Manuel Chidez held the record at Dean Flake's ranch in Snowflake, Arizona. At its height in the 1970s, when Mr Flake and his brothers ran nearly 1,000 cattle over 200,000 acres of high desert, Mr Chidez was one of dozens of illegal Mexican labourers who would arrive each spring to grow corn and alfalfa to feed cattle in winter. Nineteen times, the US border patrol raided the Flake ranch, hauled Manuel away and dumped him across the border in Mexico. Each time he returned, sometimes in as little as a day.

"There was virtually no control at the border," says Jeff Flake, the fifth of Dean and Norita Flake's 11 children raised in the town named after Erastus Snow and William Jordan Flake, the Mormon missionaries sent by Brigham Young to settle Arizona in the late 19th century. "They would go back for birthdays, for Christmas, for holidays, because they could always come back across the border easily."