Immigrant death toll casts pall
FALFURRIAS — Back in October, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney jousted about immigration issues in the second televised debate, the president made a remarkable assertion about control of the southern border.
“The flow of undocumented workers across the border is actually lower than it’s been in 40 years,” he said.
And indeed, after a decade of increased enforcement that included construction of hundreds of miles of steel border wall and a doubling in size of the U.S. Border Patrol, the results are undeniable.
The 327,577 people caught by the Border Patrol on the southern border in fiscal year 2011 were the fewest since 1970. And it was about one-third of the apprehensions made in 2005.
But don’t try telling folks in Brooks County that things are under control.
Here, apprehensions of immigrants crossing illegally, rescues of people lost in the brush and wild car chases all have increased markedly in the past couple of years.
A far more tragic indicator: the death toll of those trying to sneak around the Border Patrol checkpoint south of town on U.S. 281 has risen dramatically.
By late December, the remains of 127 people had been found in the brushy ranchland around the checkpoint, nearly double last year’s total and the highest anyone can remember. In 2010, 20 bodies were found.
“When you have 127 people die in your county in one year, it’s too much. One body would be too much,” said County Judge Raul Ramirez, who recently ran out of space for “John Doe” burials at the county’s Sacred Heart Cemetery and is looking for a new place to bury the unidentified dead.
The judge said the annual costs to his poor, rural county of dealing with illegal immigration and the unknown dead run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With an annual budget of about $6 million and just six full-time patrol deputies, Brooks County is ill-equipped for the task. And because it’s not a border county, it receives very little state and federal aid.
Already this year, one Brooks County rancher has found the remains of 16 people on his property, which straddles U.S. 281 near the checkpoint, far more than ever before.
The deaths have risen markedly despite efforts by both the Border Patrol and local deputies to prevent them.
Although several hundred agents are stationed in Falfurrias, the vastness of the terrain and the heavy pressure from smugglers sometimes has them overmatched. All told, more than 2,600 agents work in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, trailing only El Paso and Tucson.
According to a large sign at the checkpoint, 36,075 pounds of drugs have been seized and 3,781 undocumented people have been apprehended here since Oct. 1.
While the Border Patrol does not release statistics for individual checkpoints, the December apprehensions of illegal immigrants here were more than double those of last December, according to unofficial sources.
The latest official statistics for the Rio Grande Valley Sector, which includes Falfurrias, show apprehensions surged by more than 60 percent from 2011 to 2012 for comparable 10-month periods, according to Enrique Mendiola, a Border Patrol spokesman.