No More Deaths says that of the nearly 32,000 gallon jugs volunteers have left on trails, nearly 3,600 were destroyed by humans—and, specifically, border patrol agents. In a video released by No More Deaths, a border patrol agent smiles at the camera as he pours out jugs one-by-one, saying “make sure you get a nice shot … picking up this trash that somebody left on the trail.” In other footage, agents also appear to be smiling as one kicks over jug after jug:
Hunters, militia members and other actors were partly to blame but statistical analysis of the different land jurisdictions – national forest, state trust land and private land – identified border patrol as the only group with regular access and consistent presence in all three jurisdictions.
The report also cited anecdotal evidence from volunteers and an unnamed former border patrol agent interviewed last year who was quoted saying: “I remember people smashing and stepping on water bottles, I remember that being imparted on to us in one way or another.”
The report also quoted a 37-year-old Mexican border crosser named Miguel: “They break the bottles so you can’t even use them to fill up in the tanks. I needed water, some of the other people in the group needed water, but we found them destroyed. [I felt] helplessness, rage. They [the US border patrol] must hate us.”
Data suggests that more than 8,000 migrants have died crossing the border since the 1990s, with people taking more and more dangerous and isolated routes as the U.S. government has militarized the border with more agents, more high-tech surveillance, and less legal routes for families to stay together. No More Deaths estimates deaths to be as high as 10,000, with hundreds of unidentified bodies—with no way for them to be claimed—buried in graves in California, Arizona, and Texas:
In this crisis, body counts fail: there is no way to know the true number of the dead in the borderlands. With foot traffic moving through uninhabited and roadless areas, it is common for days, weeks, months, and even years to pass before human remains are discovered—if they are ever found at all. The hot sun and hard winds scour the landscape, and scavenging by animals contributes to the rapid deterioration of bodies. Within weeks, someone may be reduced to bone fragments or a partial skeleton. As a result, the ability to locate a person’s remains and the success of postmortem identification dwindle. In effect, we cannot know the total number of lives lost in the borderlands; the region has been transformed into a vast graveyard of the missing.
Steve Passament, border patrol spokesman in the Tucson sector, told the Guardian that “if the groups which published the report had evidence of agents sabotaging humanitarian supplies they should ‘immediately bring it to our attention’ because agents would be disciplined, he said.”
But it’s right there on video, federal immigration agents, paid with U.S. tax dollars, destroying humanitarian aid for no reasons other than to see migrants suffer and die. Remember, this is the same agency that stalked and detained a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy last year. These aren’t isolated incidents. These aren’t rogue agents. This is exactly who they are.
Comments are closed on this story.