The June 2022 deaths 53 people, victims of heat strokeA tractor-trailer carries the warning signs of illegally crossing the U.S. Southern border.
All of the dead came from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras — the three most common origin countries of migrants encountered by the Border Patrol in 2021 so far in 2022.
These fatalities are the result of two interrelated phenomena. One is the massive growth in the federal government’s policing system in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since the mid-1990s. The other is the strong and profoundly unequal ties between the United States and the home countries of most unauthorized — or undocumented — migrants.
“Prevention Through Deterrence”
Since 1994, when i began to research the roots and impacts of U.S. border and immigration enforcementThe U.S.-Mexico border security has been drastically altered. Beginning during Bill Clinton’s presidency, this transformation has involved infusing massive amounts of resources — in the form of personnel, technology and infrastructure — into a multifaceted system of border control.
The number and experience of Border Patrol agents has increased from roughly 4,200 in 1994 to more than 20,000 today. Typically, between 80% and 90% of them are stationed within the U.S. Southwest. The spending has also increased. In 1994, the Border Patrol’s budget was US$400 million. In 2021, it was $4.9 billion — an approximately 700% increase in inflation-adjusted dollars in less than 30 years.
A federal border policing strategy, called “The Federal Border Policing Strategy”, is also part of the growth. Prevention Through Deterrence. Introduced in 1994. strategy concentrates policing personnel, surveillance technology and infrastructureIn and around border cities or towns. Its goal? To force illegal migrants into dangerous and remote areas. abandon their efforts to reach the United States.
As Doris Meissner, Clinton’s head of Immigration and Naturalization Service, later reflected, “We did believe that geography would be an ally to us.”
U.S. officials anticipated that unauthorized border crossings “would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.” Instead, the deterrence policy has compelled migrants to take ever greater risks, resulting in more deaths.
Rising Death Toll
Traversing the southern frontierlands has been long proved deadly for migrants.
In the late 1800s for example, undocumented Chinese immigrants died in the deserts of the borderlandsThey tried to avoid policing associated with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion ActThis law barred most Chinese immigrants. And in the 1980s and 1990s, many people, mostly Mexican nationals – sometimes numbering in the hundreds – died annually trying to enter the United States without authorization.
However, Prevention Through Deterrence deaths grew markedly.
According to U.S. Border Patrol statisticsFrom 1998 to 2021, the Southwest borderlands saw an average of 359 deaths per year. This is about one death per year over the span of 24 years. Fiscal year 2021 saw 557 fatalitiesThe highest recorded death toll is at the age of 67.
These deaths occur in a clandestine group, so it is impossible to know how many total migrant trips are tragic.
But research on the location of human remainsDo not forget that high-tech surveillance systems have enabled migrants to travel farther afield and at greater risk than previously thought.
Another dangerous method of unauthorized entryThis is what San Antonio witnessed. It involves cramming people in poorly ventilated spaces, such as the back of a truck. The goal is to get them across the border. into the U.S. interiorAuthorities did not notice.
These official death tolls are likely to be significantly undercounted. They are based only on human remains or bodies that have been found. But many corpses are never recovered because of the region’s arduous terrain and enormous size: The U.S.-Mexico boundary is about 2,000 miles long. A combination of bodily decomposition and the scattering of remains by animalsThis further exacerbates undercounting.
The Border Patrol has also failed to include thousands of fatalitiesIts official counts. According to an April 2022 report U.S. Government Accountability Office report, 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.”
In the Border Patrol’s Tucson SectorAccording to the report, there were, for instance, more than twice as many deaths reported by the agency between fiscal year 2015 and 2019,
The Mexico-U.S. Connection The Mexico-U.S. Connection
1999 anthropologist Josiah Heyman made a provocative suggestion: “The United States and Mexico are really one unified, if highly unequal, society,” he wrote, “drawn together rather than separated by the border.”
Back then, Mexico was the United States’ second-most important trading partner. It was also the source 98% of people apprehendedBorder Patrol in the U.S. Southwest. NAFTA, 1994, did not include the free movement of persons. North American Free Trade Agreement.
Today, one could easily make an observation similar to Heyman’s about Guatemala and Hondurasin relation to the United States. Both have strong and deep social, economic, and political ties to the United States. These ties are however deeply inequal. The United States has also a history of intervention in Central AmericaResearch has shown that this directly contributes towards the instability and insecurity. set the stage for today’s migration.
U.S. authorities responded to the San Antonio tragedy with additional security measures. blamed smugglers for the fatalities. President Biden, for instance, said that the deaths “underscore the need to go after the multibillion-dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants.”
Such responses are typical from Washington following such tragedies. But this framing obscures that migrants’ heavy reliance on smugglers is a direct result of the dramatic growth in the federal government’s Southwest border policing system and the associated deterrence strategy. In its 1994 official document outlining the Prevention Through Deterrence strategy, the Border Patrol even included among its “indicators of success” higher fees charged by smugglers and increasingly sophisticated smuggling methods.
This means that the U.S. authorities foresaw growth in an industry they decry. Deaths remain a fact of life in the borderlands.
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