Illegal Immigration Keeps Arizona Cattle Ranchers Armed, Awake at Night on the Border

This is the third article in a series on illegal drug and human smuggling along Arizona’s border with Mexico.

PALOMINAS, Ariz.—Cattle ranchers Joe and Patty Scelso didn’t always feel the need to carry sidearms walking on their property.

Twenty-eight years ago, the Rockin JP Ranch was their dream of a country homestead come true—103 acres of lush grassland, towering cypress, and low-slung mesquite framed with distant green mountain peaks.

It was a quiet place—perfect for raising a small herd of cattle and staging rodeos.

Today, their dream has gone south as illegal migrants continue marching north through the unfinished border wall fence with Mexico just two miles from their property in Palominas, Arizona.

Joe Scelso, owner of the Rockin JP Ranch in Hereford, Ariz., fixed a damaged wire fence on his property on Aug. 24. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

The illegals use their land with abandon as a way station waiting for cars—even taxis—to come and pick them up.

They come at “all hours,” Joe Scelso said, sitting on his front porch, watching ominous thunderclouds gather on the horizon.

At least for now, the monsoon rains have stemmed the constant flow of illegals onto their land.

“They were coming in here—one, two, three at a time,” he said. “People will come out of the bushes, pick them up, and drive them out of here.

“I finally put up that gate to keep them [out], but they keep coming through the gate.”

The trash the illegals leave behind includes used feminine hygiene products, diapers, toilet paper, and human feces—”you name it,” Scelso told The Epoch Times.

“Whatever they don’t need or want, they throw on the ground. Now, they all wear camouflage. They never used to.”

A step ladder straddles an electrified fence near the border wall fence in Hereford,

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