Pence is cherry-picking our data points LETTERS

Vice President Mike Pence’s column in USA TODAY, “Democrats refuse to compromise on border wall funding,” uses cherry-picked data from a Doctors Without Borders report to make a case for a border wall.

Pence wrote that “according to Doctors Without Borders, 70 percent of illegal immigrants report being victims of violence along the journey at the hands of human traffickers, drug smugglers and vicious gangs.”

Pence cited a 2017 report that featured patient survey and medical data from 2015 and 2016, drawn from our medical projects in southern Mexico. While it provides some of the only data available on migrants and refugees from Central America, the report is not a representative survey of all undocumented immigrants.

Pence also failed to acknowledge that almost 40 percent of our patients said they fled their countries due to violence, and that close to 44 percent had lost a family member over the prior two years. Many of our patients on migrant routes in Mexico are refugees with a reasonable fear of death or violence if sent back to their countries.

The administration cites our data on violence in Mexico as it continues to enact policies that block legal avenues for asylum and increase people’s vulnerability to the very violence they claim to be concerned about. A wall on the U.S.Mexican border will not stop people fleeing for their lives, and will have no impact on the violence they suffer.