 Drug smuggling and illegal immigration has a direct and long-term impact on land management agencies. First, these illegal activities damage the resource. Well, I think one of the more important aspects of Borderlands issue is the impacts to natural resources along the Borderlands area because of illegal immigrant activity. The main big factor is associated fires and what happens is oftentimes at night it's cold so they create these little campfires to keep warm or cook their food and oftentimes if they're near reeds they can get out of control and ultimately burn down sensitive resources. This is especially important because certain areas are near wild and urban interfaces so fires over there can also damage property. Up until last year there's never been any fire to speak of on the Cabeza Prieta or surrounding lands. Last year or I guess it was a year before we had tremendous rains, very abnormal rains. The plants loved it, the wildlife loved it but consequently we got a lot of unusual growth. Well, that's happened you know in years past maybe once every decade or couple decades that happens and there was never a problem. But in the past we didn't have thousands of ignition sources, if you will if you're experienced in fire, thousands of ignition sources moving through the area. And what began to happen is that stuff dried out, the temperatures were also rising, illegals would get into trouble and they knew to start a fire because there would be a response. And so they would start fires, no one search and rescue would come. That year the refuge in Barium Goldwater Gunnery Range lost approximately 90,000 acres and that's unheard of. A lot of resource damage. It's pretty impressive when you get out there and you see all the trash. You know what, it's a different type of trash, it's not household trash, this is trash, mostly survival stuff, canned food, always the water jugs. It seems like they'll bring a whole bunch of clothes with them and then they'll, as we're close to the road, this is what we'd call a pickup area, they'd probably get cleaned up, we see evidence of soap where they've cleaned up and they probably get a ride from here. So basically everything's left behind, packs, clothing, empty cans, full cans of food, water jugs. It reminds me of pictures you see of hurricanes. Sometimes you go into an area and that's what it looks like, photos you see in a magazine of a hurricane. A couple days ago if you were here you would not believe it, you just can't comprehend the amount of trash. These trash collections from a resource standpoint we see a number of different impacts and probably at the lowest grade is just the aesthetic impact, it's not a pretty thing. This is actually a fairly small site, we have others that have stretched to the size of acres, but it's aesthetically just very displeasing. We do have concerns about wildlife getting into the trash and possibly ingesting it. We're convinced we have some information to show that some wildlife species have learned now to key in on these trash piles as scavenging sites. Then there's the level of impact on our park visitors, again there's a lot of potential health issues in trash piles like this. Human waste, drug paraphernalia, actual drugs, who knows what in these piles. There are other impacts associated with these big campsites and they're just their direct physical impacts on the ground and on plants and occasionally animals. At these layup sites very often in order to make either a structure for shade or to hide themselves from being detected from above or from other people on the ground, migrants and smugglers will break off or cut off the lower branches from these trees and build a shelter under another tree as a shade structure. There's an impact on a number of levels, it impacts the trees themselves. Here in the low Sonoran Desert, the habitat under all these desert trees, the Palo Verde tree, the Ironwood tree, is extremely important as a shelter site for new plants to come up. The Swarov Cactus is very highly dependent on that shelter site under the trees. A lot of small rodents, birds and reptiles seek shelter shade and higher moisture levels under the trees. Those areas get opened up, that micro habitat is lost. And then we've got a whole list of endangered species in this part of the country down here. We've got everything from bats and fish and to all kinds of plants and so forth. And of course a lot of those are associated with riparian areas where we've got water and the illegal immigrants and smugglers are always looking for water and water sources and so you get a tremendous conflict between the threatened endangered species and the use by illegal immigrants and smugglers. All the way as far as the Wachukas go to the east, as far as they go to the west, there's probably a travel trail that an illegal group have followed probably every half mile or less. And that comes from the pressure of apprehension they start creating these trails. And the board of patrol finds the trail so they just move a mile, half a mile over and they start all over again. Besides foot traffic, the motor transportation of illegals making them to up north is vehicle traffic. Wherever the way they can get from Mexico up to Tucson or up to a major highway, whether it's off-roading or on back roads, for one of the reasons the vehicle will break down, get stuck and they just leave it there. Recently we just recovered 11 vehicles just in probably half of the refuge. They're just not on a road. You've got to find a vehicle to go out and grab it, which causes more resource damage running over cacti, grasslands and then you have another illegal trail that you have to worry about maintaining. I get to see over 400 miles of entrenched illegally created roads, not tracks, but I mean entrenched roads that aren't going to heal for decades, some for hundreds of years. Foot trails, you take it all together, probably about 1200 miles of illegal roads and foot trails in the area. Drug smuggling and illegal immigration also interfere with employees' ability to carry out their agency's mission. The border issues impact every program we have on the refuge, whether it's public use, biological, safety of visitors, safety of employees, everything we do is impacted by issues caused by the proximity of the international border. Working on the border these days now encompasses the immigration issues as well as managing for wildlife refuge. A large percentage of our time is taken up dealing with a lot of these border issues. We are dealing with the trash issue and picking up, cleaning up trash, safety issues for our staff and managing and setting policy for our staff to make sure they're safe out there in the field. There's working in partnering with Border Patrol because of their increased activity out here. It really has changed the way we do things out here on this refuge. There's a big shift in how we do our work, especially out in the field. Before you could plan your work to come out and you do your prep work, you know your maps and you know what areas are going in and I could go easily out by myself. In most cases, today the shift has gone to more being concerned about where I'm going. I have to know the issues out there, are there border issues, is illegal activities going on. It slows down my process because what I do now and it's part of our policy, I don't go out by myself, so I have to arrange for someone to go with me. And so my planning doesn't go as fast as it used to. Basically we are told to avoid an entire stretch of area, what's called the limitrofe. So we don't do any work down there, we don't do any restoration or anything like that. In the past we have evaluated those areas and there are good areas to do restoration work but as far as employee safety, we just tend to avoid that area. It's unfortunate too because in that area it also happens to be one of the best habitat for wildlife we have. The resources there are pretty important to us and it's a shame that we can't go down there to improve it or even to protect it too. A few years ago in that area there's been high recreation use, there's fishermen, there's hunters, but now it seems the word has gotten out that it seems to be a dangerous place and it seems that the recreation has been declining in that area. We have backcountry roads that are closed to the public and that's a result of most of those roads and access areas being right along the border and the potential for the visitors to get in the middle of a situation. And it's very difficult, we can't mandate that visitors are in a buddy system or be monitored or that kind of thing so we've closed areas that we just cannot maintain the safety of the visitors in those areas. We almost don't do the good host program per se. We're very, very careful about that and you've got to be pretty thoroughly convinced that it's a very mundane situation before you'll do that. We may stop, roll the window down part way and ask somebody if they need assistance and in a lot of situations you might pull over your vehicle, get out of your vehicle and go talk to somebody to see if they really need assistance but we're pretty darn careful because there's a real likelihood that you would run into a difficult situation or if there's one person there sitting beside the road there could be 20 other people back in the bushes and you don't know it and all they wanted you to do was to stop so that they could steal your vehicle or some other kind of a thing. So we try to be as good a host as we can be but we're very, very careful about how good a host we are. Throughout my career in the Forest Service one of the hardest things I've had to do is get away from the principles that I've taught as a young forester, stopping and helping people. Our fire people don't stop and offer assistance to anyone. I mean you can't even tell if it's mom and pop it may be mom and pop but they may be hauling a load of drugs or they may be running point on a load of drugs. So it's become very different for us here because we can't be the friendly Forest Service firefighters that go in and talk to people all the time. Finally, illegal immigrants and drug smugglers cause damage by breaking into buildings and stealing vehicles. To this point most of our break-in problems and and thefts have involved residences of the employees or vehicles that are used by employees or researchers. I personally have had my refuge residence broken into nine times. The most frightening situation was when I had been here at 4 p.m. and I put my dogs in the house. I had two shelters at the time and went back to work for an hour, came back at five and everything looked fine and I unlocked my locks, walked in, my two shelters were in the kitchen and I called out hi babies and at the sound of my voice a man jumped out of my bedroom right in front of me. He was about four feet from me and he immediately came at me and he had this intense look in his eyes which I interpreted as aggression at the time and all I could do was give a shriek and I backed up like this down the hallway, backed up outside and over to my car and he was coming toward me the whole time with this wide-eyed intense look. When we got outside he went like this meaning a gesture of no harm and he left his backpack in his water and disappeared over the hill. Coming to work in the wintertime you get here in the dark. I'm the first person to the office. I'm nervous. How often does that happen? How often do you get out of your car and spend a few minutes looking around making sure you don't see somebody in your office looking for broken windows? That's odd I think. I can't recall doing that in previous jobs. There were a couple of attempts at stealing vehicles. We've had one government vehicle stolen here in the last year. We've had attempts where they attempted to steal a number of our vehicles. It's been where the vehicle's been parked out on a road where they're doing resource monitoring and they may only be an eighth of a mile from the vehicle or it's been actually where our vehicles are stored behind locked gates where they've tried to break through the gates and steal the vehicles. We're in the process now of welding steel bars to cover the windows of all the windows of the visitor's center and our administration building across the way and we already have in place at the administration building we have steel doors, entry doors and in the same doorway we also have security screen doors which have steel bars on them. Prior to that project a very recent one was to build a chain link fence around my house eight feet high with coiled razor wire on top and to build one around the fire crew living quarters. And the residences and the visitor's center and administration building all have alarms. So we're trying to cover all the possibilities, the possible ways that the fences or the windows or the openings to the buildings could be breached.