Migrant Trail Walk spotlights 'profound tragedy' of deaths in borderlands

Bearing witness to the harrowing journey of migrants crossing the Southern Arizona desert, dozens of walkers have spent the past week trekking the 75 miles between the border town of Sásabe, Arizona and Tucson.

Participants in the 21st-Annual Migrant Trail Walk set off early Monday morning and will reach their destination in Tucson on Sunday, after a week of hiking between six and 17 miles daily, camping along the way. The walkers will finish their trek around 11 a.m. at Kennedy Park in Tucson, with a public event featuring speakers, food, music and information from border-justice organizations.

Walking the Migrant Trail is “grueling,” even with support vehicles dropping off supplies and providing medical care, like treatment for blisters, said Jamie Wilson, organizer and participant in this year’s Migrant Trail Walk. Participants mostly travel on paved roads, unlike the migrants sticking to rough terrain, she said.

“It’s extremely physically difficult, which just reminds us of how dangerous this territory is for people crossing the border without the supports that we have,” Wilson said on Wednesday. “We’re calling attention to a humanitarian crisis that’s 20-plus years in the making, and we’re also in some ways symbolically finishing the journeys for people that couldn’t finish.”

Since the 1990s, the remains of more than 4,200 border-crossers have been recovered in Southern Arizona, according to Humane Borders’ migrant-death mapping project, a collaboration with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. More than 1,500 are still unidentified.

Walk participants carry white crosses bearing the names of migrants whose remains were recovered from the desert, or labeled “desconocido“ — Spanish for “unknown.” Just since last year’s Migrant Trail Walk, 191 sets of human remains have been recovered in the Arizona borderlands, Wilson said.

Among them were 46-year-old Juan De La Cruz Mendez, whose remains were found in February, in the mountains east of Arivaca, less than one day after his death from dehydration and exposure to cold, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The walk aims “to recognize those deaths and also to hold these people and their families in the light, and to bring it out of the silence,” Wilson said.

Migrant Trail participant Gabriella Soto says she’s walking to pay respect to migrants who have lost their lives and to advocate for humane border policies, and a better understanding of the impact of U.S. border militarization. Soto has a doctorate in anthropology from the UA and has been a long-time research affiliate with the UA’s Binational Migration Institute.

Some Indigenous members of the Migrant Trail community are carrying “prayer ties” on the walk, satchels containing tobacco that’s traditionally used in ceremony to transcend the seal between the physical and spiritual worlds, Soto said.

There’s a satchel of tobacco for each migrant who’s died since last year, she said.

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“We carry it at the front of every line, almost like cradling a baby,” she said. “Carrying these crosses, and carrying the prayer ties especially, there’s something really heavy about it. Even if you’re not religious, I think it ends up being a very powerful, ritual experience that you’re carrying these symbolic representatives of every one of those people.”

Soto cautions against attributing migrant deaths to heat, extreme conditions or even the desert itself. She says the surge in deaths in the borderlands is a consequence of the U.S. border-enforcement policy of “prevention through deterrence,” established under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Through border militarization, the policy intentionally drives migrants to cross into the U.S. through the most remote and dangerous regions, she said.

In the 1990s, the new Customs and Border Protection strategy aimed to close off access to urban areas and leave dangerous terrain as the only place where migrants could cross the border. Federal officials noted in a 1994 planning document that the strategy could place migrants in “mortal danger,” but anticipated that the dangerous journey would deter migrants from crossing the border illegally, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

“Strong border security and interior enforcement is the best way to stop loss of life,” U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said during House debate in 2020.

But Soto said the continued arrival of migrants, and unrelenting deaths in the desert, shows the policy has been ineffective as well as inhumane.

“We’ve invested so much in the militarization response, but nothing it seems like in terms of how can we change the factors that are bringing people over,” she said.

Border-wide, researchers still don’t have an accurate count of how many migrants have died on their journeys. A consortium of academics, advocates and forensic experts have been working to get a clearer picture, Soto said. The efforts were highlighted last fall at a migrant-death conference held at the University of Arizona.

Official data from Border Patrol understate migrant-mortality rates, and local medical examiners’ offices in border counties often don’t see it as their job to determine whether a deceased person is likely a border-crosser, Soto said. The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office is an exception, with its dedication to identifying migrant remains and working with partners to reunify them with their loved ones.

Ultimately, Soto said, the Migrant Trail shines a light on a painful reality to which many have become desensitized.

“It is a profound tragedy,” Soto said. As Migrant Trail participants, “we’re observing what’s happening and making a point of grieving together, publicly.”