Los Angeles Times

Unending migrant deaths

The militarize­d U.S. border has become a mass grave

- JEAN GUERRERO @jeanguerre

It’s one of the deadliest mass-casualty events connected to border militariza­tion in years. The number of migrants found dead in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio on Monday rose to more than 50 on Tuesday. Another 16 people, including four children, were sent to hospitals with heat-related illnesses.

Across Latin America, the terrified parents, children and siblings of people who recently crossed the border are desperatel­y trying to learn whether their loved ones are among the dead. Calls have been pouring into search and rescue groups such as Aguilas del Desierto. This San Diego-based volunteer group was started by Ely Ortiz, a Mexican, whose brother died trying to enter the U.S. in 2009.

“They want to know whether we know their names or nationalit­ies,” Octavio Soria, a Aguilas del Desierto volunteer, told me. Authoritie­s hadn’t released that informatio­n when we spoke. “We’re telling them to call their consulates and watch the news. At any moment they could release the names.” Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard later said on Twitter that the dead include 22 Mexican nationals, seven Guatemalan nationals and two Honduran nationals, among others.

When I spoke to Soria, he had just gotten off the phone with a woman in Guatemala. He had a hard time understand­ing her because she primarily spoke an Indigenous language. But she was crying and he gathered from her broken Spanish that she wanted informatio­n about her daughter, who had recently crossed the border with her 7-year-old child. She hadn’t heard from them since last Thursday.

Before the exact circumstan­ces of the deaths were known, right-wing politician­s were leaping on the tragedy to stoke the xenophobia behind the border militariza­tion that has killed countless people entering the United States between ports of entry, where they’re systematic­ally turned away. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed the deaths on what he falsely characteri­zed as President Biden’s “open border policies,” even though Trump’s most draconian border policies, “Remain in Mexico” and Title 42, a pandemic-related law used to expel migrants, are still in place.

In fact, Abbott has a central role in making the border more deadly. His beefed-up border militariza­tion program, created with the governor of the Mexican state Nuevo León, Samuel Alejandro García Sepúlveda, has forced people to enter Texas in more dangerous ways — including by cramming into trailers.

Thousands of people have died trying to reach this country since the 1990s, when the U.S. began building a steel fence along the border that rerouted the flow of people from urban centers such as San Diego to remote deserts in Arizona and Texas, where they face death from dehydratio­n, heat exhaustion and other risks. Later, the U.S. persuaded the Mexican and Central American government­s to militarize their own borders, further endangerin­g people en route to this country. Last year, 55 migrants trying to reach the U.S. died in a tractor-trailer crash near the Mexican-Guatemalan border.

Although Biden has attempted to distance himself from Trump’s border wall and largely stopped its constructi­on, he has continued to invest heavily in border surveillan­ce technologi­es and other enforcemen­t measures with similar deadly consequenc­es.

While most people in the U.S. never see these deadly consequenc­es, volunteers like Soria witness them regularly. Aguilas del Desierto is made up of immigrants and others who work in constructi­on, gardening and other fields. They spend their weekends searching for people who’ve gone missing along the border. Although the group sometimes saves lives, they more often bring closure to the families of the dead by locating their bodies. I hiked the border smuggling routes in Arizona with them several times before and during the Trump administra­tion. Each time, we found human skulls and decomposin­g human bodies.

The border has become a mass grave and a testament to the decades-long inhumanity and irrational­ity of U.S. border and immigratio­n policies. These routes are filled with Bibles, children’s photograph­s and other mementos brought along on the treacherou­s journey. Many items are lost as the desperate trekked through the desert or are scattered by animals who devoured the bodies.

As people try to find alternativ­e routes into this country, what was once largely invisible to Americans is becoming more visible. Bodies are washing ashore in San Diego. Migrants are increasing­ly dying in collisions on U.S. highways.

I was a high school student when I read Luis Alberto Urrea’s 2004 book “The Devil’s Highway,” about 14 Mexican men who died trying to cross the militarize­d border in 2001. It’s unfathomab­le that people continue to die in this way — and that administra­tion after administra­tion has done nothing to change strategies. Most of the dead are people who were forced to cross illegally because they had no other choice. Legal routes were closed to them. A vast majority were fleeing for their lives — often displaced by U.S.-made guns.

There are non-deadly and far more effective alternativ­es to reducing migrant crossings, such as legalizing immigrants without documents in the U.S. so they can sustainabl­y support their relatives back home and visit them in those countries without pressure to unite north of the border. Our politician­s must consider those alternativ­es. In the meantime, people will continue to come to the U.S. and they will continue to die because they have no other choice.

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