Migrants die at record rate as border security hardens, summer heat spikes
Editor’s note: This story contains reporting and images that some readers may find disturbing.
EL PASO, Texas, and JUÁREZ, Mexico – Mount Cristo Rey rises in the desert like two hands in prayer, over a graveyard without tombs.
On Nov. 5, three bishops from El Paso, Texas; Juárez, Mexico; and New Mexico held a Day of the Dead mass in the dry bed of the Rio Grande. With Mount Cristo Rey as a backdrop, they prayed for the migrants who die in Mexico, in the river and the desert, in the containers of trucks and in U.S. custody.
This year, migrants died in numbers never seen before: 149 in the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector in the 12 months through Sept. 30, soaring from six deaths six years ago, according to Border Patrol records. The fatalities don’t include the more than 70 migrants who died across the border in Juárez.
No stones mark the places where they died, only numeric coordinates on police reports.
The sand berm where a Border Patrol agent found Abel Lopez Rodriguez, 49, with “maggots all over his body.” The spot behind Doña Ana Community College where a child found Marlene Leyva-Perez’s decomposing body. The dunes a few miles from a winery where a smuggler abandoned Eduardo TorresRamos, a 34-year-old Guatemalan man.
They are among the migrants whose names are known. Others died without identification. Yet back home, the families who depended on them don’t forget.
Southern New Mexico residents stumble on bodies in the desert of people who were within reach of rescue. El Paso water managers have grown accustomed to the stench of death in the Rio Grande. Border Patrol agents, first responders and medical investigators have been overwhelmed by human remains – sometimes two or three bodies per day.
The toll has revealed gaping holes in the infrastructure set up to protect migrants, which has been focused, until now, on providing shelter, legal services and help on the way to destinations in the U.S.
“Never has it been something in my years of advocacy I have seen at this level,” said Marisa Limón Garza, director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso.
If the migrant death toll in El Paso was viewed as a national emergency – an unnatural disaster – it would be larger than that of the Lahaina, Hawaii, and Paradise, California, fires, more deadly than 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. It would draw federal attention and emergency resources.
A yearlong investigation by the El Paso Times, part of the USA TODAY Network, found a region shocked by the increase in migrant deaths and illequipped to track and respond to the tragedy, including:
● The number of women dying more than doubled from last year and more than tripled from 2021.
● Key local law enforcement agencies aren’t tracking migrant deaths.
● There is inadequate infrastructure to identify and return remains.
U.S. authorities, including the Border Patrol, consistently warn people not to come to the border and ask that they use lawful pathways to enter legally. But many legal paths aren’t open to some of the most desperate, and smugglers have become extremely effective at luring people to the border.
“We need to start by recognizing that migrants are dying because of U.S. policy and U.S. strategy,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. “It’s what I call ‘death by policy.’ And the policy is personal.
“Where is the humanity?” asked Ruben Garcia, the executive director of El Paso’s Annunciation House, which provides shelter and humanitarian assistance to migrants. “Where are the ethics? The morality? The justice in all of these human beings who are dying in the desert? In order to respond, your soul has to be moved. Then you discover there aren’t a lot of people in government who operate in response to that.”
A mother’s losses
The doctors told her nothing was broken. But what good were her bones if she felt shattered?
The hit-and-run on the border highway in Juárez, a few hundred yards south of the U.S. border fence, left the Guatemalan mother’s left leg bruised – but killed her 17-month-old boy and the baby she was expecting, seven months along.
The Times is withholding the woman’s name, given her fragile health condition and in keeping with the shelter’s policy for media interviews.
Two weeks after the April tragedy, she rested under a blanket with the characters from Disney’s “Frozen,” her hand on her bandaged belly. The cesarean-section scar didn’t hurt, she said. Her babies hurt. Her dead children throbbed in her heart – a pain so big it kept her from eating.
Her husband sat across the room on another bed. “Pobrecito,” she whispered. “Poor thing. He wanted a family.”
She closed her eyes. She opened them and remembered her losses. “La pérdida, la pérdida de mis bebés,” she said over and over. The words came out as if they were sticky and dry.
‘ The preservation of every human life’
Vicki Gaubeca, associate director of U.S. immigration and border policy for Human Rights Watch, has studied the “prevention through deterrence” model since its advent in the mid-1990s.
“It hasn’t worked at all,” she said. “It’s not addressing people coming here, or
that people coming here try more than once. The only thing it’s been really successful at is increasing the number of deaths.”
It took Congress nearly 20 years to respond to the situation. Under the 2019 Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act, Congress required U.S. Customs and Border Protection to submit annual reports on the deaths of persons on or near the U.S.-Mexico border.
But CBP has fallen behind. The agency hasn’t submitted the fiscal 2022 or 2023 reports to Congress. CBP denied the Times’ requests for the data, saying the reports must be first presented to Congress.
In an emailed statement, CBP said the agency “prioritizes the preservation of every human life and dedicates significant resources toward robust border-safety programs.”
“Crossing the border illegally is inherently dangerous,” the statement said. “CBP urges migrants to seek lawful pathways into the United States and not to place their lives in the hands of human smugglers, whose priority is profit.”
A spokesman for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose Operation Lone Star is rooted in deterrence, said “open border policies” contribute to fatalities. Spokesman Andrew Mahaleris blamed the death toll on “the unsustainable chaos President (Joe) Biden has unleashed on the border.” Abbott declined to be interviewed.
‘I couldn’t stand the pain’
Maryenis Morales Villa sat on a cot at El Paso’s Sacred Heart migrant shelter and pulled items out of a box tied with a pink bow: a tiny white satin gown, a doll-size hat with a pom-pom, the ink print of her baby’s foot.
“The nurse asked me, ‘Do you want clippings of your baby’s hair?’ ” said Morales Villa said. “I told her, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ ”
It was all she had of her stillborn baby, Arelis Chiquinquirá, named for a virgin venerated in her native Venezuela.
Morales Villa and her husband, Walbes José Quintero, waited at the border fence in El Paso in early May to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. They said they waited eight days on a stretch of sand, with no shade and no easy access to food or water. El Paso processing centers were over capacity.
When agents received them on May 8, they held Morales Villa, eight months pregnant, in a processing center for four days, she said, before releasing her to the shelter. They expelled Quintero to Juárez.
Morales Villa’s contractions started soon after she settled in the shelter. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where she gave birth. She mourned her loss alone.
“The nurse asked, ‘ Do you want something to help you sleep?’ I said, ‘No, gracias. This is a sadness that is coming from my heart,’ ” she said.
Upholding ‘American standards of investigation’
Five years ago, Border Patrol established an initiative to improve the agency’s ability to rescue migrants in distress, reduce deaths at the border and, when deaths occur, track them accurately.
The program improved cooperation between Border Patrol and key partners, including foreign consulates, 911 dispatchers and local law enforcement, according to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report.
But the same report cited deficiencies in the Border Patrol’s accounting of migrant deaths, owing in part to patchy reporting by local agencies and limited local resources to investigate.
The El Paso Office of the Medical Examiner, the El Paso Police Department and the Sunland Park Fire Department told The Times they did not formally track migrant deaths. The Doña Ana Sheriff’s Office northwest of El Paso, which responded to a majority of migrant deaths in this year, did not respond to multiple requests for data or interviews.
New Mexico’s Office of the Medical Investigator is struggling with the number of unidentified bodies found this year, given limited staff and the cost of DNA testing. There are few partners: While the Mexican consulate has a team in El Paso for Mexican nationals, the nearest consulates for Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are in Arizona or more than six hours away in Del Rio, Texas.
“There needs to be an overhaul of how we investigate migrant deaths at
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New or Existing Gutter
the border so we can get to the bottom of how these folks have come to be deceased,” said U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, DN.M. “Whether they are immigrants or American citizens, we should hold up the American standards of investigation.”
The federal government sees a need for better information: The National Science Foundation awarded a $1 million grant to Texas State University in 2022 to do a census of migrant deaths on the U.S.-Mexico border. The project is in the early data-gathering stage.
“Nobody really knows who is dying, where and in what numbers,” said Texas State University professor Alberto Giordano.
‘We saw the body of a young woman’
Randy Eiland and his wife, Carol, were riding their horses on a cool April Sunday morning in southern New Mexico when they saw ambulance lights flashing.
“We saw a body of a young woman leaning against a brick column, where the neighbors were going to build a fence,” Randy Eiland said.
The Eilands and their neighbors in rural Doña Ana County, near the outskirts of metropolitan El Paso, were accustomed to seeing evidence of migrant traffic around their property. Water bottles discarded in arroyos, where water runs in a rainstorm. Backpacks strewn around the creosote. Foam blocks that migrants strapped to their sneakers to mask their footprints.
Three weeks after the Eilands’ first encounter with a body, on another Sunday morning riding horseback, they spotted a bone in the sand – a femur. Then a skull, with long black hair still attached. They reported the remains to the sheriff and Border Patrol.
“I never heard anything more about it,” Randy Eiland said. “I never saw anything in the paper. Who knows how many bodies are still out there?”
A brother’s promise: ‘I’ll be sending you money’
In an El Salvador paradise of palm trees and white sand – a playground for foreign tourists – José Amílcar Portillo Solórzano, his wife and two daughters lived in poverty. His bus driver’s salary couldn’t support his family, including the medication his youngest daughter needed to survive kidney disease, his sister Leticia Solórzano told the Times.
So he left for the United States with his eldest daughter and dreams of working in New York alongside his brother, she said.
“He had gone north to help us,” she said from her home in El Salvador. “‘I’ll be sending you money,’ he told me.”
His American dream ended in a locked cell in Juárez, inside a Mexican immigration detention center hidden from sight.
When a fire started March 27 inside the men’s cellblock, filling the center with smoke, a guard released Portillo Solórzano’s daughter and the other women. No one opened the men’s door; the keys were allegedly missing, according to court testimony.
His brother in New York is wracked with guilt for financing the journey, Solórzano said. Portillo Solórzano’s daughter could hear her father’s cries from inside the cell.
“She is traumatized,” Solórzano said. “She remembers how he screamed, ‘Don’t forget about us!’ ”
Tragedy is price of entry
The morbid reality of U.S. border policy and the nation’s immigration system is that it will, sometimes, bow to tragedy.
The Guatemalan mother who lost her toddler son and unborn baby eventually received an exception to expulsion along with her husband. They crossed the border and were given the opportunity to apply to stay in the U.S.
Quintero, who is illiterate, signed up for the CBP One app with the help of friends and received an appointment to present at a port of entry. Weeks after Morales Villa gave birth to their stillborn baby girl, Quintero was allowed to cross the border and reunite with his wife.
Portillo Solórzano’s daughter, and more than 40 survivors of the Juárez detention center fire and their family members, were granted temporary entry in El Paso.
“There is a complete disregard by institutions of how they value migrant lives and migrant deaths,” said Fernando Garcia, the Border Network for Human Rights director.
“If they would care, they would change the policy,” he said. “What we have in place is a historic deterrence operation that assumes they will not cross. But migrants did cross and they died.”