SECURITY AT BORDER LEADS TO INJURIES, DEATHS

Experts say changes in barriers, pandemic-related rapid expulsions factor in

As the number of migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border has climbed, so has the death toll.

More migrants have died trying to cross the entire border during the first three months of 2021 than in all of 2019, according to data tracked by the International Organization for Migration.

Those figures include the 13 people killed in an SUV crash earlier this month about 125 miles east of San Diego. On Thursday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said a 9-year-old girl had drowned in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass in Texas. Though data on the number of injuries isn’t publicly available, Border Patrol search-and-rescue data indicate injuries are also rising.

Border experts attribute the increases to enhanced border security and a pandemic measure that allows Border Patrol to expel people without any opportunity to seek asylum. Desperate migrants fleeing organized crime and the devastating effects of two hurricanes are being driven to take greater risks to enter the country undetected rather than surrendering.

Migrants are less likely to approach border agents to seek help and more likely to try again and in more dangerous areas because of the Title 42 rapid expulsions carried out under former President Donald Trump with a COVID-19 public health justification and continued under President Joe Biden, experts said.

Nearly nothing will deter someone seeking to escape a violent death or to be able to feed their children — not jungles, not walls, not violent smugglers and not the threat of injury — according to border experts.

“Asylum seekers and other migrants being summarily expelled under this 1944 public health authority are fleeing desperate economic conditions and high levels of violence in their home countries — including

Mexico. The Border Patrol is not removing them to places far from the border, so they have every incentive to try again, often within hours. They don’t stay expelled,” said Wayne Cornelius, a distinguished professor of political science, emeritus, at University of California San Diego, and an expert on immigration.

“Anything that speeds up the revolving door has the potential to increase border-crossing fatalities.”

In 2020, a total of 113 people died while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, according to IOM. From the start of this year through March 25, 76 had died. In 2019, pre-pandemic, the total was 73.

Recent fatalities along the California-Mexico border speak to the desperation of the people trying to cross.

• A Cuban migrant drowned Tuesday trying to swim around the border wall in the Pacific Ocean from Playas de Tijuana to Imperial Beach, according to Tijuana police and Hugo Castro, a migrant activist who was among those who tried to perform CPR to save the man.

• A 28-year-old Honduran woman drowned near the same spot on March 13, according to Tijuana police and the Spanish-language newspaper Milenio.

• A Mexican national drowned in a San Ysidro drainage canal on Jan. 29, according to the Mexican Consulate in San Diego.

• In the SUV crash on the outskirts of Holtville in the Imperial Valley, 25 people were packed into a Ford Expedition that drove through a hole cut in a border fence, with a smuggler at the wheel. Ten of the 13 people killed were Mexican and one was Guatemalan.

Though there isn’t publicly available data on the number of injuries to migrants attempting to cross the border, national Border Patrol search-and-rescue data indicate those are also increasing.

For fiscal 2020, which ran from October 2019 through September 2020, national data shows the Border Patrol took into custody 5,071 injured or lost people, a spokesman confirmed. With seven months left to go in fiscal 2021, the agency has already taken 3,999 into custody. People are included in those numbers when they are lost or have injuries or medical conditions due to the heat or other weather elements.

Border Patrol agents say because sections of the border wall added under Trump are now much higher, injuries from falls tend to be more severe.

“What used to be an 8- to 10-foot structure is now an 18-foot primary and a 30foot secondary structure,” said Jeff Stephenson, a supervisory Border Patrol agent in the San Diego sector’s information and communication division. “Not to say we never had any injuries before, but now if someone falls off the wall, they’re much more likely to get injured.”

Salvadoran Jonathan Cortez, 23, fled his home country in February for Tijuana, hoping to cross the border and escape the gangs and the entrenched poverty now exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

“For the gangs, for the lack of employment, for the poverty, and because we all want a better future,” he explained earlier this month in describing his decision to try to climb over a section of the 30-foot bollard wall outside of Otay Mesa put into place during the Trump administration.

All his hopes and dreams came crashing down with him off the wall, Cortez said. He woke up in custody at Scripps Chula Vista hospital, having fallen off the 30foot structure, severely fracturing his foot and ankle. He said doctors told him it will require multiple surgeries to fix.

Doctors put two pins in his ankle, Cortez said, and just hours later Border Patrol agents arrived, picked him up and returned him to Mexico. He is now staying in Rosarito with his father, Francisco Cortez, who was deported from the U.S. in 2011.

“He was at the line in Tijuana in the middle of the night, unable to walk,” said Francisco Cortez. “They threw him over the line like an animal. They treated him like a dog. They didn’t have to do that in that way.”

A Scripps Chula Vista hospital spokesman said he was unable to release specifics about Cortez’s treatment plan due to medical privacy laws.

His family has started a GoFundMe to try to raise the funds Cortez needs for a second surgery. “We can’t even afford the medicine he needs just to manage the pain, let alone another surgery,” said the father.

Francisco Cortez said the situation has caused him lose the hope he had that most Americans didn’t agree with what he described as racist rhetoric and policies under the country’s past president, Trump.

“Nothing’s changed under Biden. Absolutely nothing is different,” he said.