From the Great Southwestern Revolving Door

Here’s a tale that’d make a Gold Hill mule shake its head and roll its eyes back into its skull. It seems we’ve got a stretch of Nevada that’s gone from wide open to wide inviting—if you happen to be a foreign scoundrel with a knack for eluding borders, bullets, and basic decency.

Let us first tip our hats to Audencio Vazquez-Calletano, aged thirty-one, a man of rare persistence and questionable planning. Mr. Calletano, a Mexican national, has been booted from the U.S. three times—May of 2011, February of 2012, and just last June of 2024.

But like a bad penny or a persistent uncle, he keeps turning up. On April 14, the U.S. Border Patrol found him again, living near the dusty outpost of Searchlight, where presumably the air is thin and the patience of federal officers thinner still.

Now, Audencio ain’t just an overachiever in the illegal entry department–he’s got hisself a little California credential too–a felony for taking a vehicle without asking nice. If convicted this time around, he might be trading desert for the cozy confines of a federal cell for up to ten years, with a bonus $250,000 bill and three years of supervised contemplation.

But Mr. Calletano ain’t the whole show.

Step up for the next act in our traveling cavalcade of calamity–Jose Luis Castillo-Alvarez and Kevin Omar Cruz-Lima–two gents whose country of origin remains unsolved, like how Congress still draws a paycheck. From September 2024 to March of this year, these two industrious businessmen were allegedly busy as badgers, shuffling enough heroin, meth, fentanyl, and cocaine around Nevada to start a pharmaceutical empire.

And they weren’t exactly shy about security, either. When apprehended on March 27, they had on hand an AR15 rifle and a homebrew pistol because nothing says customer service like firepower and fentanyl. The law says they were also unlawfully present in the U.S.—fancy that! Alvarez, it seems, got deported back in 2020 but couldn’t resist the siren song of Nevada soil. Their trial kicks off June 30, and if the jury’s got their spectacles polished, these two could be enjoying the view from inside a penitentiary wall for life.

And finally, in what might be called a grim encore, the fine folks at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Reno recently collared Luis Gomez, another Mexican national who, according to ICE, has a resume that includes sexual assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping. That ain’t a good neighbor policy. Mr. Gomez has an administrative order of removal, and ICE says he’ll be shipped off “as soon as possible”—which in federal terms could mean anywhere from next week to the next geological epoch.

So, here we are–three stories, one common thread–men who cannot take a hint. One could get forgiven for thinking the border is less of a line and more of a revolving door, oiled by red tape and blessed with a concierge, asleep on the job.