The Border Patrol too often fails to search for migrants in distress, even as the agency monopolizes search-and-rescue efforts in remote areas of Southern Arizona, Tucson-based humanitarian aid groups said in a report released Wednesday.

The report by No More Deaths and the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos came after the remains of 227 migrants were found in Southern Arizona last year, more than any year in the past two decades.

The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner has handled the remains of nearly 3,400 migrants who died while crossing the border since 2001. The number of migrants who died while crossing the border but whose remains were never found is unknown.

The crisis was the result of the Border Patrol’s strategy of forcing migrants away from border cities and into harsh, remote terrain, according to the report β€œLeft to Die: Border Patrol, Search and Rescue, and the Crisis of Disappearance.”

At the same time as the Border Patrol pushed migrants into hostile terrain, the agency also β€œpositioned itself as the primary and often sole responder to distress calls involving undocumented people,” it says.

The report was based in part on nearly 2,200 audio recordings of 911 calls the Pima County Sheriff’s Department referred to the Border Patrol from 2016 to 2018, which the aid groups obtained through public records requests.

The report also drew on more than 450 emergency calls to the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos Migrant Crisis Line in 2015 and 2016, as well as interviews with officials at the Sheriff’s Department and the Border Patrol.

Judging by the experiences of advocates and families of migrants documented in the report, 911 calls referred to the Border Patrol often end up with little to no search and rescue efforts for migrants in distress, a sharp contrast to the vast mobilization of local, state and federal resources when a hiker or foreign tourist gets lost in Southern Arizona, according to the report.

One of the main findings was that in 63% of 89 emergency requests made by advocates and families of migrants to the Border Patrol, the agency did not conduct any confirmed search-and-rescue efforts.

β€œFor those of us who call 911 in our lives with a sense of certainty that someone would respond, I think it’s important to imagine what it would feel like to have your distress call ignored or to know that there’s at best a one-in-three chance that anyone would even attempt to come for you,” said Sophie Smith, a No More Deaths volunteer who co-wrote the report.

Sister Norma Pimentel, one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2020, says migrant families at the U.S. border are weary and worried about whether they'll have an opportunity to enter the United States.

β€œThis is the reality for those who are crossing the border who are able to make a distress call when they come into a life-or-death situation,” Smith said.

One critique of the Border Patrol in the report was that the agency does not publicize how many of the 911 calls referred to the agency end up with some kind of search-and-rescue effort, which is the subject of a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in New York.

For its part, Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency β€œremains committed to humanely securing the southern border of the United States and devotes the totality of its force to finding lost or injured individuals while also balancing the border security mission with which they are charged.”

The Border Patrol regularly sends out news releases announcing agents rescued migrants, including more than 1,000 rescues in the agency’s Tucson Sector in 2019.

In July, agents carried a migrant down a mountain near Gila Bend after a 911 call was routed to the Border Patrol, according to a news release from the Border Patrol. The caller said he was injured and lost in the desert. He was taken to a hospital and then processed for immigration violations once he was medically fit.

In a news release in December, agents reported rescuing 25 people the previous weekend. β€œSeveral incidents began as emergency calls from mothers who had been abandoned by their smugglers,” according to the news release.

The report on Wednesday cast many of these news releases as β€œhumanitarian propaganda,” such as a news release from December 2018 in which agents chased an 18-year-old Guatemalan man who fell into a cattle pond as he fled. The man struggled in the water and the agent pulled him out. The Border Patrol described the incident as a rescue.

The report called the incident an example of scenarios in which the β€œBorder Patrol β€˜rescued’ people from life-threatening circumstances that were in fact created by the agency’s own enforcement operations.”

CBP defines rescues as β€œincidents where lack of intervention by the Border Patrol could result in death or serious bodily injury to suspected undocumented migrants,” said a statement from CBP. An incident reported as a rescue also could include β€œrescues of Border Patrol Agents, U.S. citizens and other individuals lawfully in the United States.”

In their report, the aid groups recommended wholesale changes to the immigration system, such as repealing federal statutes that criminalize crossing the border without being inspected by U.S. officials at a port of entry.

With regard to search and rescue, they recommended an end to the Border Patrol’s role as primary responders to emergencies.

Instead, government agencies should create borderlands emergency response systems that are fully separate from immigration enforcement, who β€œwill scan the landscape with an empathetic eye rather than a punitive one,” the report said.

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Contact reporter Curt Prendergast at 573-4224 or cprendergast@tucson.com or on Twitter @CurtTucsonStar.