ARIVACA, Ariz.—Jim Chilton and his wife Susan were college sweethearts who married young and worked hard to build a life together on their 50,000-acre cattle ranch in Arivaca, Arizona, about 11 miles north of the international border with Mexico.
Mr. Chilton’s ancestors first drove cattle from Texas to Arizona in 1885, settling along the Blue River that runs through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in eastern Arizona.
Raising cattle is in the family blood, the Chiltons say.
However, things have been changing at the Chilton Ranch & Cattle Co. And not in a good way.
“It’s not fun out here,” said Mr. Chilton, a fifth-generation rancher who is still going strong at 85.
In fact, venturing out on his property can be downright dangerous due to the rising tide of illegal border crossings from Mexico to southern Arizona.
At first, illegal immigrant families began arriving on his property, looking to escape poverty and strife in the promised land north of the border.
That was years ago.
Mr. Chilton said he would often stumble upon these frightened, desperate people who needed food, water, and hope to carry on.
To that end, he was a humanitarian. He even installed spigots on his water troughs so they had fresh water to drink.
His charity ended there, however, being a firm believer in legal immigration and the rule of law.
Over the years, and especially during the Biden administration, Mr. Chilton said he began to notice the illegal border-crossers looked quite different from the ones he’d earlier met and for whom he felt pity.
There were fewer families crossing onto his property. In their place were mostly young men in military-style clothing, masks, and carrying heavy backpacks.
Some of them had walkie-talkies, as he’s noticed from his hidden trail cameras set up at five locations on his property about a decade ago.
“This area used to have a customs office. So travel from Mexico north has been historic,” Mr. Chilton told The Epoch Times. “It was significantly heavy. It was mainly people just trying to get into America and work.
“Then, with the recession of 2008 and 2009, that traffic just stopped because the word got out there weren’t any jobs in the U.S.”
Around that time, the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico was busy taking command of all the border trails into Arizona and creating a monopoly over illegal narcotics and human smuggling, Mr. Chilton said.
The cartel began mobilizing groups of drug packers, many of them previously deported illegal immigrants—criminal types from Latin America, including the violent El Salvadoran gang MS-13.
“That traffic became significant,” Mr. Chilton said. “I would see them from time to time with cartel scouts on our mountains and coyotes [cartel guides].”
