The whole town is immoral.
If you live in this tiny town at the entrance to New Mexico’s Bootheel region, population 34 (or 70, depending on the source), it’s easy to have a siege mentality. You have dogs. You erect a fence around your property.
You call the Border Patrol when you hear people rustling around in the abandoned double-wide next door.
This unincorporated community is the last populated place on the highway to the Antelope Wells port of entry, which has seen a surge in migrants apprehended after they cross the border illegally in recent months. Hachita is 45 miles north of the border.
Thursday morning, shortly after midnight, a group of 306 migrants was apprehended at the port of entry. It was the 26th group of 100 people or more who have been apprehended at Antelope Wells since October.
“That’s a lot of people,” said Dan Stalnaker, who retired to Hachita from Michigan two-and-a-half years ago. “That’s serious business.”
Border Patrol officials say there has been an increase in migrants crossing at Antelope Wells to seek asylum because it’s easier to gain access to the country at the remote desert crossing. They come after the port of entry closes at 4 p.m., usually at night, and walk around the barriers.
They don’t try to avoid detection. They want to be caught, Border Patrol officials say, because once apprehended, they will be bused to the Border Patrol station at Lordsburg, and will begin the process to be considered for asylum.
Border Patrol officials say that smugglers in Mexico are transporting large groups of migrants from places like Juárez to a few miles from the Antelope Wells port of entry because it has become more difficult to enter the country at busier border crossings in places like El Paso.
The changing migrant pathways are making residents of this former mining town, and the country that surrounds it, nervous. There’s not much here anymore. There’s a single store and gas station. There’s still a post office.
There are no schools in Hachita; the local kids are bused to Animas, 30 miles away. A former Catholic church with a stone steeple, itself a former school, is closed. There are more vacant dwellings than occupied ones.
Bonnie Denzler, who retired to Hachita with her husband three years ago, said she wakes up in the middle of the night several days a week by dogs barking next door. She’s heard talking outside near her house late at night, too.
“I’ve heard stuff and it makes me wonder,” she said. “I don’t want to look outside, because you never what’s outside your window. It’s really disconcerting because you don’t know what’s going on.”
Denzler, 59, only returned to Hachita recently but her family has roots in town. Her parents once owned a store here and she lived in the town in the 1980s. When she and her husband returned in retirement, she bought her sister’s house, which had been sitting empty.
She is concerned about the increase in migrants crossing the border in the Bootheel region because, she said, there are too few law enforcement agents — Border Patrol and county sheriff’s deputies — to cover a vast and largely empty region.