The workers are detained by mounted inspectors and held in "disinfection rooms" where they are doused with gasoline, kerosene, or cryolite. At times the rooms catch fire in the desert heat.

In 1917, Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old Mexican domestic worker, refuses to take a gasoline bath. Several thousand Mexican women join her and block all traffic into El Paso. This uprising will become known as the Bath Riots.

In the coming decades, border patrol will also attempt to disinfect workers' clothes and bodies with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and other gasses.

David Dorado Romo, an author and the descendant of El Paso border crossers, writes: “beginning in the 1920s, U.S. officials at the Santa Fe Bridge deloused and sprayed the clothes of Mexicans crossing into the U.S. with Zyklon B. The fumigation was carried out in an area of the building that American officials called, ominously enough, 'the gas chambers.’ I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B" (Romo, 2005).