The Border Wall's Human Toll
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Monument to migrants who died crossing the border near Sasabe, Arizona (Photo by Juanita Sundberg) |
The
border wall has led to the deaths of thousands of human beings. As
urban areas along the border are walled off, desperate migrants are
rerouted through treacherous unpopulated areas, trudging through
rugged mountains and searing desert, and fighting swift currents to
enter the United States. As a result, studies estimate over 5,000
migrants have died from dehydration, exposure or drowning have been
found, and many more bodies could lie undiscovered in remote areas. A
2006
report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
found that the number of border-crossing deaths had doubled between
1995 and 2005 due to border walls and increased enforcement in urban
areas. This spike in crossing deaths occurred even though there was
not a corresponding increase in the number of undocumented entries.
The GAO also attributed three-fourths of the doubling of deaths to an
increase in the deaths occurring in the Arizona desert.
The
GAO's findings were presented to Congress two months before the
Secure Fence Act was passed and signed into law. Despite clear
evidence that existing border walls and border enforcement policy had
caused thousands of deaths, Congress voted to erect more border
walls. The new walls have made crossing the border today more deadly
than it has ever been, and border-crossing deaths have continued to
soar, even though the recent economic downturn has slowed the rate of
crossing significantly. Although the Border Patrol reported a 23
percent drop in border-wide apprehensions in fiscal year 2009, a
figure they use to estimate the number of undocumented entries, at
least 423 bodies were recovered in FY 2009, up from 390 for FY 2008.
(The Border Patrol only
reports the bodies that its agents recover,
not those found by others, so the total number of migrants who died
border-wide could be significantly higher.) An Arizona
Daily Star analysis
of the bodies recovered in the Tucson Border Patrol Sector found that
the risk of dying in that sector was twice as high in 2009 as in
2004, and 30 times greater than in 1998.
An Intentional Strategy
As
the GAO report notes, these tragic deaths are the result of an
intentional strategy to shift migrant traffic to remote areas and to
take advantage of natural barriers. By walling off urban centers
along the border, the Department of Homeland Security is purposely
funneling migrants into remote areas where it is claimed that they
can be more easily detected and apprehended by the Border Patrol.
This strategy also assumes that natural barriers like the mountains
east of San Diego, the desert in Arizona, and the Rio Grande in
Texas, will act as deterrents to migrants, causing them to simply
give up rather than attempt to enter the United States. Although the
border walls coupled with increased Border Patrol staffing have
succeeded in pushing migrant traffic into more remote areas, the
treacherous landscape has not been an effective deterrent. Instead,
hopeful migrants are forced to make riskier crossings to reach the
United States, and many are dying in the process.
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Vehicle
barrier on the border alongside Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife
Refuge, Arizona (Photo by Sean Sullivan)
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The
absolute failure of this strategy has been apparent for years. The
first border walls in the San Diego sector were found by the
Congressional Research Service to have "little
impact on overall apprehensions"
between 1994 and 2005. The Migrant
Policy Institute
found that 97% of undocumented migrants eventually succeed in
entering the United States, a number that has been unchanged since
the first border walls went up in 1995. The 2006 GAO report
documented the shift in migrant traffic to remote areas and the
subsequent rise in the death toll. Yet border walls erected as late
as 2009 were based on this failed strategy, walls which will
certainly lead to many more migrant deaths in the years to come.
A Humanitarian Crisis
The
people who risk their lives trekking through mountains and desert and
struggling against river currents are not just migrant workers, they
are often entire families, including mothers, children, and the
elderly. As restrictive immigration policies have closed down avenues
through which families can be reunited in the United States, more
migrants have turned to undocumented crossings to bring their
families together. Increasingly, the victims of the perilous journey
are children. In 1990, not a single death of an immigrant minor was
reported along the border. Recent studies cited in the October 2009
ACLU report, Humanitarian
Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border
have found that minors now make up 7-11% of migrants who die
attempting to cross.
Sign on the Arizona border
The
deaths of these children, along with the other migrants who died on a
lonely trail or in a swirling current, are needless tragedies.
Although the U.S. government has treated these deaths as inevitable,
they are instead a direct consequence of the enforcement-only policy
of which the border wall is a part. Maintaining this inhumane policy
constitutes an abuse of fundamental human rights, a human rights
abuse that is occurring daily on U.S. soil.
