Illegal entrants died at record rate since Oct. 1
By Michael Marizco and Ignacio Ibarra
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
A $28 million U.S. border control strategy and an unprecedented effort by private advocacy groups failed to slow illegal entrant deaths in Southern Arizona this year, a compilation of records by the Arizona Daily Star shows.
County medical examiner and Mexican consulate records document that 218 migrants died trying to cross into the United States through Arizona since last Oct. 1, the beginning of the U.S. Border Patrol’s fiscal year.
The death toll surpasses last year’s 205 deaths, based on the same records, despite the $15 million Arizona Border Control Initiative and the $13 million deportation flight program.
The Border Control Initiative brought 200 new agents to Arizona, many of them trained to find and save migrants. The deportation program was designed to take illegal border crossers deeper into Mexico in hopes they would stay home or at least be removed from people-smuggling organizations that operate along the Arizona-Sonora border.
The Border Patrol’s official count of illegal entrant deaths in the same time period is at 168, with 138 of them occurring in the Tucson Sector, which spans from New Mexico to the Yuma area. The agency’s Yuma Sector, which includes the far western edge of the state and a bit of California, reported 35 deaths, 30 deaths in the Arizona desert.
However, the official count does not include all migration-related bodies recovered by other law enforcement agencies. This year’s count also excludes skeletal remains, and deaths of suspected smugglers.
At the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office, where 163 migration-related autopsies have cost local taxpayers nearly $400,000, Dr. Bruce Parks counts both and any other death he can link to the human flood washing through his jurisdiction as well as Santa Cruz and Pinal counties.
He said the media, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even the Border Patrol have reviewed his department’s records, which show an increase in entrant deaths.
“My feeling is that we’re closer to the reality,” said Parks of his position that the majority of bodies found in the desert near known illegal entrant paths are linked to the migration. “It doesn’t seem there’s much reason for people to be out there wandering in the desert unless they’re trying to pass through.”
For advocacy groups like the Tucson-based Samaritans, the record death toll confirms their sense that the Border Patrol’s Arizona Border Control initiative was more about public relations than saving lives.
“What we’ve seen is the change in approach by the Border Patrol has not reduced the deaths at all, it’s simply channeled the people to other, more dangerous paths,” said Jim Sullivan, a spokesman for the group whose roughly 100 active members patrol the border’s desert regions in vehicles loaded with food, water and first aid supplies in search of illegal entrants in danger.
“It’s a major disappointment and cause to reaffirm our commitment to try and help these people and to continue to lobby in any way we can, to get this border policy changed.”
Robin Hoover, whose Humane Borders group has established 53 water stations dispensing up to 1,000 gallons of water a week along some of the most remote and dangerous migrant trails, says the death count would have been higher without the group’s effort.
He’s less confident about the government effort.
“The focus on law enforcement leads to more deaths,” he said. “Law enforcement is not the answer. The answer is in reforming U.S. immigration policy.”
Border officials maintain that the number of deaths is not the only yardstick to measure successes of the border initiative.
“If you’re going to say that the sole purpose of the Arizona Border Control Initiative was to reduce the deaths, then you can say that it was a failure,” said Michael Nicley, chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector.
But the other focuses are equally important, he said, pointing toward a decline in the number of abandoned vehicles and immigrant-related homicides and other crime on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a historic mirror of the problems Southern Arizona faces from its border with Mexico.
The agency was able to stem deaths in some areas of the border – Arizona’s west desert, for example – and its ability to control small pieces of the line will eventually improve, officials say, until Arizona is brought under control.
“We are gaining operational control of the border; it’s not happening as fast as I would have liked,” Nicley said.
Nor has it been very effective.
Only 14 percent – 12,413 people – of illegal entrants apprehended here volunteered for the U.S. government’s interior repatriation plan, which flew illegal border crossers back to their homes deep inside Mexico.
The $13 million program began with high hopes in July, but Mexico insisted that participation in the program be voluntary and most of the apprehend-ed illegal entrants declined the plane rides. They opted instead for regular deportation, which takes them to the nearest port of entry along the Arizona-Mexico border and, most likely, another illegal entry attempt.
Policy analysts say the deterrence measures in place at the border are too new to be measured effectively.
“It probably has deterred people, but ultimately, migrants will continue to cross as long as most of them get across and as long as they keep getting jobs,” said Deborah W. Meyers, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
Truly effective deterrence, she said, must include mechanisms that prevent illegal entrants from getting jobs once they arrive in the United States.