Documenting migrant deaths border-wide is focus of UA conference, working group

Researchers, academics and forensic experts from all four southern-border states met Friday at the University of Arizona to pursue a set of shared goals: developing a standardized system to document migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border, and building a centralized database to help illuminate trends in migration.

Effective and humane border policy requires a deeper understanding of migrant deaths border-wide — and that requires good data, said Daniel E. Martínez, co-director of the UA’s Binational Migration Institute and an associate professor of sociology.

Martínez is a member of the multi-state working group whose members gathered at the UA Student Union Memorial Center Friday for a mini-workshop. It was the public portion of the group’s three-day conference on migrant deaths, funded by a grant from the UA’s Office of Research, Innovation and Impact.

Lacking reliable federal data on migrant deaths at the border, stakeholders in various states have taken it upon themselves to develop sound methods to document the deaths. These efforts will hopefully also help policymakers better understand the impact of U.S. border policy, Martínez said.

The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner has led the way in this field, and has become a model for other forensic efforts.

“They really represent the gold standard when it comes to trying to classify, enumerate and track migrant deaths, and also to work with consulates and NGOs to help identify individuals and reunite the remains with loved ones,” Martínez said. “Nothing like this really exists in other regions of border.”

The workshop’s panelists — hailing from California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — discussed their efforts to count migrant deaths, the challenges they face and their progress so far.

Forensic anthropologist Molly Miranker, postdoctoral researcher at Texas State University, pointed to the migrant-death map developed by Tucson nonprofit Humane Borders and the Pima County medical examiner’s office. The level of detail in the mortality data enables meaningful analysis that simply can’t happen in other jurisdictions, she said at the conference.

“I cannot stress enough how important it is that Arizona, for now, is the only jurisdiction that can do meaningful geospatial analysis, trend analysis, even predictive models ... and potential indicators for identification based on these data,” she said. “No one else does this.”

Just before Friday’s public event began, Dr. Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, who co-founded the UA’s Binational Migration Institute in 2004 and is considered the “mother of ethnic studies” in Tucson, described her joy at seeing so many experts gathered there, and her sadness that this work is still so necessary.

She recalled when migrant deaths began accumulating in the Southern Arizona desert, following the 1994 implementation of the U.S. border policy known as “prevention through deterrence." She and colleagues started working to compile reliable, “rigorous” data on the phenomenon. She said it was due to the openness and compassion of the county’s then-medical examiner, Dr. Bruce Parks, that they were able to launch the work that continues today: chronicling the migrant-death crisis.

“He is a hero,” she said of Parks. “He allowed us to go into his archives and his data, and let us use it, so we could begin to make sense of what was happening.”

Nearly two decades later, those efforts are more important than ever, Rubio-Goldsmith said.

Border Patrol data lacking

More than 4,100 people have died in the Southern Arizona desert since 1990. That includes 27 sets of human remains discovered in September alone, according to preliminary monthly data shared by Mike Kreyche, mapping coordinator for Humane Borders.

But along the southern border, researchers are still struggling to get an accurate picture of the number of migrant deaths on U.S. soil.

The official figures compiled by Border Patrol are unreliable, Martínez said. Especially in the past decade, they have deviated significantly from the numbers reported by the Pima County medical examiner’s office in the Tucson sector, he said.

For example, in fiscal year 2021, Border Patrol’s count of border deaths in the Tucson Sector was 78, compared to the 225 recorded by the Pima County medical examiner.

“There has been a notable disconnect,” Martínez said.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson did not directly respond to the Star’s questions, submitted on Tuesday, about this disparity and about the challenges in getting an accurate count.

In a statement, the CBP spokesperson emphasized the dangers of crossing the border between ports of entry, despite false claims — repeated by human smugglers persuading migrants to make the trip — that the U.S. has “open borders.”

“When migrants cross the border illegally, they put their lives in peril,” the statement said. “No one should believe smugglers or others claiming the borders are open. The borders are not open and people should not make the dangerous journey; individuals and families are subject to border restrictions, including expulsion.”

Challenges in other states

Arizona has advantages in locating and counting migrant remains, compared to other states, Martínez said.

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Arizona tends to have larger counties that are better resourced than Texas counties. Arizona border counties also have a lot of public land, which is easier to gain access to than the mostly private ranch land on Texas’ border with Mexico. And while the Southern Arizona terrain is rugged, at least it’s walkable, Martínez said. Texas has a lot of deep sand and low scrub brush that makes it “almost impossible to get in there and look for remains,” he said.

The large number of small counties is a challenge for researchers trying to calculate migrant deaths in the state, panelists said during the workshop. Most of the counties in Texas don’t have a medical examiner; they have justices of the peace, who are also responsible for civil court cases and marriages, and have little training in forensics, said Courtney Siegert, anthropologist and post-doctoral scholar at Texas State University.

Stephanie Leutert of the University of Texas at Austin described the process of compiling migrant-death counts from three Texas counties, and comparing them with the official figures from Border Patrol. She found between 2009 and 2017, Border Patrol missed 128 of the cases reported by the counties, she said. She also noted that Border Patrol reported 74 cases that weren’t in the county data during that period.

Marni LaFleur, of the University of San Diego, said it’s only been recently that death investigators in Southern California have begun noting whether someone may be a migrant, and it’s not always clear how individual counties define a migrant death, she said.

Her attempt to count migrant deaths using publicly available data found 2,051 deaths in two counties — San Diego and Imperial counties — since the early 1990s.

“This data is not pretty, it’s not easy to map,” she said. “But I think the important thing to note is that California is not a place where this happens once in a while; this is something that’s happening all the time.”

In New Mexico, the number of border deaths has historically been low, said Heather Edgar, forensic anthropologist at the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator. That’s because the state has a short border with Mexico, fewer economic opportunities compared with other states and rugged terrain south of the border, she said.

But in the last two years, the number of border deaths has exponentially increased, as overall migration rates have surged and border enforcement in Texas has pushed more migrants to the west, she said.

The state is newly confronting challenges that stakeholders in states like Arizona have long been dealing with, she said.

“We don’t know how we’re going to pay for DNA analyses,” she said. “We don’t know how we’re going to deal with long-term storage (of unidentified remains.) ... How will we adjust to this new caseload?”

Focus on policy

This weekend’s conference was the first in-person meeting of the migrant-deaths working group, which has been meeting virtually since October 2021.

The working group was initially organized by Cate Bird, missing persons and forensic manager for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC’s role has been to connect working-group members with one another, and also to connect the working group with similar forensic and research efforts outside the southwest border region, including around the Mediterranean Sea, where tens of thousands of migrants have drowned trying to reach Europe.

“We’re really optimistic about what this group can achieve,” Bird said. “We may have initially brought people together, but the working group members themselves have taken the lead and really owned this.”

Central to the mission of the working group is maintaining a focus on the humanity of deceased migrants, as well as on their surviving loved ones, Martínez said. Working group members also hope to create a border-wide centralized database of unidentified migrants, which could aid in efforts to use DNA analysis to identify missing migrants and repatriate their remains.

Mapping the locations where remains were found also helps identify sites where multiple migrants have died. That information not only aids advocates who place water for migrants in distress and conduct search-and-rescue missions, but it can shed light on the human impact of U.S. border enforcement policy, Martínez said.

For example, to better understand the impact of Title 42 pandemic-era border policy, Martínez studied the location of migrant deaths in the Tucson Sector before and after the policy was implemented.

Title 42, technically a public-health code, allowed border agents to immediately expel most migrants without giving them the opportunity to request asylum. Previously migrants were usually apprehended under Title 8 and had the opportunity to request a credible-fear interview, which could open the door to an asylum hearing.

Migrants apprehended and expelled under Title 42, which expired in May, were more likely to cross again, Martínez said. About 26% of migrants crossed again between ports of entry after being expelled, compared with 7% before Title 42’s implementation, he said.

Those repeated efforts could explain mapping data that shows a greater concentration of migrant remains close to the border, suggesting repeat border crossers were in a weakened state and were more at risk of succumbing to dehydration and exhaustion, he said.

“We need to continue to work on this,” Martínez said at the workshop. “I think we’re starting to scratch the surface of what’s going on.”