Border Patrol Agents Have Missed Thousands Of Immigrant Deaths

A new government report shows Border Patrol agents significantly undercount immigrant deaths, with the number of people dying likely twice as high as previously reported. The finding provides more evidence that for many years U.S. immigration policy has been ineffective, counterproductive and deadly. Continuing policies that rely on enforcement alone and ignore the need to offer legal visas for those seeking work will result in thousands of more deaths and continued frustration about policies that fail to deter unlawful migration into the United States.

“CBP [Customs and Border Protection] has not collected and recorded, or reported to Congress, complete data on migrant deaths or disclosed limitations with the data it has reported,” according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report found a critical problem is Border Patrol sectors do not avail themselves of all the resources in their area that would allow for a full accounting of immigrant deaths. The Tucson sector illustrates the scope of the problem.

GAO compared data reported by the Tucson sector in the Border Patrol’s Border Safety Initiative Tracking System (BSITS) to public data from the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants, which GAO notes is a joint effort of the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and Humane Borders, Inc. “It shows that Tucson sector collected and recorded fewer migrant deaths in BSITS than the [Arizona OpenGIS] Initiative each year, from fiscal years 2015 through 2019,” writes GAO.

The undercount of immigrant deaths is significant based on the statistics GAO presents. The data indicate there were approximately twice as many immigrant deaths in the Tucson sector than were reported by the Border Patrol between fiscal years 2015 and 2019—339 reported by the Border Patrol vs. 699 for the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and Humane Borders. That would represent an undercount of 360, or 72 immigrant deaths per year in the Tucson sector alone.

Since 1998, the Border Patrol has recorded approximately 8,600 immigrant deaths at the border, including 557 in 2021. If the Tucson sector is representative of underreporting deaths in other sectors, the actual number of immigrant deaths might have been twice as high in 2021 (i.e., more than 1,000 deaths) and over the past 24 years.

University at California-San Diego Prof. Wayne Cornelius concluded immigrant deaths are not an unintended consequence but a direct result of Border Patrol policies that started in the early 1990s and have continued to the present day.

In 1993, during the Clinton administration, the Border Patrol implemented a “prevention-through-deterrence” policy that evolved over the years into using more barriers and personnel. Unauthorized immigrants were funneled into more remote areas.

“Another consequence of concentrated border enforcement has been a sharp increase in the number of migrants who die trying to gain entry,” wrote Cornelius in a 2001 report. “From 1994 through mid-2001, approximately 1,700 deaths were reported to the Mexican Consulates along the Southwest border. . . . The incidence of deaths rose in tandem with the intensification of border enforcement in California, Arizona and Texas.”

Tragedies along the Southwest border go back decades.

In May 2001, 26 Mexican men crossed the border into the southern Arizona desert. A coyote known as Mendez guided the men into brutal territory, part of Devil’s Highway. Mendez took wrong turns that caused the group to become lost. In all, 14 of the 26 men in the group died. One of them was Lorenzo Ortiz Hernandez, a father of 5 children aged three to 12. He couldn’t support his family by growing coffee and chose to borrow $1,700 and cross the border unlawfully for a chance to work in America. Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, described what Border Patrol agents saw when they found Hernandez’s body: “Lorenzo was on his back, his eyes open to his enemy, the sun.”

In May 2003, more than 73 unauthorized immigrants were locked in the back of a tractor-trailer for a 300-mile trip to Houston. The air conditioner on driver Tyrone Williams’ truck failed, leaving the men and women—and one child—in hellish conditions. Two men poked small holes in the truck. Passengers took turns breathing through the tiny passages. By the time Tyrone Williams stopped driving, 19 people had died of “asphyxiation, dehydration and heat exposure as the result of being trapped inside a tractor trailer-truck. Among the dead was a 5-year-old child,” according to Jorge Ramos, author of Dying to Cross.

Historically, the only effective way to reduce illegal entry significantly has been to allow more foreign nationals to work legally in the United States. Apprehensions at the border, a proxy for illegal entry, declined by 95% between 1953 and 1959 due to an increase in the lawful admission of farmworkers under the Bracero Program during that time, according to research from the National Foundation for American Policy. After the Bracero program ended in 1964, apprehensions increased by more than 1,000%, rising from 86,597 to 875,915 from 1964 to 1976.

The GAO report on immigrant deaths and Border Patrol shortcomings in counting those deaths should be a wake-up call to Congress. The current enforcement-only policies or even harsher versions of those policies will bring more death and tragedy.