Two young migrant children died Monday in separate drowning incidents that took place along the U.S.-Mexico border as their parents attempted to cross the rough waters.
The incidents highlight the significant dangers that migrants face entering the country between ports of entry. Under pandemic rules, the Biden administration has not allowed migrants to seek asylum at the ports, prompting nearly 2 million to cross illegally since he took office.
The most recent child drownings took place in El Paso, Texas, and Eagle Pass, Texas. They are in addition to more than 600 deaths documented at the southern border since October 2021, the start of the government’s 2022 fiscal year.
In the first incident in Eagle Pass, Border Patrol agents operating a boat on the Rio Grande responded to a woman and man on the riverbank. Agents found a two-month-old infant floating in the water by the couple and attempted resuscitation, according to a statement from Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that manages Border Patrol.
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The woman and baby were taken to a local hospital to recover. The baby was in serious condition as of Tuesday. A second child, a 3-year-old boy, was found later in the day and declared dead by the Eagle Pass Fire Department.
That same day, a 5-year-old Guatemalan girl drowned attempting to cross a canal from the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez into El Paso. The girl had tried to walk across with her mother. Mexican officials recovered the girl’s body and rescued the mother, according to video from Juarez television station Canal44. Mexican first responders covered the girl’s body with a blanket.
Immigrant advocate Fernando Garcia told the New York Post that the recent drowning near El Paso was in addition to 20 in June and July in the region.
“What you don’t see is an outcry in America — why do children have to die?” said Fernando, founder and executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights.
The deaths underscore the human toll of the Biden administration’s border crisis, with more people apprehended crossing into the United States illegally in recent months than any other time in the Border Patrol’s centurylong existence.
The 609 deaths as of late July was already higher than the 566 record set in all of 2021, which was the previous highest level, and more than double the 300 bodies recovered in 2019 and 247 in 2020.
“It seems like a daily occurrence people are dying,” a senior Border Patrol official told the Washington Examiner in July.
Images of migrant deaths under President Donald Trump stoked national outrage, in particular among Democrats, but the deaths since President Joe Biden took office have largely gone unreported.
The 2019 image of Salvadoran father Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, lying drowned on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande illustrated the enormous risks many have taken to get to the U.S.
Days before that incident, the bodies of a 20-year-old woman, two babies, and a toddler were found along the same river.
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Many have met the same fate — dying after traveling for weeks by foot, bus, and train in hopes of escaping extreme poverty, violence, and lack of opportunity back home. In an incident that garnered international attention, 53 migrants died after being trapped inside a tractor-trailer that a human smuggler had abandoned on the side of the road in San Antonio on its way from the border city of Laredo.
