The Deadly Passage of the All-American Canal

For the first time beginning this summer, police in Arizona will be able to stop anyone they like and order a check of their ID to determine whether the person is in the U.S. illegally. The new powers, just recently signed into law, have reignited the national debate on immigration.

Since 9/11, getting into the United States has become a good deal harder and, for some, much more dangerous. With border enforcement increasing, many illegal immigrants are now attempting to cross one of this country's most important irrigation projects called the "All-American Canal." The canal has become sort of a national moat on our southern border, and hundreds of people have perished in its waters. It is a carnage that has gone mostly unnoticed because many of the victims are buried without their names.

Full Segment: The All-American Canal
Web Extra: Border Control
Web Extra: Militarizing The Border
Web Extra: Illegal Immigration - The Hard Facts

In the California desert, in a field of mud, is a graveyard that is hard to imagine in America. Bricks mark the final resting place of hundreds of human beings, identities unknown. They died traveling to America in search of a life better than their home countries could offer. They rolled the dice in the underworld of human smuggling and lost. Their families back home never learned that their journey ended in the All-American Canal.

Asked where the bodies are usually found, Dr. John Hunter told "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley, "Typically, they'll find them at the drops. So for example, there's five of these big hydro drops here. Drop one, they found over a hundred bodies at drop one, drop two they had 60. Drop three, 60 etc."

Hunter showed us the hydroelectric dams or "drops" that catch most of the bodies. Hunter is an unlikely activist: he's a physicist and life-long Republican who has spent much of his career designing weapons for the U.S. government.

"I'm a very right-wing guy," Hunter said. "I'm not an open border kinda person. I just don't believe we should be letting people drown in our backyards. It's inhuman."

Ten years ago, a newspaper article about rising immigrant deaths caught his attention. And today, the deaths in the canal system are an obsession.

"This first picture is a little girl named Alexandra. And she drowned saving her older sister's life," Hunter said, pointing out pictures. "This is border agent Goldstein. He drowned trying to save his dog."

"This is one small subset of the American canal. Each pushpin represents a person who drowned in this particular location," Hunter added, showing Pelley an online map with virtual pushpins.

Asked how many pushpins - each representing a victim - there are, Hunter said, "There's over 550 victims and those are the ones we know of."

While the canal is a deathtrap, it is also a lifeline for the nation. It flows the length of 85 miles just north of California's border with Mexico, transporting water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley. Two thirds of our winter fruits and vegetables are grown with this water. But half of the people who pick those crops are illegal immigrants.

To get the jobs created by the canal, they cross the canal, usually at night, on makeshift rafts or using plastic jugs for flotation. The water is 225 feet across, 20 feet deep, with few rescue lines or climb-out ladders, safety devices that you would find in some other canals.

The All-American is owned by the federal government but its management is controlled by a regional authority called the Imperial Irrigation District. And for ten years, Hunter has been lobbying the elected members of the Irrigation District to add safety features.

They've taken votes, commissioned studies, but done almost nothing.

There are hundreds of reasons people risk their lives to cross the canal.

Stephanie Martinez knows one of them. "This is my husband and his baby right now. This is about the last time he saw our baby," she told Pelley, showing him a photo.

Martinez was born in Germany. She came to the United States as a teenager, became a citizen, and married a carpenter named Sergio Martinez, who was an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

"Even though we don't look so all-American, we really had an all-American family. We were having a mortgage, and a nice backyard and a tree house for the kids," Martinez said.

Asked if they were living the American dream, Martinez said, "Yeah. It felt American to us."

And she said her husband felt American.

Martinez built homes; his wife raised the children and taught Hebrew school on the side. In 2007, Martinez was pulled over for a traffic stop and the police discovered he was in the U.S. illegally. Martinez was deported to Mexico. And under U.S. law, there was practically no way for him to obtain legal status once he'd committed an immigration violation.

"He took matters into his own hand and came and took a bus to the border and called me from there that he was about to cross and that there was no one going to hold him from doing that," Martinez remembered.

Asked what happened to her husband, Martinez said, "They caught him two times. And on his third try to cross, he drowned."

"You know many people watching this interview are probably thinking to themselves 'This is a terrible tragedy for your family, but he shouldn't have come. What he did was illegal and he shouldn't have tried,'" Pelley pointed out.

"That is true and I understand that. But I think that once you put yourself in the position…how many fathers are watching this? How many moms are watching this that have a small baby at home? And then imagine that some legality keeps you from seeing that baby. People say that people should come here legally. And I absolutely agree, but what people don't know is you're not able to do that," she said.

"Couldn't we just put a few lines. Just anything like a buoy or something where people can grab onto. Deport them all, I don't care, but just to put something up so people don't have to die," Martinez pleaded at a hearing of the Irrigation District.

One of the directors listening that day was Stella Mendoza who's been with the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) for nine years.

"Is the IID supposed to save every individual that jumps into the canal? Is that my role as a director?" Mendoza asked.

Mendoza told "60 Minutes" that she worries that adding safety features like buoys, lines or ladders would give illegal immigrants a false sense of security.

Asked if she feels the canal is safe, Mendoza told Pelley, "The canal is intended to convey water to the Imperial Valley from the Colorado River. It's not intended as a recreation and so…."

"We're not talking about recreation here. We're talking about people desperate to come into the United States and who are losing their lives in your canal," Pelley remarked.

"I understand that. When an individual decides to cross the desert, decides to cross the mountains, decides to jump into the canal to swim across, they are taking their lives in their own hands. They have to be accountable for their actions," Mendoza argued.

In 2007, as the drownings continued, the board approved climb-out ladders along about one quarter of the canal's length. But they're spaced every 500 feet - a drowning man would be lucky to reach one.

John Fletermeyer, of Florida International University, is one of this country's top researchers in the subject of drowning. He was commissioned to do a study on the safety of the All-American Canal.

"I've been involved in drowning research for most of my life. And I think that the All-American Canal's probably the most dangerous body of water in the United States," Fletermeyer told Pelley.

"Help me understand the dynamic when somebody gets into the water?" Pelley asked.

"One, the water's very cold, so that a victim, or someone in the canal, would almost immediately begin to experience hypothermia. The second factor relates to the currents. They go approximately eight feet per second, which even an Olympic swimmer could not successfully swim against," Fletermeyer explained.

Fletermeyer believes it would take about $1 million to install buoys and escape lines every 150 feet.

"With the recommendations that I made, I think it's very realistic to say that 75 percent of the drownings could be prevented," he said.

And last year the board agreed to test one of Fletermeyer's safety lines.

But according to Stella Mendoza, that test never happened. Asked why, she said, "Bureaucracy."

"Fill me in," Pelley said.

"There's no excuse for that," she acknowledged,

"There doesn't seem to be any urgency here, if you see what I mean," Pelley remarked.

"I understand what you're saying," Mendoza replied.

"I hope that you guys can start putting hardware in the water as soon as possible, because you have the most lethal killing machine in the country and it's still going on," John Hunter said.

Hunter was so frustrated with the pace of installing safety features that he built his own. Then, wearing fins and a wetsuit against the cold, he installed his system in less than ten minutes.

The Imperial Irrigation District removed it almost as fast.

"The appropriate measures are not rocket science. Canals have been made safe in the U.S. for hundreds of years," Hunter said.

"Why should the United States spend dollars on safety features in this canal when the people who are drowning in the canal, frankly, are criminals?" Pelley asked. "They should not be coming into the country."

"Right. If they were serial murderers, it they were child molesters, I'm a right wing guy, I'd say 'Let 'em, have at it, put the gators in the canal. You know, we'll line it with mines, too, and I'll help you set the fuses on the mines.' But they're not! You saw those pictures. Alejandra was a ten-year-old saving her 12-year-old sister, so they're are not your hardened criminals," Hunter said.

In fact crossing illegally is a class B misdemeanor, the same as loitering.

But in the 1990s, after scenes of immigrants rushing border stations, Congress beefed up the border, and a California congressman, Duncan Hunter, led the charge to build a better fence in San Diego.

"I'm Duncan Hunter. We built this double fence here at the Mexican border in San Diego, and reduced the smuggling of hundreds of thousands of people and tons of drugs by more than 90 per cent. The fence works," he said.

It did work: the fence channeled illegal immigrants away from the cities and rerouted them to the desert and the remote canal. Drownings rose rapidly, from six in 1994 to more than 30 in 1998. That county cemetery in the desert had to expand. There are now 850 bricks in the paupers graveyards, mostly people who drowned or perished in the desert.

Former Rep. Duncan Hunter says the fence is a success and now the canal should be made safer. The congressman's brother, John Hunter, feels the unintended cost of the fence has been too high.

"I wonder whether any of this is family guilt…that motivates you?" Pelley asked John Hunter.

"I have nothin' - guilt to me is an acceptable phrase. I mean, there is, we all love each other in my family, aside from the occasional fist fight, okay. And so I would say there is some ownership, 'cause I helped Duncan back in the day," Hunter replied.

"If 500 and more Americans had drowned in the canal, what do you think would have happened?" Pelley asked.

"If 50 Americans had drowned in the canal, this would have been solved a long time ago," Hunter replied.

Last year, there was a massive effort to save lives on the All-American Canal. The federal government paid for a project to rescue fish, lifting them over the hydro-electric "drops" where the human bodies tend to gather.

The Imperial Irrigation District has recently started a year-long test of a single safety line. If the board votes to install the system it's testing, it will still cover only a short stretch of the canal that is lined with concrete.

"So three-quarters of the canal would have no safety features?" Pelley asked Stella Mendoza.

"Correct," she replied.

At this time, she said there's no plan for putting in safety features.

"So it's not likely people are gonna stop drowning in the canal?" Pelley asked.

"Probably," Mendoza replied.

Produced by Shawn Efran