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John Ladd Jr., a thoughtful, soft-spoken rancher just outside Bisbee, gives new meaning to the word stoic. He is forced to work the equivalent of several weeks a year to repair, as best he can, all the damage done to his property by never-ending swarms of illegal aliens. "Patience is my forte," he says, "but it's getting lower." The 14,000-acre Ladd ranch, in his mother's family since the 1800s, is right on the border. Ladd and his wife and three sons as well as his father and mother have their homes there. The largely flat, scrub-covered piece of real estate, with its occasional groves of cottonwoods, spiny mesquite and clumps of sacaton grass and desert broom, seems to offer few places to hide. But the land is laced with arroyos in which scores of people can disappear from view. Ditches provide trails from the border to Highway 92, a distance of about three miles. That is the route that Ladd says 200 to 300 illegals take every night as they enter the U.S. They punch holes in the barbed-wire border fence and then tear up the many fences intended to separate the breeding cattle--Brahmin, Angus and Hereford--that divide the Ladd land.
Ladd doesn't blame the border patrol, most of whose officers, he says, are doing all they can under the circumstances. Indeed, apprehensions of illegals in Arizona have soared from 9% of the nation's total in 1993 to 51% this year. "I have real heartache for the agents who are really working," he says. "They track down the [smugglers], and the judges let them off, and they get a free trip back to Mexico, where they can start all over." The border-patrol agents, Ladd feels, "are responsible guys in a hypocritical bureaucracy."
Border crossing at the Ladd ranch is so flagrant that sometimes the illegals arrive by taxi. A dirt road parallels the border fence and the Ladd property for several miles, in full view of border-patrol electronic lookout posts that ceased functioning long ago. When drivers reach an appropriate location, passengers pile out and run through one of the many holes in the fence and make their way across the ranch.
These gaps present their own special problem. On the other side are Mexican ranches whose cattle wander onto Ladd's. "I'm up to 215 Mexican cows that I've put back into Mexico," he says. "I've got a dual-citizen friend--he's Mexican and American--works on this side for Phelps Dodge [Mining Co.], but he's got a ranch over at the San Jose Mountain. So I call him, and then he calls the Mexican cattle inspector. Then that guy meets me at the border and then coordinates the cows getting back to the rightful owners in Mexico." Ladd acknowledges that his do-it-yourself cattle diplomacy is "breaking both countries' laws." How so? "[In] the United States, you're supposed to quarantine any Mexican cattle for 30 days, and they test them for disease and everything else. What the problem is, there isn't enough cattle inspectors to do that, and then they don't have a holding corral anymore to do that."