The 30-foot steel bollard wall stretching across the U.S.-Mexico border abruptly ends where the Cocopah Indian Reservation begins.
This “gap” area is a major crossing point for migrants, said Jason Mercado, a former Border Patrol agent with 27 years of experience.
Standing on a small hill in Andrade, California, a vantage point he previously frequented while on duty, Mercado’s fingers traced alongside the Colorado River, which flowed downstream next to him and into Mexico.
“When you get down a little further in the background, you can kind of see the border fence … and the river,” which acts as a natural deterrent in the absence of a physical wall, he said. “Depending on how high the flow is, you can walk right across, barely getting your feet wet.”
For the Cocopah tribe, this river is a “cultural power source,” which is why they have historically opposed a wall on their land.
Farm fields stretch as far as the eye can see, blurring the territorial lines where Arizona, California, Mexico and the tribal land meet. Mercado recalled his time patrolling this region, also known as the Yuma Crossing.
“You’d get U.S. citizens that would go have a good time in Mexico and stumble across,” he said.
But Mercado’s last year in service coincided with a surge in unauthorized migrant crossings and a switch to the catch-and-release policy under President Joe Biden.
The Biden administration directed agents to process and release migrants into the U.S. in an expedited fashion, under humanitarian parole, instead of deporting them for making an unauthorized entry.
As former press secretary Jen Psaki put it, the Democratic-controlled White House hoped to make the immigration process “a humane system.”
But cities like Yuma could not keep up with the uncontrolled flow of people.
This county, which shares a 118-mile-long border with Mexico, experienced an overwhelming surge in crossings from 40 a day before 2020 to more than 1,000 a day, with highs of 2,000, particularly during 2021 and 2022. (The occupancy of the Border Patrol processing center is roughly 500 people.)
During this time, agents felt demoralized, Mercado said.
After releasing millions of people into the United States without proper background checks, “you start feeling a little depressed and a little ashamed of your work,” he confessed.
Farmers and the Yuma hospital bore the brunt of the surge, as seen through reports of contaminated produce fields and an at-capacity maternity ward. The city still holds unreimbursed funds six years after the surge began during the pandemic and under the Biden administration.
The Deseret News traveled to Yuma in February and late March to understand how this border town is navigating life during the Trump era, when the crossings have all but stopped.
Since President Donald Trump reversed many of the Biden-era border policies, things are now quiet along the Mexico-U.S. border.
Crossings have dropped by 99% in Yuma, with daily encounters ranging from three to 10 people.
“At times, it gets better, like right now,” said John Boelts, the president of the Arizona Farm Bureau. “But we need to maintain this, regardless of administration or political persuasion. The borders of our country should be places of legal commerce.”
The Trump White House touts that it has secured the border and eased some immigration rules for farmers. But is that enough to bring stability to border towns like Yuma?
In Yuma, farmers felt the impact
Nearly 1.5 million migrants entered the country illegally in fiscal year 2024, 2 million the year before that. In fiscal year 2022, Yuma, Ariz., became one of the busiest Border Patrol sectors in the country.
Most people who passed through Yuma didn’t stay long, but because of the expedited processing, large groups of migrants often ended up on the streets, and that’s when Yuma’s resources — from emergency services to food banks — got hit hard.
Even though the aftermath of the border crisis isn’t visible, it is there, below the surface. County officials are doing their best to make the city’s resources whole again.
This border town was thrust into the national spotlight amid reports of an unprecedented number of migrant crossings. Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls declared a local emergency amid the surge in 2021.
“Our local farming and our health care industry bore the brunt of the Biden fiasco at the border,” he said.
Ovida Health, formerly known as the Yuma Regional Medical Center, incurred $26 million in unreimbursed expenses directly related to migrants who entered the country illegally in 2021 and 2022, according to KTAR News.
About one-fourth of migrants were maternity patients, with “no or little to no prenatal care, so the babies when they are born are typically very sick, they typically wind up in our neonatal intensive care unit,” as one doctor from this hospital told FOX10 Phoenix in March 2023.
One program that added to these expenses provided free car seat safety training for new mothers.
This hospital is on the list of concerns Jonathan Lines, the vice chairman of the Yuma County Board of Supervisors and a Republican, took to the White House on March 27 upon invitation from Washington, D.C., for National Agriculture Day.
Lines previously served as the Republican state party chair and maintains a relationship with the Trump administration.
He told the Deseret News he had a few talking points prepared for the federal government to help Yuma rebuild what was lost.
Lines worked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to film an 18-minute docufilm, “Midnight at the Border.” Released in August 2023, it captures the “uncontrolled flow” of migrants and the security gaps.
“We didn’t have the whole wall back then,” Lines said. “Eleven areas that were open,” including the one along the reservation, attracted the highest amount of unauthorized crossings.
That’s not the case anymore.
Mercado, who is still in touch with his brothers from service, says they tell him “it’s dead” at the border.
An active patrolling agent confirmed that’s the case when he stopped to check in on this Deseret News reporter and photographer, who held a drone remote control. He advised to keep the drone on the American side. When asked whether there’s any major activity on the border as of late, the agent answered, “I would normally be chasing people but I’m talking to you. What does that tell you?”
Living along the border
Migrants who entered Yuma County illegally did not lead to an uptick in serious crimes, but issues of theft and trespassing by the border became common as migrants walked through farm fields and private property.
Some farm owners resorted to installing fences and electronic field monitoring as well as signage to prevent people from walking through their fields.
Reports of migrants drowning in the Colorado River while trying to cross into the U.S. also raised local bipartisan support for the Biden administration to finish building the wall, a project Trump greenlit in 2017, to protect the interests of farmers. The federal government complied and finished construction of the Morales Dam gap in 2023.
This was a popular migrant crossing spot, according to the Cooks, a family who live next to the border and close to the Morales Dam area. Their home is adjacent to an organic farm and they frequently witnessed migrants crossing between the gaps.
“Most of them were asylum-seekers,” Barbra Cook told the Deseret News from her front porch.
At night, she often saw and heard Border Patrol searching for “getaways” around their home, sometimes under their oleander trees and in their small barn.
“But they seemed to stay away from us,” Cook added. “They wanted to just be on their way.”
Looking toward her barking German shepherd dog, who peered at her through the window, she said the Border Patrol sometimes relied on their dogs’ barking at the trespassers.
Cook said she spoke to Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly near the Morales Dam gap areas in August 2022. Although Yuma had bipartisan support behind building the wall, the same couldn’t be said at the national level, where Biden had pledged not to add to the border wall.
Kelly knew what was at stake. In a 2021 letter to Biden, the Arizona senator acknowledged the Yuma gap as “a popular location for border crossings,” and asked Washington to help Yuma mitigate the impact of the historic number of migrants entering the U.S. illegally.
In 2022, claiming that the federal government was dragging its heels to help Arizona, then-Gov. Doug Ducey issued an order to fill in the gaps in the wall with 60 double-stacked shipping containers, only for Washington, D.C., to fight to reverse it.
Around the same time, Kelly promised to advocate for closing this gap, successfully garnering the attention of then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ on the issue.
“For too long, the Morales Dam area has been an operational challenge for Border Patrol agents to properly secure the border and keep our communities safe,” he said in 2022. “I’ll keep working to ensure that Arizona has the tools needed for a secure and orderly process at the border, including fencing and barriers where they make sense.”
Barbra Cook recalled that the farm next door often put stakes in the ground around a 6-foot radius of the footprints they found.
Produce, often consumed directly from the fields, requires stringent measures to minimize contamination. Any unauthorized entry, whether by animals or humans, leads to investigations, and if necessary, farmers must plow affected areas to ensure food safety.
“But there’s hardly anything going on now, ever since the wall finished,” Cook said.
Yuma grows America’s lettuce
Yuma is “very sensitive to anything that impacts our agriculture,” said Nicholls.
Roughly 90% of the U.S. and Canada’s leafy green supply for winter comes from Yuma and about 70% of the economy depends on it, he noted.
He described the “no-win scenario” many farmers faced. Yuma would send local police to the farmlands, where migrants who entered the country illegally would refuse to vacate commercial farmland. But the city couldn’t arrest 1,000 people at a time, and the farmers wouldn’t press charges on the foreign-born intruders; they were more focused on getting “back to farming,” said the mayor.
“Those were crimes,” said Nicholls, “but were those prosecuted? No — because the farmer’s mission is to get back to farming.” These families suffered millions in losses and have never been reimbursed.
During the period of heightened migrant activity, Yuma’s airport, which is shared with the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station, redirected its efforts to transporting migrants until arrangements were made to bus them to major U.S. cities like San Diego and Phoenix. Local churches, the Red Cross and emergency services also refocused to support the newcomers in the thousands each week.
The crackdown at the border has brought these nonprofits back to their usual operations while other systems, like the shuttle buses, were dismantled.
Migrants waiting by the border or stuck on the wall would often call 911, which led the fire department to respond to hundreds of people seeking rides into Yuma.
“They had to find a way to manage those crowds,” Nicholls said, while the city was left unattended. The fire department still struggles with half a million dollars in unreimbursed expenses, the mayor said.
Although crime remained low, as the national and international news outlets began paying attention to this border town, the mayor said people assumed chaos reigned in the streets of Yuma and that it was a dangerous place, driving away potential visitors and investors.
“That’s a true loss for us,” the mayor added.
Who came in during the surge?
Former Border Patrol agent Mercado highlighted the lack of information on asylum-seekers entering the U.S. during the migrant surge, expressing doubt about effective vetting under Biden.
He noted that, unlike the U.S., where arrests involve fingerprinting documentation, some countries don’t have a criminal database, nor are they willing to cooperate on sharing information. There’s no such thing as an international criminal database. Migrants not properly vetted under Biden could be “sleeper cells at worst and working illegally at best,” Mercado said.
The Yuma region is a hub for three different cartel groups, noted Lines. “People end up being their No. 1 commodity,” he said. “Trafficking is not nearly as apparent to the community … it was the toughest thing to deal with when your government wouldn’t address the issue.”
Lines noted witnessing single adult men from over a hundred countries arriving at the border, sometimes in large groups. The sheriff’s office collected trash bags of money and IDs that some of these groups left behind to investigate potential affiliations with cartels or terrorist groups.
“They were able to weed out some of those people,” Lines said.
During a shift at the processing facility, Mercado recalled encountering seven men from the Eastern European nation of Georgia on the border, who claimed asylum. This instance was part of a larger trend of people from this Eastern European nation making their way to America.
From fiscal year 2021 through 2024, 140,839 military-age Chinese nationals were recorded as entering the U.S. illegally. The border also saw an uptick in Indian, Venezuelan and Cuban migrants who entered illegally, according to Pew Research based on census data.
After some small talk, Mercado said he found out some of the Georgian men were in the police force in their country. The men revealed they had traveled from Spain three weeks prior, where they had enjoyed the clubs and the beaches, and even saw a big soccer match between Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Mercado eventually asked, “Why did you keep traveling to Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally?”
“It sounded like they found safety in Spain, a democracy and freedom-loving country,” said Mercado. “I think the public can connect the dots.” Mercado had to process these individuals but made a note in their file, hoping other federal agencies would run additional background checks.
Yuma still needs long-lasting solutions
Although there’s not much activity around the gap areas anymore, the several ports of entry along the border in Yuma County are as busy as ever.
Maria Guzman, an adviser at Arizona Western University, who lives just 10 minutes from the San Luis port in Yuma County, a very busy land port, told the Deseret News she frequently crosses the border to visit family, shop or get her dental work done.
She notes, “It is difficult to separate Mexico from San Luis,” reflecting the intertwined nature of American and Mexican life along the border.
Thousands of farmworkers and commuter families walk over these ports for work or school, the university adviser told the Deseret News while standing near the land port area. It was late afternoon, and many farmers, wearing straw hats and carrying lettuce in plastic bags, were making their way home.
During the pandemic, roughly 20,000 people, mostly essential farmworkers, crossed from Mexico to the U.S., said Guzman.
She highlights the importance of those who cross the border daily for work, asking, “How do we value this group of people who are hard-working, essential workers?”
“Yes, we do have criminals,” she said, “but we cannot generalize.”
Those crossing the border include the farmworkers, who get in line to enter the U.S. at the crack of dawn and work all day in the fields, picking lettuce or citrus, she said.
“It’s challenging to lose what you’ve built with so much sacrifice,” she said while blaming the lag on partisan politics.
Trump administration’s stricter immigration policies exacerbated labor shortages in U.S. agriculture by cutting off the flow of undocumented workers who traditionally filled these roles. (Government surveys indicate that more than 42% of the estimated 2 million farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented.)
In response to chronic labor shortages in the agricultural sector, the Trump administration altered the H-2A agriculture visa program for seasonal farmworkers. But H-2A workers continue to face long processing times, high costs and uncertainty because of the ever-changing border policy.
Arizona Farm Bureau’s Boelts said the H-2A program still has some flaws. It’s designed to bring temporary workers but disregards the needs of agricultural sectors that require labor year round.
“We’re watching agriculture wither on the vine in our country, while we’re getting outstripped by imports,” he said, calling for “long-lasting and durable solutions” from Congress.
Guzman said she observes that the Trump administration has given people structure and curbed unauthorized crossings and instances of drug and human trafficking, and for that, local residents are happy.
“You go to Walmart or Starbucks, (the Border Patrol) is there. It’s normal to see them around” in Yuma and San Luis, she added. People who work here aren’t “afraid of finding them in the store,” Guzman said. “It’s because the majority of the people have documents.”
Other locals are more concerned about ICE enforcement. Roxanne Barley, a member of the Cocopah Indian Tribe near Yuma, said Native people are already more susceptible to going missing and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ lack of training on verifying Native American documentation is a source of concern for her.
“We provide those tribal identification cards, and they’re not being accepted,” she told the Deseret News in February during an anti-ICE protest.
“With U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement being on patrol, I’m even more of a target. I don’t think they’re as visible as they are in bigger cities, but their presence is still here.”
In the aftermath, the mayor said, the city feels “a huge sense of relief.”
“We can talk about something besides the border and the numbers of the day,” he said. Meanwhile, the fire department, the local hospital, and the nonprofits are still owed money; they realize they probably won’t be reimbursed by the state or the federal government.
The border has always ebbed and flowed. All communities along this international line have different needs and address them differently, the mayor said.
“What does it mean to live in Yuma? How do we want to be prepared and ready if things go that way again?” the mayor said.
This rural community, three hours away from the nearest big city, has a unique blend of culture, with two military installations, a major Border Patrol presence, and a 67% Hispanic population, all of which produce a “very positive, patriotic and military-friendly” community, the mayor said.
“Those that truly need asylum, this country is welcoming,” Mayor Nicholls said. “Our community is one of the most giving communities I’ve ever seen.”
But the mayor echoed the need for more federal resources, and revisions to immigration law are necessary to make long-term change.
Back on the lookout point by the Colorado River, former Border Patrol agent Mercado noted he didn’t bump into any Border Patrol agents in the hour that he spent at the hilltop with the Deseret News. This area used to be a hot spot for patrolling but “operations have been restored to normal now,” he mused.
Still, the Yuma mayor’s work is far from done. “My big push has been and still remains that uncontrolled movement of people across the border is a disaster which FEMA needs to engage on,” he said. “These have been some pretty dramatic record-setting flows. Will it happen again? Most likely.”
