Conditions

It froze every night last week.  Our camp was on top of a hill in an area called Chavez Siding--about 15 miles north of the border.  Each morning a thick frost covered the camp, and an even thicker layer iced the trails.  There was hail the first day of the week, and intense winds.
For us, the weather was inconvenient, something to huddle inside a tent or inside a truck from.  Folks crossing don't have tents, they don't have cars waiting for them when the weather turns bad or full propane tanks to make hot drinks.
We found a fire ring in the middle of a trail on Wednesday.  Brushing away the ashes, the coals were still warm underneath from the night before.  It is rare to see such disregard inconspicuousness.  In the darkness of the desert, a fire can be seen by helicopters from tens of miles away, and there are many helicopters.

A few volunteers came across a man a few weeks ago, during a period of similar conditions, whose core body temperature was 95 degrees--hypothermic.  He was eventually evacuated.  It frosted the night after this man left the desert, a frost that would have been sure to kill him.
Conditions are never ideal for crossing. 
The cold is misleading.  It makes one think that much water isn't necessary,  and dehydration sets in slowly and persists, with headaches and dizziness to start.
The rain is misleading too--one would think that there would be much more fresh water along trails, in canyons and through washes.  But in the past weeks, I have witnessed and heard stories of more people vomiting from contaminated water than in the past several months.  There is little, if any, naturally occurring, uncontaminated water out there.
It is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to convey the problems people face in crossing.  Thinking of all the negative conditions and the harshness of the terrain it is still hard to believe that anyone makes it.  Trails don't zig-zag up mountains in switchback, they go straight up and down--to decrease time at more visible elevations, and to increase speed.
The darkness changes everything.  Many believe most folks walk only at night.  I think most folks walk constantly, through the day and through the night.  Without a moon it is impossible to see the trails, well defined as they may be.  It is impossible to see low lying, thorny branches or loose rocks in the trail, or yucca branches or barbed wire, lying like trip lines across paths.  It is impossible to know who or what is around the next boulder or over the next pass.  At mountain saddles, intermittent house lights scatter along the horizon or in distant valleys, but are miles away, with no trails leading to them, and a glow from the lights of Tucson light up the sky to the north.

When considering all the elements that people work against in crossing, I'm reminded of a conversation a volunteer had with a woman who had become injured in the desert.  The volunteer was apologetically talking about the difficulties the woman had faced, the conditions we make people face to work here.  The woman replied that the journey was nothing.  That sitting down at the dinner table with her three children and explaining that they didn't have enough food for dinner that night was something immeasurably worse than anything the desert could present.