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ImmigrationProf Blog
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Do policy makers care that people are dying on the border?

By immigrationprof

Guest blogger: Leandra Gamboa, first-year law student, University of San Francisco

Imagine that you’re someplace safe and you have a good view off in the distance. And, in the distance you can see a wall, a boundary, or a border of some sort. Just over this wall you see hundreds of people and they’re running toward the wall. Soon they’re at the wall and they’re rushing over it in desperation and fear; they’re running from something. What is your first concern? 1

Robin Reineke posed a similar situation to me as an audience member of a social justice symposium held at New Mexico State University.  At the time I was an undergraduate student studying international business and had a good idea of what it meant for the U.S. to be involved in a globalized economy. I studied figures and charts correlating to trade balances and exchange rates, but no economics lesson could have prepared me for the numbers that appeared on the screen as Robin clicked through her PowerPoint, representing the human deaths occurring on the U.S. – Mexico border.

6000 people have died along the U.S. – Mexico border in just over a decade. Since 2001, the remains of at least 2,200 migrants have been recovered in Pima County and the numbers continue to rise, averaging 165 people that are dying each year in the Tucson sector.1

Robin attributes the increasing numbers to government’s refusal to ask the fundamental question that intuitively comes to mind after hearing her scenario: What are they running from?

The Government’s first big push for tougher immigration policy occurred in 1994 with the implementation of the Southwest Border Strategy. Subsequently, the Border Patrol passed the Border Safety Initiative in 1998 with the intention of enforcing border security, educating and informing migrants of the dangers involved in crossing the border illegally and carrying out search and rescue operations to help the migrants in life-threatening situations.2 The product of these initiatives was an increased presence of Border Patrol agents in urban areas such as San Diego and El Paso, places traditionally used by migrants to enter the U.S. Instead of asking why these people were migrating, these strategies centered on the theory of “prevention through deterrence.”1 Policy makers reasoned that by increasing Border Patrol agents to apprehend migrants as soon as they crossed the border, the migrants would realize their efforts were futile, become discouraged and stop attempting to cross.  From 1998 to 2000 the apprehensions did in fact increase, but they began to decline from 2000 to 2005. Along with the general decline in apprehensions, the number of border-crossing deaths in the Tucson sector continued to increase over the same period.2

An explanation for this phenomenon was that the migrants were not deterred; they were rerouted. They no longer took the safe, urban routes traveled by their ancestors; instead they were funneled into the wide expanses of the Sonoran Desert characterized by mountainous terrain and extreme summer temperatures.

Robin argues that the way border security is talked about now comes with a certain acceptable collateral damage.3 The collateral damage is the hundreds of migrants dying on the border each year and each year policy makers turning their heads to this “silent mass disaster.” A reason for their unwillingness to react may be the result of society’s criminalization of migrants. Robin observes that there is a sense that because these migrants broke the law initially that they deserve whatever results from their actions. The idea that their lives amount to less because they are so called “illegal.”1 But is justice served if hundreds of human lives are being taken each year?

When we look at migrants as individuals it is easy to label them criminals, but Robin observes that this is a misrepresentation of a bigger problem. Society must change its view and look at these people on a collective level – look at them as the hundreds of people running toward the wall. Then we ask not only the fundamental question of why they are migrating, but knowing that they will migrate because they have done so for years, how will we treat them when they get here?1  The answer, I propose, is that we treat them like human beings.

Robin’s work centers on the fight for humanity of migrants. She founded the Missing Migrant Project at the Colibri Center for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization based in Tucson, Arizona. One of their main focuses is working with families, forensic scientists and humanitarians to end migrant death and related suffering on the U.S.-Mexico border. 4

Since 2006, Colibri has been working with families to create forensically detailed missing persons reports. They then partner with forensic scientists and medical examiners to identify the dead.4 Robin describes that after just one day in the desert the bodies are often unrecognizable. So, they study personal items the migrants carried with them – handwritten notes, a child’s drawing, faded photographs, laminated prayer cards – in hopes of finding a match to one of nearly 800 bodies stored in a large warehouse that is kept below 40 degrees to preserve the remains.5 Colibri has developed the first comprehensive system to track and compare missing and unidentified persons on the Southwestern border and has been able to identify 66% of the bodies recovered. Robin says the work is “haunting and heartbreaking”, but that, “the bodies keep coming.”5

The Pima County Medical Examiner’s office observed their worst year in 2010 when 223 bodies were found – 99 in June, July and August alone. Other deadly years have included 2013, when 168 bodies were recovered, and 2012, when 156 were found.6

It is unclear what “magic number” the migrant death toll has to reach before policy makers care enough to put this issue on their Legislative radar. We do know, however that 165 bodies a year, 6,000 in total and 800 sitting in a warehouse freezer is not enough. It is the efforts of organizations like Colibri that remind us that the events occurring on the border are about people, regardless of their status. Family members are disappearing and human lives are being lost and this is something we should all care about. Robin says, “I wish more people felt disturbed by this crisis of humanity.”3 So do I. 

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPlpbFKWc6E. The human rights crisis at the border. TEDxTucsonSalon. 3 September 2014.
  1. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06770.pdf .Border-Crossing Deaths Have Doubled Since 1995; Border Patrol’s Efforts to Prevent Deaths Have Not Been Fully Evaluated. United States Government Accountability Office. Aug 2006.
  1. http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002390527/bodies-on-the-border.html. Marc Silver. Bodies on the Border. Aug 2013.
  1. Colibri Center For Human Rights. http://www.colibricenter.org/about-us/
  1. http://www.arizona.edu/naming-dead. Naming the Dead. University of Arizona. 13 May 2013.
  1. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ff-immigrant-border-deaths-20151021-story.html. Nigel Duara. Why border crossings are down but deaths are up in brutal Arizona desert. Los Angeles Times. 27 October 2015.

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