TUCSON, Ariz. — On Dec. 23, Pope John Paul II spoke of the “hopeless journey of immigrants.”

He could have been talking about the Arizona Sonoran desert.

Although the exact number is unknown, the Department of Homeland Security estimates there are 9 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, with as many as 6 million Mexican nationals among them. Drawn by the promise of work, they cross the border by the tens of thousands each year, leaving the bodies of the hundreds who died along the way behind them in the desert.

One of them was José Luis Hernandez Aguirre, the youngest of six children living in Mexicali, just south of California. His sister, Sonia Canett, told Catholic Relief Services Mexico that the 25-year-old was a construction worker with a wife and two children, ages 1 and 7.

“He was not able to make enough to support his wife and children and our mother,” she said.

“He moved to Mexicali to find work in a maquiladora plant,” she said, referring to a foreign-owned factory in Mexico. “I went with him to the factories to look for work, but no one would give him a job. Finally, he gave up and decided to go to the United States with his brother Jaime.”

After borrowing $1,000 from friends and relatives to pay the smugglers, José and Jaime and four others crossed the border on June 18, 2001. “The next day, my brother Jaime called us in Mexicali and told us José was lost.” Sickened and exhausted by the heat, Jaime turned back, but José was determined to continue.

“Four days later, on June 22, they told us that José's body had been found, along with one other man in the group. The other three migrants in the group are still missing,” Canett said. “When I was crossing the border back into Mexico with the coffin of my brother in the back of a truck that a friend lent us, I passed a group of migrants getting ready to start across the desert. I made them come and look at José's body in the coffin.”

The Tucson District of the U.S. Border Patrol responded to stories like José's with Operation Pipeline, which completed on Dec. 22 after interceptions of illegal immigrants dropped from 320 to 23 people per day.

The numbers reflect a success for the operation, which since its inception Nov. 17 apprehended 3,028 illegal immigrants and smugglers, impounded 127 vehicles — including nine stolen in the Tucson area — and confiscated 4,835 pounds of marijuana.

“It has been going great,” Tucson District's public information officer, Charles Griffin III, said halfway through the operation. Covering Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties, Griffin said the operation has effectively closed the pass through the Huachuca Mountains and surrounding area to immigrant-smugglers.

“If the gradual integration of all immigrants is promoted, there is less of a risk that immigrants form ghettos where they are isolated from the social context, which sometimes results in the desire to gradually take over the territory,” the Pope wrote.

“This is an area that hasn't been hard-hit before,” he said.

But as the Border Patrol, a division of the new Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security, closed another hole in the border that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson joined with others in working for reform of U.S. immigration law. In mid-November, Bishop Kicanas was elected to the board of directors for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, which was created by the U.S. bishops in 1988.

Bishop Kicanas, whose diocese extends from the border to the Santa Catalina Mountains south of Phoenix, is calling for a change in the economic and political engine that drives more and more Mexicans to attempt the dangerous trek to find jobs and a better life in the United States.

More border patrol operations are planned for this year if the number of border crossings starts to rebound.

Sovereignty vs. Dignity

“Because of our location, border questions are part of our day-to-day life,” Bishop Kicanas said. “Therefore, the Church is interested in responding to the immigration issue in a way that respects the right of nations to enforce their borders and maintain their sovereignty but also respects the right of people to work, housing and human dignity.”

The bishop noted it isn't merely a Mexican problem.

“The Holy Father has consistently reminded us that we are not independent nations,” he said. “We lean on each other, interact with each other and we are responsible for each other.”

The Pope issued his message for the 90th World Day of Migrants and Refugees on the theme “Migration in the Perspective of Peace” on Dec. 15. He recognized both the right to emigrate and the right not to emigrate.

“It is up to governments to regulate the flow of migrants with full respect for the dignity of people and the needs of their families, keeping in mind the needs of the societies that accept these migrants,” the Holy Father said in his letter. Migrants, he said, can “offer a valid contribution in order to establish peace. Migrations can facilitate exchange and understanding among cultures, as well as among people and communities.”

“If the gradual integration of all immigrants is promoted, there is less of a risk that immigrants form ghettos where they are isolated from the social context, which sometimes results in the desire to gradually take over the territory,” the Pope wrote.

The World Day of Migrants and Refugees will be celebrated throughout 2004 in local churches on a date established by the respective bishops conferences.

According to Bishop Kicanas, three issues need to be addressed.

“First is a humanitarian response,” he said. “There's desperate poverty and a lack of human dignity right across our border. Second, we need to educate people in this country about why people, in the face of danger, are willing to make the trip. They aren't criminals or terrorists, they just want to care for their families.”

“The third issue is, obviously, legislative. We must look at our border immigration policy,” he said. “Businesses here need workers and continue to hire [illegal] immigrants. There's also the question of family separation created by the current immigration policies. We can't separate families, because that leads to nothing but problems.”

Meanwhile, other groups are attempting to decrease the number of deaths in the desert by direct action. Church Without Borders, operated by the mission office of the Diocese of San Diego and the Maryknoll Lay Missioners, works among the people along the Chihuahua-Texas border and coordinates tours of the Brownsville -Matamoros area to “show the reality of the border experience.”

The Diocese of Las Cruces, N.M., operates the Family Unity and Citizenship Program to protect the human rights of immigrants by helping them legally enter and stay in the United States.

The Rev. Robin Hoover, pastor of the First Christian Church in Tucson and president of Humane Borders Inc., is coordinating an effort to maintain water stations along the U.S. side of the border.

Although opposed by ranchers overwhelmed by the litter and vandalism caused by the influx of immigrants and barred from the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation — which is struggling to pay for the cost of recovering bodies and investigating deaths on the reservation — Hoover said providing water is the single most important thing anyone can do to save lives.

“Last year, we had 205 known deaths of immigrants, and two-thirds of them were in Arizona,” he said.

Although the water stations are controversial, Hoover said they are effective.

“I can show you a map of water station locations and places where they've found bodies and it's obvious that very few people die near water stations,” he said.

The long-term solution is immigration reform, he contends.

“Year after year, despite a redoubling of efforts to stop them, the number of immigrants remains the same,” he said. “It's obvious the policies aren't working. Until they do something about the fundamental migration itself, all we'll get is more and more of the same.”

Philip S. Moore writes from Vail, Arizona.