.

“Not one person in this jail who has had a detainer filed against them has walked out of this jail to re offend anyone,” Virts added.
Wayne County also houses overflow immigration detainees from the Batavia facility, which Virts said earned the jail $140,000 in revenue last year.

According to Virts, a wall alone won’t be enough to stop smugglers and the terrain is so rough where he was, that a wall couldn’t be built in some places. He said that they need to invest in more technology like thermal imaging, infrared and drones, along with more Border Patrol personnel, including agents on horseback to patrol the rough terrain.

“Trump is saying that Mexico is going to pay for the wall, but we have to have Mexico be our partner in this because if Mexico is going to allow that scout to be on the hill, we’re in trouble,” he said.

Virts reiterated multiple times that he didn’t go down there for immigration purposes and that border security shouldn’t be thrown “in the same bucket” as immigration. Without border security, he said that they won’t be able to stop the flow of drugs, especially heroin, that eventually makes its way to Wayne County.

“If we don’t secure that border, that is a slap in the face to every family that has ever lost someone to a drug overdose, to every family that’s struggling with drug addiction, and it will continually undermine this country and drain our resources,” he concluded.