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*The second of the four-part series “Beyond the Border” from a partnership between The Texas Observer and the Guardian. South Texas landowners are “caught between protecting their property and saving lives.” VL

texas_observer_logoBy Melissa del Bosque, The Texas Observer, and the Guardian US interactive team

Presnall Cage was driving the outskirts of his ranch when he saw the black tennis shoes. The sight of them up ahead, neatly arranged in a rut of the sandy road, filled him with dread. Several vultures perched in a sprawling live oak tree near the road, and two more flew in lazy circles. He already knew what he would find underneath the tree.

This time it was a young man – what was left of him – his body already decomposing in the heat. In his pockets were US credit cards and an ID. It was always a sad thing to witness, yet another life lost on his land. Like hundreds of others in the past decade, the man had died in Brooks County, Texas, trying to circumvent an immigration checkpoint two miles south of Cage’s ranch. He called the sheriff’s department. By now he had the phone number memorized.

Two years later, Cage, now 69, remembers the young man – and all the others. His ranch has one of the highest death counts in Brooks County, because it is so vast at 46,000 acres and close to the immigration checkpoint. The US Border Patrol established the permanent checkpoint on US Highway 281 outside the town of Falfurrias – 70 miles north of the border – in 1994 to search for undocumented immigrants and for drugs. It’s the Border Patrol’s last line of defense. Many migrants leave the road and hike through the rugged ranchland, hoping to reconnect with the highway north of the checkpoint. Hundreds die every year on the ranches, most from the heat.

In the past decade, Cage estimates, he’s found at least 100 bodies – enough to make him anxious anytime he sees vultures circling on the horizon. The man with the black tennis shoes was one of 16 bodies he’d discovered in 2012. It was a brutal, unrelenting summer, with temperatures in the triple digits, and it became the worst year for deaths in Brooks County. Sheriff’s deputies recovered 129 bodies in Brooks County, and Texas surpassed Arizona as the deadliest state in the nation for undocumented immigrants. The next year, 2013, the weather had been more merciful, and he’d discovered seven of the county’s 87 bodies. But as of May, Cage had already found four bodies and the hottest months hadn’t even begun yet. “I expect I’ll find more than last year,” he says.

Not counting his time in the air force, Cage has, like his father before him and his grandfather before that, lived his entire life on his family’s sprawling south Texas ranch. He’s seen migration through his land ebb and flow, but he’s never seen so much desperate humanity coming through as in the past few years.

Like many ranchers in Brooks County, Cage’s political views are conservative, and he takes a hard-line stance on immigration. “The illegals broke the law when they decided to come here,” he says. “But the politicians can’t be honest about it.”

Cage believes the Obama administration is allowing the current influx of unaccompanied children and families from Central America to come across the border to help the Democratic party. “They need new recruits who will vote Democratic,” he says. But while his feelings about illegal immigration frustrate and even anger him at times, when he encounters people on his ranch who need help, he can’t help but feel sympathy for them.

“Last Thanksgiving, we had a very pregnant woman knock on my daughter-in-law’s door. She’d been left behind by the smuggler,” Cage says. “We helped another woman – all she had was a T-shirt wrapped around her like a skirt. She’d been raped in the brush. And we had a baby born on the ranch. When you see a pregnant woman or a lost 14-year-old, your first instinct is to help. I may be a conservative, but I’m a human being, too.”

Most of the people who knock on his door these days come from Central America, a significant change from just five years ago, when 90% of the migrants passing through south Texas were from Mexico, according to Border Patrol apprehension figures. In 2012, US government data showed that for the first time in 40 years, net migration from Mexico had reached zero. But apprehensions of Central Americans coming across the south Texas border have tripled since 2011. The southernmost tip of the Texas-Mexico border is the shortest distance from Central America to the United States and the most traveled route.

Very few of the migrants come through his land without a guide, Cage says. Everyone must pay the cartels and organized crime at some point to make the journey. Most tell Cage they’ve paid anywhere from $7,000 to $9,000 to get to Houston from Central America. “They think the lights of Falfurrias are Houston,” he says. “That’s what the guides tell them – that they’ll only have to walk a couple of hours to get to Houston. When I tell them it’s a four-hour drive they get very disappointed.”

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