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A grim record at the border

This year likely to be worst in migrant deaths
By Leslie Berestein
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 10, 2005

This year is shaping up to become the deadliest ever along the Southwest border, with 366 recorded deaths of undocumented immigrants from Oct. 1 to yesterday.

The majority of the deaths have occurred in Arizona, where immigrant smugglers trying to evade border security take their human cargo through the most desolate and deadly stretches of desert. As of yesterday, 119 of those found dead are believed to have died of heat-related causes.

Already, according to Border Patrol records, the death toll this year has exceeded the total number of deaths for all of fiscal year 2004 (Oct. 1 to Sept. 30), when the bodies of 330 migrants were found.

The toll has also surpassed the year-to-date record for 2000, the deadliest year thus far for illegal border crossings: 383 migrants were found dead that fiscal year; 310 had died by this date.

"It looks like we are on course to have the most number of deaths we have ever experienced," said Dr. Bruce Parks, medical examiner for Pima County in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector.

About 65 migrants died in Pima County in July alone, "which is by far a record in this office," Parks said last week. He attributes the tragic spike to a deadly heat wave that lasted through much of July, during which several Phoenix residents, many of them homeless, also died.

The overwhelming caseload of migrant fatalities is taxing the limits of the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office. For the first time, the facility has been forced to rent a refrigerated truck to store bodies that can't fit inside the building. Medical examiners have been overwhelmed – at one time there was a backlog of about 30 unexamined bodies, Parks said – and have had to forgo routine full autopsies in favor of external examinations.

"For the first time, we had to resort to performing a more limited examination," he said.

The concentration of migrant deaths this summer has taken place in Arizona's remote western desert, where immigrant smugglers take their charges to evade high-tech surveillance technology installed further east as part of the Arizona Border Control Initiative, said Jose Garza, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's Tucson sector.

"It's a huge deterrent to smugglers, so they've moved west," Garza said.

While there are also more agents patrolling the western desert as part of the initiative, which began in March 2004, Garza said agents have noticed a shift to the sparsely populated western corridor, where temperatures tend to be hotter, "in the last couple of years."

"The routes of egress in the western desert are farther," Garza said. "They have to do a lot more walking . . . they are taking them through the most treacherous areas. They can't carry enough water to get through our deserts."

Border Patrol rescues have also been on the rise: As of Monday, 2,092 migrants have been rescued along the border, according to the agency, compared to 1,347 at this time last fiscal year. There have been 560 rescue incidents this fiscal year so far; last year at this time, only 411 rescue operations had been performed.

According to the Border Patrol, one factor that may contribute to higher death counts is that with more agents on the ground, in addition to more rescues, there are also more bodies being found.

"As we gain more operational control of that area and our patrols are more frequent in the most remote areas of that desert, we're finding a greater frequency of skeletal remains," said Salvador Zamora, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, parent agency of the Border Patrol.

But there have still been more heat-related deaths this year than last, in spite of additional patrols, additional rescues and an interior repatriation program that, since early June, has flown more than 10,000 migrants caught in the Arizona desert to Mexico City in hopes of preventing them from crossing again.

To critics, the continuing deaths are a sign the federal government's border policies aren't working.

"We focus all of our energies on border enforcement, instead of even starting to look at the structural problems that cause migration," said Claudia Smith of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, who blames tighter enforcement in Arizona for pushing border crossers into more dangerous terrain. "Whenever you intensify the strategy, it does not mean they are going to be dissuaded from crossing. They are just going to be taken through a more remote route, where the possibility of being rescued is minimal."

As border enforcement has moved east, so has illegal immigration traffic – and the accompanying casualties. In fiscal year 1998, four years after Operation Gatekeeper tightened security along the border in San Diego County, the greatest share of migrant deaths took place in the Border Patrol's El Centro sector. That year, 90 migrants were found dead in the El Centro sector, which encompasses Imperial and Riverside counties. Thirty-six were found dead in the San Diego sector, while the Tucson sector registered 11 deaths.

Since the 2005 fiscal year began in October, the El Centro sector has registered 29 deaths, and the San Diego sector has registered 18. Meanwhile, 173 have been found dead in the Tucson sector.

"It's very sad," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents agents. "It just shows the most serious flaw in the logic of the Border Patrol's national strategy of pushing people away from the cities. It assumed that people would simply not cross because these areas were remote and dangerous to cross. They underestimated by a large degree their level of desperation."

Meanwhile, despite the federal government's continuing investment in border security over the past decade, the estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has roughly tripled sincethe 1990s.

"If we stopped hiring people, offering jobs, they would stop coming across," Bonner said. "That would be the most humane solution to this problem . . . let's take a look at how much imported labor we need, and legitimize that, so that people don't have to risk their lives crossing the desert."

As many as 3,500 people are believed to have died crossing the Southwest border illegally since January 1995.