El Paso Times this past summer reported a rising number of migrant deaths in the region, many losing their lives due to heat exposure and drowning in dangerous canals. That report said that at least 37 migrants had died in the region since October 2021, approaching the death toll of 39 during the previous fiscal year. Advocates in that report warned of “a major human rights crisis at the border.”
They have been horrifically, tragically correct. CBS News reports that at least 853 migrants died while attempting to cross the southern border region during the past 12 months, making it the deadliest year on record. The report notes that the number is still likely to be higher, in part because U.S. border agents have a history of undercounting these deaths.
RELATED STORY: Taller border fencing is hurting and killing more migrants, exactly as it was intended to do
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“The number also does not encompass all deaths of migrants who died trying to reach or cross the U.S. border, since Border Patrol only counts migrants it identified or processed on U.S. territory,” CBS News reported. “Still, the record deaths reported by Border Patrol offer a grim glimpse into the dangerous, and sometimes deadly, trek millions of migrants have undertaken over the past years in hopes of reaching the U.S.”
The dangers are frequently conditions of the harsh borderlands, including extreme heat and swift waters. Alan Paredes Salazar, a 37-year-old Peruvian migrant, was one of nearly a dozen people swept away by the fierce Rio Grande waters this past September. They all drowned. His aunt, Rose Lee, told CBS News that she’s been unable to claim his body so far. "My nephew's death has left us devastated,” she said in the report. “It's a very tragic death, to travel so far and die in an unknown place.” Sometimes unknown migrants are identified through clothing. Other times they are buried in simple graves with only a “Jane” or “John Doe” placard. “The South Texas Human Rights Center, a nonprofit that works with migrants and their families, reports that 280 families are actively looking for a loved one who disappeared somewhere on the journey north,” NPR reported in 2019.
The dangers are also man-made. Prevention Through Deterrence strategies and other harsh policy force migrants to take riskier routes and methods, including having to put themselves in the hands of coyotes. This has cost some their lives, like the 53 migrants killed in what became the deadliest single smuggling incident in U.S. history.
"We started banging at the door, and other people started banging at the door so they would let us out," survivor Marvin Gomez told ABC News last month. But the smugglers would not let them out of the trailer. Border fencing has also been built taller, with a specific goal of hurting migrants.
“Advocates for migrants have also blamed U.S. policies like Title 42—which allows authorities to immediately expel some migrants without allowing them to request asylum—for pushing migrants to take more dangerous routes to try to enter the U.S. and avoid apprehension,” CBS News continued. The Biden administration enforced Stephen Miller’s unscientific Title 42 order for more than a year and planned to end its use in May, but was then blocked by Republicans. But the Biden administration, on its own, has since expanded the debunked policy to include Venezuelan migrants. In urging the Biden administration to rethink this decision, lawmakers said it puts “thousands of displaced asylum seekers at risk,” and “violates our legal obligations under domestic and international law.”
Theresa Cardinal Brown of the Bipartisan Policy Center summed it up succinctly. "The answer is that desperate people do desperate things, and desperate things are often dangerous things," she told CBS News.
Some immigrant rights advocates have estimated that as many as 10,000 migrants have died from exposure and other elements within the last two decades, a number significantly higher than what border officials have stated. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed in a disturbing report this past spring that agents have indeed been undercounting deaths. The federal government, in fact, has a history of harassing human rights advocates whose work in the desert has been to prevent agonizing deaths.
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