Imagine waking up every morning to that kind of an environment and going out to do what is necessary to keep that ranch going, as it has been going and has been running for someone's parents, grandparents, and generations on back. It is a beautiful life, as they say, and as the movie title goes.

   Then picture this: One day a person gets up, but their whole life is completely turned around because of something that has happened, a change in the environment, I guess one might say. Imagine finding that across the land people are coming, and people are coming in very large numbers. People are coming by the hundreds, by the thousands. People are cutting the fences in order to get on the land. People, once they get on to the land, are defecating in the water supply and/or breaking the water valves. This is, re- member, the middle of the desert, and the water there is the most precious commodity imaginable.

   Imagine them strewing trash all over the ranch so that the cattle begin eating some of this trash and eventually die.

   Imagine being threatened by these people who are crossing the land. Remember again that this is land on which you and your ancestors have been for six generations, but your children all of a sudden are afraid to go to their grandmother's house because of the danger that exists in moving just a few miles across the land.

   This is the situation that Steven and Tammy Sue Smith are facing. The Smiths own and operate a cattle ranch located only 30 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the home and workplace of their family. There are, as I say, six generations of owners of this particular property. Like many other ranch families in Arizona, their family has been there longer than Arizona has been a State.

   The Smiths have three children: two sons, Chance, 17, and Will, 15, and one daughter, Shaye Lynn, 14. All three children live and work on the ranch and attend school.

   Over the past several years, the Smith family has had to deal with an invasion of thou- sands of illegal aliens, illegal aliens trespassing on their ranchland and messing it up as they pass over the land. Not surprising, when we consider that, in one month alone, the Tucson sector, which is the area in which this particular ranch exists, reported that they had, in fact, stop or identified or collected 23,000 illegal aliens. That was in the month of November, 2002.

   Also, remember that they even admit that they get one in five. So, in the Tucson sec- tor, where this ranch exists, 100,000 people came across that border from Mexico and into the United States illegally, and many of them came across this ranch.

   Since September 11, 2003, as security at ports of entry in and around cities has been stepped up, the flow of illegal aliens has shifted to the public and private rangeland, where countless miles of border are marked by barbed-wire fences and little else. At and near the border, this open rangeland is rapidly becoming one of America's most danger- ous doorsteps.

   Steven and Tammy Sue Smith have concern for their property, their children, and the safety of their family. This concern is not misplaced, nor is it exaggerated.

   I will cite a few examples of the direct and very dangerous encounters that the Smiths and their children have had on their own land. Remember that this has been happening to them only in the last several years.

   Because of the very mountainous terrain, the Smith ranch is a popular travel route for people-smuggling and drug-smuggling. The hilly and rocky terrain makes it harder to track the trespassers and harder to see and apprehend them. Thus, the Smith family finds its ranchland a major thoroughfare for hundreds of illegal aliens and drug-smug- glers every month.

   Shaye Lynn, when she was 12 years old, was driving with her grandmother across their own ranch to feed some cattle. On the road, they were confronted by a car with two illegal aliens, who subjected the grandmother and granddaughter to threats of violence. Fortunately, they were able to outrun the pursuers. Their vehicle made it to safety.

   Steven, the dad, almost died 2 years after he contracted a very serious illness, after coming in contact with a cadaver on his land. In fact, the doctors asked him if he had come across something like a cadaver. They told him that they were encountering many strange diseases for which they did not have any sort of treatment, diseases which they could not do anything about.

   Their son, Will. rolled his pickup truck in avoiding hitting two illegal aliens who tried to hijack him by placing large boulders in the middle of the road. I have seen this out there. The illegals, in fact, will use either boulders on the road or cut down a tree or large saguaro cactus and lay it across the road, and then. when people stop, they are hijacked. This is on a little, tiny, dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

   Will and Shaye Lynn were able to identify a man on "America's Most Wanted" one night, based on his appearance on their property a few weeks earlier. He had demanded food and then tried to steal two horses. "America's Most Wanted" described this man as one of Mexico's most dangerous coyotes, the thugs who smuggle people across the bor- der for money.

   On another occasion, the Smith family observed a group of 32 aliens crossing their lands very near their house. They tracked them and were able to stop 27 of them, de- taining them until the Border Patrol arrived. One, who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, was later found to have been from Guatemala.

   The Smith family and other people like them are America's homeland heroes. We should not forget them, and we should hold them up in high regard, since they truly are on the front line of an invasion.

Thomas G. Tancredo is a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the Sixth Congressional District of Colorado.

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