The image of a migrant father and toddler washed up on the side of the Rio Grande over the summer illustrated the enormous risks many have taken to get to the United States.
Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, drowned in late June at the very end of the family’s 1,500-mile journey from El Salvador. Days earlier, the bodies of a 20-year-old woman, two babies, and a toddler were found nearby along the same river, which separates Texas from Mexico.
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.
Data yet to be publicly released, obtained by the Washington Examiner, show the bodies of 300 people were found by U.S. Border Patrol agents working on the American side of the border in fiscal 2019, which started Oct. 1, 2018, and went through September. Border Patrol agents on the southwest boundary arrested more than 851,000 people who illegally crossed into the country that year.
Border Patrol has compiled and released data on the number of recovered bodies since 1998, now at approximately 7,800. Over the past five years, agents reported finding anywhere from 251 to 329 bodies each year. But in each of those years, the number of illegal immigrant arrests was roughly half the total arrested in 2019, suggesting a more people tried to cross in 2019, and a lower percentage died doing so.
Cris Ramon, a senior immigration policy analyst at Washington think tank Bipartisan Policy Center, explained the lower percentage as the result of more people applying for asylum at official border crossings. Ramon also said since more than half of the 851,000 arrested were members of families, those that did illegally cross the border actually sought out and surrendered to agents near the border instead of going through remote areas along the border to evade detection.
“People are actually going up to CBP to turn themselves in to seek asylum, and so as a result, that’s the reason you may be seeing lower death rates being reported,” Ramon said. “When you had people who weren’t trying to do that in the ’80s and ’90s and the early 2000s, that’s the reason that you saw more deaths because those individuals were trying to evade CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and trying to get into the country to work.”
Border Patrol data since 1998 shows a shift in the demographics of people illegally crossing the border. Mostly adults were arrested in the 2000s and early 2010s, but that has shifted to more families and children.
“Most of these deaths are probably among the adults, and they’re the ones who take these longer, more dangerous routes to try to evade the Border Patrol,” said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “Most of what’s been driving the change in apprehensions is families and children, and they don’t tend to evade the Border Patrol.”
Capps said it is more likely that adults die further inland while traversing remote areas where families and children more often died crossing through the border river or canals. Border Patrol does not break down the total number of deceased by adult or child.
“It’s an open question as to whether we’ll see an uptick in those deaths now that it’s harder for people to claim asylum in the U.S. and almost impossible for people to get to stay if they do,” Capps said.
Across the nine regions that Border Patrol divides the U.S.-Mexico border into, the Laredo and Rio Grande Valley sections of southeastern Texas were the most deadly for migrants. Sixty-nine bodies were recovered in the Rio Grande Valley, which runs up against the Gulf of Mexico. West of the Rio Grande Valley in Laredo, agents found 78 bodies last year.
Agents in Arizona’s Tucson and Yuma regions used to see the most recovered bodies, but now southeast Texas does. Capps said regions where most bodies are found tend to be where the greatest number of arrests took place because those areas have higher foot traffic.
