When people’s bodies, often merely skeletons, turn up in the remote and harsh reaches of southern Arizona’s desert, it can be hard to say how or when they died, let alone who they were or where they were from.
But a comprehensive new study of 2,238 migrant deaths in Arizona over the past 23 years tackles such questions head-on and tracks the ways the answers to these questions have changed over the past two decades.
Among other findings, the study, which was released Wednesday by the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute and the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, found that:
• One in eight migrants who have died trying to cross the border into southern Arizona since 1990 were under 19 years old.
• Many deaths are among the relatively young. About 43 percent of those who died were under 29 years old.
• Migrants increasingly are likely to die.
• Migrants in Arizona were twice as likely to die last year as in 2009, when deaths are compared with the rate of apprehensions by the Border Patrol. In the patrol’s Tucson Sector, migrants were five times as likely to die last year as in 2004.
An increasing proportion of those dying are from Central America. Over the past six years, 17 percent of migrants who died were from Central America and countries other than Mexico, up from 9 percent of those who died from 2000 to 2005.
In recent years, migrants are dying in more remote areas. Consequently, their bodies are more often decomposed when they’re found, making it harder to figure out why they died. In 46 percent of the deaths since 2006, medical examiners couldn’t determine the cause of death. By contrast, from 2000 to 2005, examiners couldn’t determine the cause of death in 20percent of the cases.
The proportion of migrants dying in auto accidents has dropped from 20 percent of deaths in the 1990s to 7 percent.
“Has there been another time in our history when government agencies have had to deal with this level of death outside of disasters?” Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, an adjunct professor at UA and one of the study’s authors, asked rhetorically. “In a sense, we are dealing with a disaster ... but politicians don’t like to talk about it. How many politicians in Washington right now are discussing deaths on the border?”
She noted that measuring or ameliorating deaths hasn’t been a major topic in the ongoing immigration-reform and border-security debate. An immigration and border-security bill is expected to be taken up on the floor of the U.S. Senate next week.
Border-crosser deaths in southern Arizona began rising sharply in 2000 as increased enforcement pushed migrants to more remote areas.
More fencing and border security was supposed to deter crossings by making them more difficult, said Robin Reineke, coordinator of the Missing Migrant Project, another of the six co-authors of the study.
“(But) they haven’t been deterred,” she said. “They have taken long, dangerous treks through the desert, and they are dying in very high numbers.”
The Medical Examiner’s Office and the Binational Migration Institute started collaborating in 2005 to track migrant deaths. Gregory Hess, Pima County’s chief medical examiner, said his office works to identify remains found in the majority of southern Arizona counties but not, with some exceptions, Yuma County.
Medical examiners work to identify the cause of death (if it hasn’t been determined by a doctor) and to identify remains. Medical examiners and forensic anthropologists use a coding system to label unidentified remains as border crossers and compare them to missing-persons reports from foreign consulates or families.
About two-thirds of remains are identified, Reineke said.
The office is a national leader in tracking bodies found in the desert. There is no federal effort to systematically collect data across counties or states, Hess said.
He said the Border Patrol does cooperate with his office and the Binational Migration Institute in compiling the data and has regularly requested data from the study’s authors to help the agency record migrant deaths, many of which are reported by local law-enforcement officers.
In response to queries from The Arizona Republic, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector office issued a written statement that its information-sharing with the university and Medical Examiner’s Office “is useful in helping us to determine where to dedicate resources specifically aimed at reducing migrant deaths and injuries along the Arizona-Mexico border.”
By contrast, Texas has nearly four times as many border counties as Arizona, each of which tracks migrant deaths separately, if they are tracked at all.
Migrant death counts from Texas are considered less reliable because of the lack of coordination among the counties, several of the study’s authors said.
Across the entire southwestern U.S. border last fiscal year, 463 migrants died, the second-highest total in the previous 15 years.
But, based on Border Patrol apprehensions, only one-third as many people crossed last year as in 2005, when 492 bodies were found.
The Tucson Sector, with 102 migrant deaths reported since the beginning of October, is still the deadliest.
Just last week, Border Patrol agents discovered the remains of five people near the town of Sells on the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Hess said that they may have been homicide victims and that personal effects found at the scene suggest they were migrants.
But rising death counts in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley may soon lead that sector to overtake the Tucson Sector.
Last year, while deaths in the Tucson Sector fell by 18, to 177, deaths in the Rio Grande Valley jumped to 150 from 66 the year before. Texas is seeing significant increases in border crossers from Central America, according to Border Patrol data.
Rail routes from southern Mexico make Texas the most direct crossing point for migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American countries.
Although the study doesn’t recommend specific steps to reduce migrant deaths, other human-rights advocacy groups have done so.
Thursday 6 June 2013
http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20130605arizona-border-deaths-report-migrants.html?nclick_check=1
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