Migrant deaths: A crisis deepens in the desert

From the Arizona Daily Star investigation: Death in the desert series

Curt Prendergast , Alex Devoid | Dec 2, 2021 Updated Dec 3, 2021

First of four stories

Oscar’s phone battery was failing as he tried to stay on the line with the 911 dispatcher. He had crossed the Arizona-Mexico border southwest of Tucson a few days earlier, but he was running out of food and couldn’t keep walking through the Baboquivari Mountains. His call to 911 came during a record heat wave that turned September 2020 into one of the deadliest months for migrants ever recorded in Southern Arizona.

“I’m lost and alone,” Oscar said through a shaky connection with a dispatcher at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which recorded the call. “I’ve been lost for two days and I have almost nothing to eat here so I called this number.”

The battery was running out. “It’s down to 5%,” he said. The dispatcher connected Oscar’s call to the Border Patrol, but the call dropped even though multiple carriers provided coverage in the location he called from. “Hopefully, he’s able to call back,” the Border Patrol agent said. Oscar called again but the call dropped. He called again, and this time the coordinates showed him to be about a mile away from the site of his original call. “I only have 3% of my battery left,” he said. An agent told him to send a text message through the WhatsApp messaging service instead of using his phone battery on a call.

Oscar called back again, pleading, “please don’t leave me here.” The Border Patrol sent an aircraft to look for him, but Oscar said it was flying on the wrong side of the mountain. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” Oscar said. “I don’t have anything left. I didn’t think things were going to be so hard here.” His battery was at 2%. “My wife is about to give birth and I prefer to just go back there. This is killing me,” Oscar said. He started to sob. A Border Patrol agent took over the call and the 911 audio recording stopped. Oscar’s fate isn’t known. The Sheriff’s Department later said the Border Patrol found him, but the Border Patrol could not find any record of what happened to him.

He was one of thousands of migrants who cross the border in Southern Arizona every year. Each year, many of them are overwhelmed by the harsh deserts and mountains, leading to distress calls to 911 dispatchers, family members and local humanitarian groups. Some find help. Others do not. Over the past two decades, the remains of more than 3,900 migrants were found in Southern Arizona, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, the Tucson-based aid group Humane Borders, and the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office. An unknown number of others also died while crossing the border, but their remains were never found.

The long-running humanitarian disaster is intensifying. Within weeks of Oscar’s calls for help, the remains of 36 migrants were found, making September 2020 the deadliest month since 2013. By the end of the year, the remains of 239 migrants had been found, more than any other year since large-scale deaths in the desert of Southern Arizona began in 2000. Until this summer.

After the remains of 52 migrants were found in June, more than any month since 2010, the death toll so far in 2021 is on pace to surpass last year. The remains of 222 migrants were found in Southern Arizona from January through September, compared to 192 during the same period last year and 124 during that period in 2019.

“2020 does not look like a one-year blip,” said Dr. Greg Hess, Pima County’s medical examiner, who oversees the vast majority of remains recovered in Southern Arizona. “We’re super busy over these types of remains in 2021 and I imagine we’re going to come close to the numbers we had last year.” The increase in migrant deaths is raising the stakes for President Joe Biden as he seeks to overhaul immigration policy. Hundreds of predictable and preventable deaths could continue for the foreseeable future without urgent and sustained action by federal authorities, but that action is nowhere on the horizon.

As has been the case for the past two decades, the thousands of migrant deaths flit around the periphery of the immigration debate but rarely become the center of attention. Biden has proposed a wide array of new immigration and border policies, but they are not aimed at helping migrants in the desert. To understand the crisis, the Arizona Daily Star analyzed medical examiner data in multiple Southern Arizona counties and built a statistical model of migrant deaths.

We listened to audio recordings of 911 calls from migrants and reviewed incident reports from law enforcement agencies. We also tracked how lawmakers discussed those deaths; and interviewed migrants, scholars and officials. We visited sites where migrants died, and walked through the desert and mountains with Border Patrol agents and humanitarian volunteers. The Star found the Border Patrol, humanitarian groups and local law enforcement work hard to rescue migrants. But no one is in charge of those efforts or held accountable, despite the need to coordinate across 20 jurisdictions and work with humanitarian groups and the families who lost loved ones in the desert.

The Star also found the scope of the crisis remains unclear, even after two decades of migrants dying in large numbers in the desert. The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office is the only agency involved that does not take a lethargic approach to record-keeping. As a result, migrant deaths tend to be treated as isolated incidents, rather than as part of a large phenomenon.

Perhaps most importantly, the lack of clear rules for providing humanitarian aid blocks the intellectual power and volunteer energy the Tucson community unleashes when an extraordinary migration event occurs, from the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, when Tucson churches and activists helped refugees fleeing violent conflict in Central American countries, to the volunteers and donations that keep the Casa Alitas shelter for asylum-seeking families in Tucson running today.

All this is unfolding as the U.S. Senate considers the nomination of Chris Magnus, current chief of the Tucson Police Department, to be the next commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol. A key committee narrowly approved moving forward with his nomination process on Nov. 3.

The Star’s investigation found that: Exposure to the elements, particularly heat, is the most common cause of death, leading to 1,390 deaths and likely many of the 1,866 sets of skeletal remains where cause of death was undetermined. The journey has grown more dangerous over the years, due in part to walls and barriers funneling migrants into remote areas. Today, remains are found an average of 17 miles from towns. Southern Arizona’s desert is as large as several states, but deaths are concentrated in specific areas. About half the deaths in 2021 occurred in 6% of that area. Migrants often can’t call for help. At least 514 migrants died in areas without cellphone coverage. Migrants often die just hours before help arrives. More than 1,000 migrants died less than 24 hours before the discovery of their remains.

Opposing principles

The political decisions that shape the official response to migrant deaths have become wrapped up in the debate over border enforcement without being “elevated to the discussion it needs to have,” said U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat who has represented districts along Arizona’s border with Mexico since 2003. “Politically, if you show any empathy, any response short of enforcement, then for some reason you fall into the category of those that don’t want to do anything about the border, and you fall into the open-border discussion,” Grijalva said. “So politicians have backed away from it.” Without clear guidance from Congress, the public policy response to migrant deaths remains caught between opposing arguments.

On one hand, the argument is that if migrants didn’t cross the border illegally and try to evade Border Patrol agents, they wouldn’t risk dying in the desert. “No one wants anybody to die,” Border Patrol Agent Jesus Vasavilbaso said as he sat next to a trail in the Baboquivari Mountains where a migrant from Mexico died last year. “If we had 100% apprehensions, nobody would die,” Vasavilbaso said.

“Strong border security and interior enforcement is the best way to stop loss of life,” U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said during a debate on the House floor in December 2020, over a bill that would direct federal officials to count migrant deaths. “In reality, to prevent future deaths at the border, we need to make it absolutely clear that no one should embark on this dangerous journey because illegal entry is simply not an option,” Reschenthaler said.

On the other hand, the argument is that border enforcement strategies put migrants’ lives in danger by leaving only one option, crossing through deadly terrain rather than through ports of entry, as they look for a better life in the United States or flee poverty, corruption and violence in their home countries. In 2005, U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican who represented Southern Arizona from 1985-2007, described a “hard lesson” learned in Arizona after a vast increase in the number of Border Patrol agents and technology in previous years: “No matter how much we increase our enforcement, still the illegal migrants kept coming, at the same rate or faster than they had come in previous years.” “The border buildup did not stop the flow; it merely shifted it to more dangerous areas, where apprehensions are more difficult and death more likely,” Kolbe said in remarks on the House floor, archived by the Library of Congress.

Over the last two decades the Border Patrol “monopolized the emergency response to a crisis of their own creation,” the Tucson-based aid group No More Deaths wrote in a February report. “Only abolishing Border Patrol policies and practices that cause people to become lost, missing, and injured in wilderness terrain in the first place will stop death on the southern border,” said the No More Deaths report.

‘For my family’

Damaris, a 25-year-old woman from Guatemala, had heard about the dangers of crossing the desert, but a family member was able to loan her the money this summer to make the journey. She decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

“You have to overcome,” she said at a migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, in late July. “You make the decision to risk your own life and you say ‘for my family.’” The Border Patrol had picked up her group the day before, after they walked through the desert for more than a week. She didn’t know where they crossed the border, saying “everything looks the same.” As she traveled to the United States, she met a 50-year-old woman from El Salvador who sobbed as she described her ordeal in the desert. “We don’t know who to trust,” she said through tears.

Joel Mondragon, a 27-year-old man from the Mexican state of Jalisco, had been in Nogales for nearly two months. He and his family, including young daughters, did not plan to try to cross the border through the desert.

“I wouldn’t risk it,” he said. “They told me about asylum here and I think it’s better, more correct, to do things right,” Mondragon said. Damaris and Mondragon were among more than 100 migrants and asylum seekers seated at long tables inside the Kino Border Initiative shelter in Nogales, Sonora. Many of them erupted in loud applause as asylum seekers took turns with a microphone to call on Biden to let them make their claims at the port of entry a few miles away.

They spoke in front of a mural portraying a border version of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” with Jesus surrounded by migrant parents and their children. The windows behind Jesus in the mural showed the wilderness and mountains of Southern Arizona stretching into the distance. That wilderness covers the equivalent of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It includes harsh desert, steep mountain ranges, and vast areas with few towns and roads.

Crossing the wilderness

From a car, the Altar Valley flies by on Arizona 286, which connects Three Points and Sasabe southwest of Tucson. On foot, the 45-minute drive turns into days of walking across rough terrain rutted with ravines. Walking is even more treacherous on the trails that run along ridges in the nearby Baboquivari Mountains, which Customs and Border Protection officials in Arizona say have become one of the main thoroughfares for migrants crossing the border.

The area also has long been one of the deadliest for migrants, medical examiner numbers shows. The remains of nearly 1,400 migrants were found since 2000 in the corridor on the west side of the Baboquivari Mountains on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, including more than 140 since January 2020.

On the east side of the mountains, the remains of about 550 migrants were found in the Altar Valley since 2000, including at least 35 since January 2020. The trek is made more difficult by the fact that many migrants already walked for days on the Mexico side of the border, as a couple from the Mexican state of Oaxaca did last December. They sat glumly on a stone next to a dirt road in the mountains a few miles north of the border. They had been walking for four days and couldn’t continue, they said. They tried to call for help, but they couldn’t get cell reception and decided to wait for someone to come by.

As Border Patrol Agent Jesus Vasavilbaso questioned them, they emptied crackers and vitamin water from their backpacks and showed him the street clothes they wore under camouflage pants and jackets. Minutes later, they got into the back of a Border Patrol truck. From there, they likely were expelled to Mexico, left to decide whether to give up or try to cross the border again. Had the couple from Oaxaca continued their journey, they might have met the same fate as Jovita Garcia Ortiz, a woman from Hidalgo, Mexico, who died near the northern edge of the Baboquivari Mountains. Garcia was traveling with a group of migrants, but she fell behind in early August 2020.

Her fate was unknown for more than a month. On Sept. 11, 2020, a Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue (Borstar) agent called the Sheriff’s Department to say they were tracking a group of migrants near the Border Patrol checkpoint on Arizona 86, not far from the northern edge of the Baboquivari Mountains. A Border Patrol dog led the agents to Garcia, who appeared to have died several weeks earlier.

The Pima County sheriff’s deputy who went to the scene remembered an Aug. 15 report from No More Deaths volunteers, who relayed a call from Garcia’s family. Another migrant in the group had called the family to let them know Garcia had fallen behind.

At the time, deputies believed Garcia’s last known location was on the Tohono O’odham reservation. A deputy alerted the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department and the Border Patrol, but it turned out that Garcia was not on the reservation. The phone she carried with her showed missed calls and text messages sent days earlier. Like Garcia, about half the migrants whose remains were found in Southern Arizona were from Mexico. Another 12% were from Central American countries such as Guatemala. The medical examiner could not determine the nationalities of 37% of the found remains.

Remains are far more likely to belong to men, accounting for nearly 3,100 remains where gender could be determined, compared with about 500 belonging to women. In terms of age, about 1,600 were between 18 and 39 years old and about 460 were in their 40s or 50s. About 100 were under 18 years old. The ages of about 1,500 could not be determined

Shaky correlation

A sharp increase in border crossings since the winter when Biden took office dominated news coverage and political rhetoric about the border, which might make it tempting to point to the rise in crossings as the obvious explanation for more deaths in the desert.

But a rise in crossings doesn’t fully explain a rise in deaths, the Star found by comparing Border Patrol statistics on encounters with migrants, which generally are used as an indicator of overall crossings, and medical examiners’ data from Arizona’s border counties.

Agents in Arizona reported more than three times as many encounters with migrants in 2021 than they did in 2020, but the number of remains found in those years stayed on the same record-breaking, but consistent, pace. Agents reported 74,800 encounters last year and about 265,000 through September of this fiscal year. Medical examiners reported 239 sets of remains last year and 222 from January to September this year.

On a smaller scale, agents in Arizona reported similar totals for encounters in June and July, but the number of remains was dramatically different. Agents reported 30,800 encounters in June and 32,800 in July. But the remains of 52 migrants were found in June, more than twice the 23 found in July.

In fact, Border Patrol apprehensions plummeted by roughly 90% over the past two decades, while the number of remains found in Southern Arizona grew nearly tenfold.

Apprehensions in Arizona dropped from 725,000 in 2000 to 74,800 in 2020, while the number of remains grew from about 25 in 1999 to 239 in 2020.

Longer, more perilous routes

Deaths occur throughout the year and across thousands of square miles, but they are most frequent during the heat of summer and in the desert west of Tucson, the Star’s geographical analysis of migrant deaths shows.

Two important trends emerged in the Star’s analysis: Summers are growing hotter in Southern Arizona and migrants are taking longer, more dangerous routes through the desert.

A third trend, the quick expulsions of migrants to Mexico during the pandemic under the public health order known as Title 42, may have allowed migrants to make repeated crossing attempts just hours or days after making grueling treks through the desert. While Border Patrol statistics show Title 42 expulsions were the norm in the Tucson Sector in 2021, no data is available on how many of the migrants who died had been expelled.

More than 3,200 migrants died from exposure to the elements or their bodies were too decomposed for the medical examiner to determine a cause of death. The months from May to September accounted for 60% of remains found. For the roughly 1,400 sets of remains found within a week after death, more than 1,000 were found in the summer.

The risk for migrants is worsening as the deadly summer months in Southern Arizona grow hotter. Last year was the second-hottest year on record, as well as the driest, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Seven of the 10 hottest years on record were in the past decade.

In the cold winter months, migrants sometimes die of hypothermia, including about 60 since 2000. Migrant deaths from violence have become rarer in Southern Arizona over the past decade. Fewer than 3% of all migrant deaths, or about 120, were the result of violence, such as gunshot wounds or stabbings. About 220 deaths were linked to vehicle wrecks.

A woman named Esthela disappeared in 2006 while crossing the border in Arizona “searching for the American dream,” according to a video testimonial her sister Nadia provided in 2018 to the Colibri Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit in Tucson that helps identify migrants’ remains and their families to find closure. “She wanted to give her son a better future. School, clothes, food, everything that was very difficult, and is still difficult, to get in Mexico,” Nadia said.

“She was an ambitious woman. She didn’t want to settle for how things were. She wanted to fight for more.” “I don’t know exactly how far Esthela walked. They think it was three days and that those days were very difficult for her, that it was terribly hot and perhaps Esthela wasn’t in the best health to walk,” Nadia said.

“I imagine that Esthela had to have suffered from thirst,” Nadia said as her voice choked up and she wiped tears from her eyes. “Sometimes I think about that and it, that idea, thinking about that, that Esthela died thirsty. It tortures me, it hurts me.” “Esthela had to have been aware that she wasn’t going to make it across the border or that she wasn’t going to survive,” Nadia said.

“How must my sister have felt in those moments?” “I often tell my nephew Emiliano, I tell him, ‘Your mom gave her life for you, because she loved you.’ And I think, if my sister lost her life crossing the border it’s so that her son could be a successful man and could have a chance.” “We didn’t come here to do bad things. We came because we want our kids to get ahead, for school, because there are more opportunities here to work,” Nadia said.“And, I don’t know, I think that telling my sister’s story can help so that someone analyzes that, that perhaps there are laws that are too unjust and aren’t giving people a chance.”

Already exhausted upon reaching US

The journey across the border in Southern Arizona has grown longer and more dangerous over the last three decades, the Star’s analysis of all migrant deaths on record in the state shows. The trend is clear: Since 1990, the remains of migrants have been found in increasingly remote areas. Today, they are found much farther from roads, cities and towns than they were in the 1990s or 2000s, according to the Star’s analysis of medical examiner data and OpenStreetMap data, a public geographic database.

In 1990, when relatively few remains of migrants were found, the average distance they were found from the nearest road was less than one mile. By the late 1990s and 2000s, that distance ranged from two to four miles, spiking to seven miles one year. Since 2010, the average distance from the nearest road ranged from five to eight miles away.

The shift away from towns and cities was also apparent, growing from an average of about three miles in 1990 to roughly 11 miles in the late 1990s and between 11 and 15 miles in the 2000s. Since 2010, the average distance ranged from 16 to nearly 20 miles away.

The Star analysis shows 43% of migrant deaths occurred in mountain ranges. Border Patrol officials say migrants who try to evade agents are crossing the border in more numerous, but smaller, groups that require more agents to respond. At the same time, large groups of migrant families, unaccompanied children and other asylum seekers flag down agents, which pulls agents away from patrolling remote areas where deaths most often occur.

The dangerous routes smugglers choose to bring migrants across the border is a key reason for deaths in the desert, Border Patrol Agent Alan Regalado said. Even before migrants reach the border, they may have walked for days or weeks and already are malnourished when they cross, he said. “Their bodies just shut down when they go up the mountain,” he said.

When Suyapa Chacón crossed the border this summer, the guide who smuggled her group across the border said they would make it through the desert in three days. “But when it came time, it wasn’t three days. It took us eight, nine days,” Chacón, a 29-year-old woman from Honduras, said in late July after the Border Patrol sent her and her 11-year-old son back to Nogales, Sonora. They walked “sometimes all day, sometimes all night,” she said inside the Kino Border Initiative shelter, a Jesuit ministry for migrants in Nogales, Sonora.

“At one point, we ended up without any food, any water,” Chacón said. “Our shoes broke underneath and we couldn’t walk, we couldn’t keep going, but we had to keep battling because we had to get there.” “There were moments when I didn’t think I would make it. I could feel that my heart was beating fast, I felt like I couldn’t continue, but I had to arrive for my children,” said Chacón, adding she “wanted something better for them.” She said she didn’t know where she crossed the border, but recognized the names of several towns in Mexico west of Nogales.

‘Funnel effects’

The increasing remoteness of migrant deaths the Star found in medical examiner data is in line with the conclusions of a study published by University of Arizona researchers in April, the latest in a series of studies on migrant deaths in Southern Arizona over the past 15 years. Border enforcement policies pushed migrants into ever more remote and dangerous areas, leading to more migrant deaths, despite an overall decline in Border Patrol apprehensions, the UA researchers found.

Rather than walk for a day or two to a house or a highway and get a ride, migrants are walking farther and longer through the desert, said Daniel Martinez, a UA sociologist who has studied migration and migrant deaths since 2005 and co-authored the study.

“People today are crossing through some of the most remote and desolate areas of the Arizona-Sonora border,” Martinez said. The UA researchers described “funnel effects” in which border enforcement policies in the 1990s pushed migrants away from cities like San Diego and El Paso to Southern Arizona. From there, border enforcement policies in the early 2000s pushed migrants away from Nogales and other Arizona border cities into remote areas.

The initiative to build up border enforcement in Arizona, dubbed Operation Safeguard by the Border Patrol, began in the mid-1990s, Martinez said. But the resources, such as fencing in urban areas, more agents, vehicles, and technology, didn’t arrive until 1999. “It was the following year that we saw migrant deaths in Southern Arizona go from 15, 20 per year, up to 70, 79 roughly in 2000,” Martinez said. “And by 2001, we had over 100 known migrant deaths in Southern Arizona.”

The border security buildup in Southern Arizona was part of a wide-ranging strategy the Border Patrol put in place in the 1990s known as “prevention through deterrence.” The idea was to block urban areas and leave dangerous terrain as the only place where migrants could cross the border. If migrants instead crossed into busy urban areas, they could quickly blend in, making it harder for agents to spot and arrest them.

Federal officials acknowledged at the time that the strategy could place migrants in “mortal danger,” as a 1994 planning document put it, but the thinking was that the danger would deter migrants from crossing the border. Instead, migrants continued to cross, and thousands died in the wilderness of Southern Arizona. Over the past two decades, the number of agents in Arizona increased sharply, and a wide array of surveillance technology and border barriers was installed, including bollard-style fencing in urban areas such as Nogales, Douglas, Naco and Lukeville.

Border Patrol checkpoints dot most of the north-south highways in Southern Arizona and ring the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation. In many areas, surveillance towers stand on hilltops several miles apart from each other in a long row a few miles north of the border. Agents park in trucks with portable surveillance equipment and thousands of sensors alert agents when someone passes by.

Arizona was at the center of former President Donald Trump’s plan to build a 30-foot-tall steel wall along the border in 2019 and 2020, accounting for about 225 miles of wall, or roughly half of all the miles of wall built under the Trump administration.

As a candidate, Joe Biden said he would not build another foot of border wall. Soon after taking office as president, Biden stopped wall construction, including an additional 20 miles of wall planned for Arizona’s 370-mile long border with Mexico.

Body count is up in unwalled areas

The Star has found statistically significant evidence that walls and pedestrian fencing have contributed to the funnel effect. Using data from 2015 to 2020, the Star built two statistical models to examine how border walls and remoteness may impact migrant death counts.

The Star found cross-border migration corridors that have more of Arizona’s unwalled border also typically have more deaths than other corridors in a given year. Also, more deaths tend to be found in remote corridors. To run the first model, the Star calculated the border miles by year that were unobstructed by the 30-foot-tall walls built during the Trump administration or the roughly 15-foot-tall pedestrian fencing built during previous administrations.

Then the Star calculated the number of border miles in each corridor by year that were unobstructed by these barriers. Using these two numbers, the Star calculated each corridor’s share of Arizona’s unwalled border by year. Our first statistical model estimates that a 1 percentage point increase in a corridor’s share of Arizona’s unwalled-border typically increases deaths by about 4%. For example, the migration corridor west of Lukeville currently has the smallest share of Arizona’s unwalled border. Nearly all of it is walled off. Effectively, its share of Arizona’s unwalled border is 0%.

Meanwhile, the corridor west of Nogales, where Sasabe is located, has nearly 4 miles of Arizona’s unwalled border, which is about a 3% share of unwalled border across the state. Based on data from 2015 to 2020, our model expects that the corridor west of Nogales would have 14% more deaths in a year than the corridor west of Lukeville. The direction of this trend is apparent in the corridor in the eastern portion of the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, where most deaths are currently found.

In 2015 it had about a 20% share of Arizona’s unwalled border. Since the new wall was built under the Trump administration, the share of the state’s unwalled border more than doubled in this corridor on the east side of the Tohono O’odham Nation, to 43%. No new wall went up on the reservation.

In 2020, 77 deaths were found in this corridor, or 50% more than in the corridor with the next highest death count. This corridor has been one of the deadliest for migrants since 2000, however, so there are certainly other factors at play in addition to its share of the state’s unwalled border. To run the second model, the Star took all the deaths in each corridor and calculated their average distance from the nearest town or city by year. We used this to measure remoteness. The model identified this trend: As distance from cities and towns increases, deaths counts in a corridor tend to increase, too.

The Star’s models show that, from year to year, more deaths are typically found in corridors that aren’t engineered to slow migrants on foot with walls, and more deaths are typically found in areas where migrants die more remotely. While these models help us see statistically significant patterns in the data at hand, they don’t establish cause and effect. Federal officials would need to make much more data available for researchers to build a highly predictive model that might anticipate where migrants will die.

Repeat crossings follow expulsions

The vast majority of encounters with migrants in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector result in quick expulsions to Mexico under the pandemic-related public health order known as Title 42. The Trump administration started using Title 42 in March 2020 and the Biden administration continues to use it.

The Border Patrol reported about 159,000 expulsions in the Tucson Sector in fiscal 2021 and about 32,500 migrants processed under immigration laws.

Title 42 is relatively new and needs more research, but it would be unwise to discount its effect on the increase in migrant deaths in Southern Arizona, the UA’s Martinez said. Title 42 expulsions are leading people “to engage in repeat crossing attempts that we haven’t seen since the early 2000s,” Martinez said, referring to the period when migrants often were sent to Mexico in what were known as voluntary returns.

“A lot of people are stuck at the border with very few options other than to try to cross again,” he said.

Planting crosses

The monsoon rains left the hills near Amado covered in greenery dotted with blue, yellow and orange flowers in early August.

Alvaro Enciso and a handful of volunteers trekked out to the desert west of Amado on a Tuesday morning, one of hundreds of trips Enciso has made in the past eight years to mark where more than 1,000 migrants died.

He makes wooden crosses and fits them with a red dot, as seen on the Humane Borders online map of migrant deaths, and an item left by migrants in the desert, such as the metal top to a jar. Guided by GPS coordinates, he and a handful of volunteers hauled wet cement in a bucket down a dirt road and into the meadow. He puts crosses at the “exact point where someone’s life, plans and dreams ended there. And that death caused a lot of repercussions and ramifications to a family south of the border, and maybe to a family here,” Enciso said.

One of the crosses now stands in a meadow a quarter-mile from a dirt road east of Amado.

Second of four stories

A 911 call from a migrant in distress in July 2020 sent Border Patrol agents into the desert on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation. They found the caller near Arizona 86. But that day’s search was not over.

Another man needed help to the south, the caller said.

Agents relayed the information to an Air National Guard helicopter pilot, who spotted Jose Antonio Guillermo, a Mexican citizen, lying face down under a palo verde tree about half a mile away. The pilot guided Border Patrol paramedics to Guillermo, but when they found him he was gasping for air, a tribal police report says. An agent poured ice water onto Guillermo’s face to try to cool him down and then ran to his truck to get a heart monitor. Guillermo’s heart rate was dissipating and he no longer had a pulse. Two more Border Patrol paramedics arrived and over the next 25 minutes they performed CPR, consulted a doctor, and injected him with epinephrine and atropine.

Despite their best efforts, they had arrived too late. Guillermo died, just a week after he turned 23.

Calls for help come from migrants stranded in mountain ranges, such as the Baboquivari Mountains southwest of Tucson where trails rise up steep mountainsides and crisscross ridges. Migrants call when they are lost in the desert dozens of miles from the nearest signs of civilization. Calls also come from family members desperate to know what happened to loved ones who went missing after crossing the border.

Those calls spur Border Patrol agents, paramedics and sheriff’s deputies to hustle down remote roads or fly helicopters along mountainsides. The calls prompt humanitarian aid volunteers from groups like Tucson-based No More Deaths to coordinate between family members and first responders.

Rescuing migrants in the desert requires overcoming a multitude of challenges, the Arizona Daily Star found by analyzing incident reports from sheriff’s departments and other local law enforcement agencies, audio recordings of 911 calls, and data from medical examiners in Pima and Yuma counties.

Some calls came before medical help was needed, but others came just minutes before the caller or their companions succumbed to heat and dehydration.

“I need help. My friend is dying. Hurry! Hurry!” one man said in a call from the Altar Valley north of Sasabe. “He’s not drinking water anymore.”

“Please, help. I’m alone. They left me,” a man said through tears in a call from east of Arivaca.

“My chest hurts, my heart,” the man said when the 911 dispatcher asked him if he was injured.

“We’re lost in the desert. Can you help us? I can’t take it anymore,” a man said in a call from the Three Points area.

“I don’t have anything left to eat. I don’t have any water. I feel like I’m going to pass out,” a woman said in a call that pinged off a cellphone tower near Green Valley.

Some areas have spotty reception, leading to frequent dropped calls as 911 dispatchers and Border Patrol agents try to gather information from the migrant in distress. In other, huge areas of the desert west of Tucson, there is no cellphone coverage, making calls for help impossible.

The wilderness in Southern Arizona is as large as several states, and would-be rescuers often have little information about where distress calls come from. When they have an exact location, they may still have to travel long distances over rough terrain to make the rescue.

Rescue efforts unfold across 20 jurisdictions that include local sheriff’s departments, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers, National Park Service rangers, and the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department. When calls come from areas that could be in multiple jurisdictions, 911 dispatchers have to figure out where to refer the call.

The de facto situation is that the Border Patrol has dual roles as the main enforcer of immigration laws and the main responder to migrants in distress. At the same time, search-and-rescue efforts technically are the responsibility of county officials, not the Border Patrol.

Either way, local law enforcement agencies and the Border Patrol have limited resources to respond to these distress calls.

Humanitarian aid volunteers see saving migrants as their top priority, but they do not have the authority to take effective action. Their efforts are hemmed in by federal agencies like the Border Patrol and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The speed and effectiveness of rescues have become even more important over the last two years as more migrants were found shortly after their deaths.

Just in June, the bodies of 16 migrants were found within 24 hours of their deaths, the highest monthly total in at least a decade and more than all such cases reported in 2019. Another 13 sets of remains were found within one week, also the highest monthly total in at least a decade, according to Pima County’s medical examiner. More than 1,000 sets of remains have been found within one day of death since 2000.

Rescues are not keeping pace.

The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector reported rescuing 14 migrants in need of medical care from May to July. During those months, the remains of 126 migrants were found, including 35 who were found within a day of death and 25 within a week of death.

If rescue efforts were to increase, they would not necessarily have to be spread across the length and breadth of Southern Arizona, the Star’s geographical analysis of medical examiner data shows. Instead, they could focus on certain cross-border corridors that are the deadliest for migrants. Even within those corridors, large numbers of deaths occur in very specific areas.

Difficult rescues

Local officials sometimes lack the resources to conduct simultaneous searches.

In the case of Jeremias Soto Velazquez, all would-be rescuers knew was that he was last seen near a water tank somewhere south of Little Tucson on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation.

A Guatemalan man stranded in the Baboquivari Mountains southwest of Tucson is lifted into a helicopter by Border Patrol rescuers in late July. U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Soto crossed the border with a group of migrants in May 2020, but he grew ill and eventually fell unconscious. The group left him on the west side of the Baboquivari Mountains. A family member called a hotline run by No More Deaths, who then called the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department, says an incident report from the tribal police.

But the Tohono O’odham police were busy searching for another missing person elsewhere on the reservation. The next day, Soto’s father told No More Deaths volunteers that Soto was left by a water tank or well, but he didn’t have Soto’s precise location. The report does not say how Soto’s father learned that information.

Again, the Police Department did not have any resources available. It wasn’t until three days after Soto went missing that those resources became available and police searched for him. They couldn’t find him.

The search effort was given a boost after a man in Soto’s group returned to where they had left him and brought him water. The man logged the GPS coordinates for Soto’s location and passed them to Border Patrol agents when they picked him up. Using those coordinates, a police officer found Soto’s body.

In other instances, rescue efforts get tangled up in jurisdictional confusion that costs precious minutes.

On May 6, 2021, two cousins crossed the border southwest of Tucson. They made it all the way to an area west of Marana, but one started to feel sick and the other called 911, according to an incident report from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies from Pima and Pinal counties, along with officers from the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department, tried to figure out who had jurisdiction.

A half hour went by and one cousin called 911 again to say the other had stopped breathing. A short time later, Borstar (Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue) agents arrived and tried to treat the cousin, but he had died.

In some cases, humanitarian groups and relatives of a missing migrant must step in when official efforts fail.

During a record-breaking series of 100-degree days in June, four brothers showed up at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department to ask about their brother-in-law. He had gone missing after crossing the border through the desert southwest of Tucson.

Their brother-in-law, Carlos Arevalo Gonzalez, crossed the border on June 12 near Sasabe. Border Patrol agents caught the group two days later south of Three Points, about 30 miles southwest of Tucson, but by that time a woman in the group had died, a sheriff’s deputy wrote in an incident report.

The Mexican Consulate had informed the brothers that the woman who died, Berta Ladios, was in the group that crossed the border with their brother-in-law. One of the migrants in the group contacted the brothers and told them Arevalo was not doing well after they left Ladios behind when she died. Soon after, the group left Arevalo.

Deputies searched for Arevalo, but couldn’t find him. One of the brothers told a deputy that he and volunteers with No More Deaths would search the next day. They followed birds to Arevalo’s body, about 30 miles north of the border.

Calling for help

When officials spoke to a crowd of news reporters this spring for an annual border safety event, they tried to send a clear message to any migrants planning to cross the border: Call 911 if you need help. Don’t waste precious battery calling your family or anyone else.

Inside a hangar filled with airplanes and helicopters used to rescue migrants at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, officials from the Border Patrol, Mexican consulate and Guatemalan consulate took turns driving home the message, meant to take advantage of the fact that many migrants carry cellphones when they cross the border.

Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Sabri Dikman urged migrants not to cross the border illegally, saying, “Don’t do it. The desert is vast and treacherous.”

“To find a person whose only location information is, ‘I’ve been walking for five days’ can be nearly impossible,” Dikman said. “Even with our best resources, the task can take days.”

For migrants who carry a phone, he urged them to call 911: “This is your single best chance for being rescued.”

The southern foothills of the Baboquivari Mountains west of Sasabe. “The desert is vast and treacherous,” the Border Patrol’s Sabri Dikman warns migrants contemplating a crossing. “Don’t do it.” Josh Galemore photos, Arizona Daily Star

“If you call anyone else, you’re wasting your battery. That cellphone battery is your life. Call 911,” Dikman said.

Ideally, rescuers would then be able to locate migrants using cellphone towers. In a positive development for rescue efforts, 911 is also now the emergency number in the Mexican state of Sonora, just south of Arizona.

Yet, at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, many of the bags containing property recovered at the scene of a death include at least one cellphone. Incident reports from local law enforcement agencies often mention finding phones and solar battery chargers next to migrants who died in the desert.

While Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement and humanitarian volunteers can respond to hundreds of 911 calls every year, those efforts face an obstacle that no amount of individual effort can overcome: They can’t respond to distress calls that are never made.

The desert west of Tucson has been one of the busiest areas for border crossings for many years, but vast areas of it either do not have cell coverage of any kind or the coverage is spotty and unreliable, according to coverage maps from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission as of June 2020.

The largest coverage hole is in and around the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, one of the deadliest areas for migrants in Southern Arizona. Smaller holes dot the mountain ranges that run north-south across the border.

The remains of 48 migrants were found in areas without cell coverage since the start of 2021. Another 66 sets of remains were found in those areas in 2020, the Star found by comparing data on migrant deaths with cellphone coverage maps from the FCC. The remains of 514 migrants were found in those areas since 2000.

Nearly all the 911 calls the Star reviewed came from the area between Nogales and the eastern portion of the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation.

The only calls from west of the reservation came from humanitarians, ranchers or wildlife officials reporting the discovery of human remains.

Nerve center

The limits created by the lack of cell coverage are clearly visible inside an office on South Swan Road that the Border Patrol uses as its nerve center for rescuing migrants.

A massive 30-foot-long screen dominates one wall, while agents sit in rows of cubicles with phones pressed to their ears. The screen shows a map of Southern Arizona, similar to the topographical maps offered by Google Maps, with icons showing where distress calls came from and how far agents are from arriving at the migrant’s location.

The map showed three red icons of telephones on June 17, indicating three distress calls from migrants in the Baboquivari Mountains. Icons for Border Patrol agents slowly moved across the screen toward them.

The area from the New Mexico state line to the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation was abuzz with icons showing migrants, agents, aircraft and other Border Patrol assets. But much of the desert west of Ajo showed no activity at all.

The Border Patrol’s wall-sized video screen at the Arizona Air Coordination Center shows the location of rescue call stations and active rescues in the Tucson Sector. Curt Prendergast, Arizona Daily Star

The lack of cell coverage west of Ajo is a fact that Agent Ryan Riccucci, who leads the rescue efforts from the office, must work around. Simply put: “People can’t call for help out in that area,” he said.

Even for migrants who are in areas with cellphone reception, the ability to make a call does not guarantee a rescue.

Migrants at a shelter in Nogales, Sonora, said smugglers told them not to turn on their phones because the Border Patrol would be able to track the signal; or that they bought a phone to be able to make calls, but the signal was unreliable.

Calls to the 911 dispatch center at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department often were dropped repeatedly, much to the frustration of dispatchers, Border Patrol agents and migrants, the Star found after reviewing roughly 150 calls the Sheriff’s Department transferred to the Border Patrol since September 2020.

Deadliest areas

The border counties in Arizona where migrants cross into the U.S. include about 27,500 square miles, or more than three times the size of El Salvador.

But migrant deaths are not spread evenly across that area. Instead, remains are found in a small fraction of it, focused on specific areas west of Tucson, a geographical analysis by the Star shows.

Every year since 2000, at least 50% of the remains were found in less than 8% of those 27,500 square miles; in some years it was as little as 3% of that area.

The concentration of deaths in certain areas could allow more focused rescue efforts to be more successful.

The Star divided Southern Arizona into sections that cover 100 square miles each, and found that deaths tend to cluster in some of the areas. For example, about 50% of all remains found in 2021 were in 16 of these areas, which add up to about 6% of the area in border counties.

Nearly all of these 16 areas are west of Interstate 19. Most overlap the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation. Others overlap the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range and a section of the Coronado National Forest along the border. East of Interstate 19, one area overlaps the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

Using the 12 cross-border corridors established by the aid group Humane Borders, the Star found the corridor west of the Baboquivari Mountains is the deadliest one in 2021, with more than triple the death count of any other corridor.

Within that corridor, many of the deaths are concentrated in smaller areas. A cluster of seven of these areas near Sells, on the Tohono O’odham Nation, accounted for 25% of all deaths in border counties so far in 2021. These seven areas account for less than 3% of the area across Arizona’s border counties.

Small measures

As they have done for two decades, local aid groups and the Border Patrol push forward small-scale measures on their own initiatives.

The Border Patrol increased its rescue efforts over the years, although officials are quick to say they must balance efforts to rescue migrants with the agency’s primary goal of securing the border.

“Our primary mission is border security, but we are a link in the emergency management system,” Riccucci said. When agents get a distress call from a 911 dispatch center, “at that moment the border security mission stops and it becomes purely humanitarian,” he said.

The Border Patrol now has an integrated system to relay information about migrants in distress between the Tucson headquarters and agents on the ground and in the air, which Riccucci said has allowed them to respond to twice as many distress calls.

The Tucson Sector’s 3,600 agents now include 23 paramedics, 53 Borstar agents, who are specially trained in search and rescue, and more than 230 agents trained as emergency medical technicians.

The Border Patrol set up more than 30 rescue beacons, which have a blue light to make them visible at night. Migrants in distress can push a button on the beacon to alert the Border Patrol that they need help.

Migrants in distress can push a button on one of more than 30 rescue beacons set up by the Border Patrol, but the effectiveness of the beacons remains unclear. Josh Galemore, Arizona Daily Star

The Border Patrol also placed a half-dozen satellite phones in the desert, akin to roadside assistance phones, and 30 placards migrants can use as reference points when calling 911.

The effectiveness of the rescue beacons is unclear. Tucson Sector officials did not provide data on their use to the Star. The best available data came from a Customs and Border Protection report in February, which said 144 rescues were associated with 67 rescue beacons “in the southwestern section of Arizona” in fiscal 2019.

“At this time, CBP’s data systems lack the interoperability and data sets that would enable CBP to track and share specific information associated with migrant rescues with federal, state, and local partners, rescue beacons, 911 placards, location and identification of remains, and cellphone coverage on a large-scale basis,” CBP officials said in the report.

A network of humanitarian groups focused on rescues sprang up in Southern Arizona since the early 2000s.

Some areas of the desert in Southern Arizona are now dotted with blue water barrels, maintained by Humane Borders, and small caches of water jugs and food placed on migrant trails by volunteers with No More Deaths, which also runs a camp for migrants in need of medical care near Arivaca, much to the aggravation of Border Patrol officials.

Groups such as Border Angels, Aguilas del Desierto (Eagles of the Desert), Armadillos Busqueda and Rescate (Armadillos Search and Rescue), and Battalion Search and Rescue all search for remains in the desert.

La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (The Coalition of Human Rights) established a crisis call center to help families find lost loved ones. The Border Patrol runs a similar operation to find missing migrants by coordinating family members, consulates and law enforcement agencies.

The Colibri Center for Human Rights helps families identify lost loved ones, at times by conducting DNA tests. Humane Borders used medical examiner data to build a public database on migrant deaths.

The efforts of these humanitarian groups unfold within tight boundaries built up over the years by federal officials in Arizona.

The Border Patrol and the U.S. Attorney’s Office repeatedly cracked down on humanitarian efforts they viewed as crossing the line between helping migrants and aiding human smuggling.

As far back as the 1980s, federal authorities arrested members of the Sanctuary Movement on human-smuggling charges after they offered shelter at churches in Tucson to refugees from Central America.

In the 2000s, as volunteer humanitarian efforts spread into the desert, a federal judge ruled that volunteers could not legally transport migrants in distress to hospitals in Tucson.

In recent years, Border Patrol agents entered No More Deaths’ medical camp near Arivaca without permission several times after surrounding the camp with agents and trucks.

Even leaving food and water on migrant trails could be a criminal offense. Fish and Wildlife officials changed regulations on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in the summer of 2017 to prohibit leaving food and water there. Nine No More Deaths volunteers faced federal misdemeanor charges when they disregarded that rule change, citing a humanitarian imperative to help migrants in distress.

The remains of more than 160 migrants were found on or near the Cabeza Prieta refuge since the summer of 2017.

In 2018, No More Deaths volunteer Scott Warren faced felony human-smuggling charges after he let a pair of migrants spend two nights at a No More Deaths aid station in Ajo.

Reminders of lives lost

One local effort that has become the gold standard along the U.S.-Mexico border is the record-keeping at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

Over the course of 20 years, the office has built the capacity to quickly and accurately document migrant deaths, director Dr. Greg Hess said.

That effort is guided by the public’s interest in migrant deaths, similar to the public’s interest in deaths resulting from drug overdoses, suicides, firearms and other causes, he said.

“We try to keep as much detailed, objective information as we can to respond to people’s needs to learn about those different types of deaths,” Hess said.

The county medical examiner is not required by law to document the deaths of migrants, but it is a task that any civilized country should take on, Hess said.

“There isn’t anything that requires one to keep track of this group separately from all the other remains that are reported to you,” Hess said. “Legally, the only thing the law says one must do with unidentified remains is report it to the medical examiner’s office. That’s it.”

While Hess keeps the public up to date on deaths in the desert, lockers in a small room down the hall from his office fill up with heartbreaking reminders of the lives lost.

Belongings found on migrants who died in the deserts of Southern Arizona are kept in sealed bags at the Medical Examiner’s Office on Tucson’s south side. Josh Galemore, Arizona Daily Star

A wallet-sized photo of a little girl with one pigtail tied with a red scrunchie. A water-soaked Bible. Prayer cards and rosaries. A receipt for a refrigerator. School records. Marriage records. A business card for a Tucson immigration lawyer. Pages of handwritten phone numbers. Letters to loved ones.

“My love, I know we are not a perfect couple but I love you,” read a letter found among the property of one woman who died.

“I’ve always told you that you are the love of my life and you really are important in my life,” she wrote in Spanish. “I know that sometimes I’m not the woman that you wanted in your life and the truth is that I know you sometimes get bored with me for how I am. I love you and I thank you for staying by my side in spite of everything.”

Day after day, the remains of the people who carried those items and wrote those words are wrapped in white plastic sheets and placed in the cooler, waiting for their loved ones to claim them.

At an office on South Swan Road in Tucson, a Border Patrol agent talks to a group of five lost somewhere in the Baboquivari Mountains. The corridor west of that mountain range has triple the death count of any other area this year in Arizona’s borderlands. Kelly Presnell, Arizona Daily Star

Third of four stories

As a political issue, the deaths of thousands of migrants in Southern Arizona rarely appear at the forefront of federal lawmakers’ discussions.

The issue popped up sporadically over the past two decades in bills proposed by a handful of lawmakers from both the Republican and Democratic parties. In all but one instance, bills that addressed migrant deaths either stalled in committees or were voted down as part of comprehensive immigration reform bills, the Star found after reviewing Library of Congress archives since 2000.

Soaring rhetoric about a “higher moral obligation” to save lives in 2006 from Sen. Bill Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, faded away over the years. Migrant deaths remain part of the immigration debate, but they mainly are relegated to the periphery of that discussion unless they can be used as props for other arguments, the Star found by tracking 2021 comments from officials and lawmakers.

In March, President Biden tried inaccurately to explain away a dramatic rise in border crossings by saying migrants cross in the winter to avoid the deadly summer heat. Migrant deaths were the top reason Yuma County officials cited to justify Gov. Doug Ducey’s deployment of the National Guard to the border in April, despite the Guard’s mission not including rescues. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona, cited the deadly danger of crossing the border in Southern Arizona as a reason to support her immigration bill during a visit to Tucson in June, even though her bill did not address migrant deaths.

Large-scale deaths of migrants began in 2000 and continued regardless of whether the president was a Democrat or Republican. The remains of 500 to 800 migrants were found in Southern Arizona during each presidential term, including 1,400 during the two terms Joe Biden served as vice president during the Obama administration.

Since Biden’s first term as president began in January, the remains of more than 222 migrants were found in Southern Arizona, putting this year on pace to surpass the record-breaking 239 remains found in 2020. Biden has proposed wide-ranging reforms to immigration and border policy, but none is aimed at reducing migrant deaths.

In this 2003 photo, Tijuana artist Alberto Caro speaks at the U.S.-Mexico border fence in Tijuana, Mexico, at a ceremony marking the ninth anniversary of Operation Gatekeeper, a Border Patrol program that critics say forced illegal immigrants into crossing Arizona’s desert. A coffin marked with the number of immigrants who died trying to cross the border that year was hung next to coffins with previous years’ death totals. Lenny Ignelzi, Associated Press

‘We have higher moral obligation’

Immigration reform and border enforcement frequently appeared in federal legislation since 2000, but the vast majority of those bills did not address migrant deaths.

When lawmakers did address those deaths, the proposed measures made little progress, with certain provisions jumping from bill to bill over the years without becoming law.

In 2006, Frist introduced the Border Deaths Reduction Act, which would have directed Customs and Border Protection officials to gather data on the number of migrant deaths, causes of deaths, locations and demographic information.

If Congress had passed the bill, CBP officials would have analyzed trends in that data, evaluated CBP strategies for reducing migrant deaths, including the use of rescue beacons, and recommended actions to reduce those deaths.

The report in Frist’s bill would have contained “particular emphasis on enhancing the deployment of rescue beacons in the Tucson Sector.” The bill would have authorized $500,000 for the report and $1.5 million to deploy more rescue beacons.

No votes were held on the bill in the Senate.

When Frist introduced the bill, he pointed to a Government Accountability Office report that said migrant deaths had doubled since 1995, despite border crossings not increasing. The Border Patrol “has not addressed these limitations to sufficiently support its assertions about the effectiveness of some of its efforts to reduce border-crossing deaths,” GAO officials wrote.

The results of the GAO report were “sobering, shocking, and, I strongly believe, a cause for action,” Frist said as he introduced the bill in 2006. “Since 1995, deaths along our borders have doubled. Despite the heroic rescue efforts of the men and women of Customs and Border Protection, things have gotten worse.”

The increase in migrant deaths “stem largely from an increase in deaths from exposure to the elements in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona,” Frist said at the time. “Illegal entries, however, have not increased. Quite frankly, it is getting more dangerous to cross the border.”

“Until recently, CBP did not even keep a systematic count of those who died crossing our borders,” Frist said. “We still do not have a unified national strategy for reducing the deaths. We still do not know how well our safety efforts work — if they are saving lives or not. We need to do more.”

“The founding document of our nation, the Declaration of Independence, lists ‘life’ first on the list of the government’s responsibilities,” Frist said. “The overwhelming majority of the people who cross our border do so in search of a better life. They take enormous risks and make enormous investments in hopes of helping their families.”

“Illegal immigration needs to stop,” Frist said. “We must defend our borders. We must construct physical barriers, add detention beds, hire personnel and equip them with better technology.”

“But we have a higher moral obligation to protect the life of every person —every man, woman, and child — who sets foot on American soil. We must do everything in our power to preserve life,” Frist said.

At that point, the remains of about 1,040 migrants had been found in Southern Arizona, according to the Pima County medical examiner.

Although Frist’s bill did not become law, the provisions in the bill about gathering data on migrant deaths, compiling a report, and recommending actions to reduce those deaths were included in several comprehensive immigration reform bills introduced in 2006 by three other Republican senators: Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, Chuck Hagel from Nebraska and Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania.

Specter’s bill passed the Senate, but not the House. The bills sponsored by Hagel and Santorum did not advance beyond the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The following year, the same provisions appeared in bills proposed by Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois, Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, and Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia. None of the bills became law. Reid’s comprehensive immigration bill was widely debated in the Senate but ultimately did not pass.

The provisions expanded in 2009, when Rep. Solomon Ortiz, a Democrat from Texas, sponsored a bill that included directing CBP officials to “conduct a study of Southwest Border Enforcement operations since 1994 and its relationship to death rates on the US-Mexico border.”

President George W. Bush speaks about border security at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson in 2005. Ron Medvescek, Arizona Daily Star

Legislation lags as deaths mount

The study in Ortiz’s bill would have included an analysis of the “relationship of border enforcement and deaths on the border,” whether “physical barriers, technology and enforcement programs have contributed to the rate of migrant deaths,” and the “effectiveness of geographical terrain as a natural barrier for entry into the United States in achieving department goals and its role in contributing to rates of migrant deaths.”

The study also would have directed CBP officials to consult with nongovernmental organizations and community members “involved in recovering and identifying migrant deaths” and an “assessment of existing protocol related to reporting, tracking and inter-agency communications between CBP and local first responders and consular services.”

The report on the study would have been submitted to the “United States-Mexico Border Enforcement Commission,” made up of a mix of local and federal officials, border residents and others.

Ortiz’s bill was referred to committees and no vote was held in the House.

By the end of 2009, the remains of about 1,620 migrants had been found in Southern Arizona.

The expanded provision appeared again in 2010 in a bill sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey who is helping lead the charge on Biden’s immigration bill in 2021. The expanded provision also appeared in 2012 in a bill from Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat who has represented districts along Arizona’s border with Mexico since 2003. Neither bill passed.

In 2013, Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York and current majority leader, sponsored a comprehensive immigration bill that included provisions calling for CBP to identify areas where migrant deaths are the most frequent, study the relationship between enforcement and deaths, clarify CBP efforts to mitigate those deaths and install up to 1,000 rescue beacons.

By that point, the remains of about 2,400 migrants had been found in Southern Arizona.

In 2014, the Border Patrol changed how it counted migrant deaths to include only instances where an agent was directly involved. As a result, the Border Patrol’s count started to diverge dramatically from the count by the Pima County medical examiner. In 2020, the Border Patrol’s Tucson and Yuma sectors reported 49 migrant deaths, roughly one-fifth of the 239 counted by medical examiners in Arizona.

In 2014 and again in 2015 and 2017, a bill introduced by Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from Texas, would have directed CBP to gather data on migrant deaths, including the extent to which CBP has “adopted simple and low-cost measures, such as water supply sites and rescue beacons, to reduce the frequency of migrants’ deaths.”

Grijalva introduced a bill in 2015 and again in 2017 that would have directed CBP to gather data, analyze trends, recommend actions, and study the relationship between enforcement and migrant deaths. The bill also would have directed CBP to specify where rescue beacons were needed.

In 2017, Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, introduced a bill to direct CBP to figure out the total number of migrant deaths and report to Congress on efforts to identify remains.

By the end of 2017, the remains of about 2,950 migrants had been found in Southern Arizona.

In 2019, Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, introduced the Homeland Security Improvement Act. That bill would have directed CBP officials to evaluate policies to “reduce the number of migrant deaths,” among other provisions. It also would have directed CBP to report the “extent to which border technology, physical barriers, and enforcement programs have contributed to such migrant deaths.”

Escobar’s bill passed the House, but not the Senate. During the debate on the House floor, Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama, opposed the bill on similar grounds to the current opposition to immigration reform.

“Law enforcement has encountered nearly a million migrants illegally crossing the southwest border,” Rogers said in September 2019. Democrats refused to see the “crisis,” he said, and after Trump administration policies took effect the “crisis has finally abated.”

Instead of proposing “another partisan messaging bill that stands no chance of becoming law,” Democrats should have presented a “bipartisan bill to address the causes of the border crisis and prevent another one from happening,” Rogers said.

In response, Escobar said the bill was an “opportunity to come together and begin to make a powerful and well-funded federal agency more accountable to the Congress and to the people that they serve.” The bill “comes right from the communities that are impacted the most,” Escobar said.

Rep. John Joyce, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said his district is nearly 2,000 miles away from the border, but “illicit drugs continue to pour across the southern border and infiltrate into my district,” causing “addiction and death,” Joyce said.

Instead of passing Escobar’s bill, he suggested they return to committee and “work on a bipartisan basis to secure our border, to end the asylum loopholes, and to protect this great country,” Joyce said.

Border Patrol Agent Andy Adame waits for other agents to help process 78 border crossers found hiding under trees near Arivaca in 2007. Gary Gaynor, Tucson Citizen

In 2019, Escobar called for the creation of an ombudsman and border oversight panel, with one of various goals being to reduce migrant deaths. The bill passed the House. Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, introduced similar legislation, but it did not pass the Senate.

The exception to the rule was the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act introduced by Cornyn in 2019, which became law after former President Trump signed it in December 2020. The law opened up grant funding to local governments and nongovernmental organizations to deal with migrant deaths and identify remains, although Cornyn ensured priority would not be given to the border area. The bill also funded more rescue beacons.

The law also requires CBP to file a detailed report with Congress and post it on the CBP website by the summer of 2021 about its efforts to count migrant deaths and mitigate those deaths, its collaboration with local governments and nonprofits, and the effectiveness of rescue beacons.

The bill passed the House on Dec. 16 after 10 minutes of debate in a nearly empty chamber. The speaker pro tempore, Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas, called for a voice vote, but the few Congress members in the chamber didn’t respond. He had to ask them again, prompting a handful of “ayes.”

In other words, after 20 years and at least 3,900 deaths, the thrust of the first substantial action taken by Congress was to count how many migrants had died and to identify them.

Just one sentence

In his first days in office in late January, Biden pushed for broad immigration legislation to address a variety of issues.

When Democratic lawmakers introduced the 353-page bill in February, it contained just one sentence about migrant deaths, calling for more rescue beacons in the desert.

In a call with reporters days after the bill was introduced, several lawmakers responded to the Star’s question about how the bill would address migrant deaths but quickly veered off into other topics.

The bill addresses “certain concerns that our humanity compels us to address,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez, a Democrat from California who sponsored the bill in the House.

“Obviously, the deaths at the border, the rescue beacons are an important part of that,” Sanchez said. “But so is professional training for CBP and having medical training, having humanitarian standards for those that are detained, particularly for children and vulnerable populations.”

Sanchez said the “most exciting” part of the bill is that it addresses the root causes of migration, a thought echoed by Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who sponsored the bill in the Senate.

“Yes, the beacon is only one example of modernizing and managing the border effectively with technology that enhances our ability not only to be humane but also to detect contraband and counter transnational criminal networks,” Menendez said.

The bill was introduced just as Border Patrol encounters with migrants started to accelerate dramatically. As those encounters reached historic highs, President Biden waved away concerns by telling a reporter at a March 25 press conference that the increase in migration “happens every single, solitary year” in the winter months.

“The reason they’re coming is that it’s the time they can travel with the least likelihood of dying on the way because of the heat in the desert,” Biden said.

Four months later, Biden’s words came back to haunt him politically, not because he had done nothing to address migrant deaths, but because border crossings continued to rise in the summer, which contradicted his claim that the rise in February and March was seasonal.

When Arizona Gov. Ducey deployed the National Guard to the border in late April, the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office issued a news release supporting Ducey’s decision and citing migrant deaths before any other concern related to the border.

When Department of Homeland Security officials announced a wide-ranging crackdown on smuggling organizations on April 27, they spent nine paragraphs talking about targeting the logistics of those organizations before ending with the line: “In Fiscal Year 2020, Border Patrol located 250 migrants who died during their journey.”

The exception to the legislative indifference to migrant deaths came in May when Escobar reintroduced her bill.

When Sen. Sinema came to Tucson on June 1 to promote her border bill, part of her pitch was the rising number of border encounters in Southern Arizona as the summer heat arrived.

As Sinema spoke to reporters at Casa Alitas, a shelter for asylum-seeking families in Tucson, about the importance of the bill she sponsored with Cornyn, she noted the “deadly” journey migrants make through Southern Arizona.

“The reality is that it’s getting more and more deadly every day as our temperatures are increasing,” the Arizona Democrat said. “And the routes, particularly in the Tucson Sector, as you all know, is very treacherous terrain and the number of search-and-rescue attempts are increasing every day.”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas speak at Casa Alitas migrant shelter in Tucson in 2021. Rebecca Sasnett, Arizona Daily Star

The Star asked Sinema and Cornyn why they did not include any measures addressing migrant deaths in their bill. Both pointed to the rise in border crossings, rather than deaths in the desert, as the “immediate crisis” that needed attention.

Sinema said one goal of the bill was “jump-starting the conversation” to “target the immediate crisis that both of our states are suffering from.”

“This bill was meant to deal with the immediate crisis at hand, which has to do with asylum claims and our inability to process those claims in front of an immigration judge in a timely manner,” Cornyn said, noting the 1.3 million-case backlog in immigration courts.

“This was not meant to be a comprehensive immigration reform bill,” Cornyn said, adding, “this is no task for the short-winded.”

When Biden released his “Blueprint for a Fair, Orderly and Humane Immigration System” on July 27, the plan dealt with a wide array of issues. But not migrant deaths. Instead, Biden proposed more technology at the border and investment in ports of entry, along with measures to quickly remove migrants from the United States, discourage irregular migration, and target smugglers.

Migrant deaths appeared at the Nov. 3 hearing on the nomination of Tucson Police Department Chief Chris Magnus to head CBP.

Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, noted the record-high number of encounters with migrants in fiscal 2021.

“Tragically, but not surprisingly, it also led to another record: the highest annual number of migrant deaths, 557 dead, trying to cross our borders,” Crapo said.

Meanwhile, back on the ground …

The lack of federal legislation related to migrant deaths has not gone unnoticed by aid volunteers in Southern Arizona, but it has not deterred them from continuing to try to reduce those deaths.

Watching politicians and lawmakers “really gets me down sometimes,” Dora Rodriguez said, as she drove back to Tucson after checking on a support center for migrants in Sasabe, Sonora, that she helped create this summer.

“But when I think I have a trip to Sasabe it pumps me up,” she said with a smile.

As she talked, she kept an eye out for signs of migrants in distress, pointing to black water bottles and discarded clothes in the dirt next to the highway, and to crosses marking where migrants died.

She said a “sea of volunteers” in Southern Arizona has helped pick up the slack by “doing the government’s job” when it comes to helping migrants in the desert.

She has firsthand knowledge of how deadly the border can be, and how necessary it is for someone to help migrants in distress. She crossed the border after fleeing El Salvador in the 1980s, but several of the people she was traveling with died during the crossing.

“For me, personally, this is a mission because I do this for my brothers that died the day that I was rescued,” Rodriguez said. “I think of that every day.”

Bill Busher, a volunteer with Humane Borders, carries a water barrel that will be left for migrants making their way through the open desert in Organ Pipe National Monument. Josh Galemore, Arizona Daily Star

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