Oscar Andrade says every day is an opportunity to rescue migrants in the Arizona desert, where 110 degrees Fahrenheit this year.
“People are dying from the heat. We always have to bring them water and help them, and it’s also cold in the desert in winter; if they don’t wear warm clothes, they get hypothermia and they also die. Temperatures are a problem,” said Andrade, an evangelical pastor who heads (Desert Chaplains), an organization dedicated to search-and-rescue work in the desert.
For four years, the group has been working in the border states of California, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, where it has rescued 362 people and found 183 bodies.
For Andrade, the number of sets of migrant remains is a cause for worry.
“We have numbers of people who died that neither the coroner nor CBP has because those remains have not been recovered,” Andrade said, referring to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “We have found many bones in the desert, but they’re not complete, so in many cases, a DNA test cannot be done on those remains because there’s no way to obtain it.”
Andrade’s concerns and those of other activists working in the desert are echoed by that found that in Arizona, the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office recorded 3,634 migrant deaths from FY 2000-2022, while the Border Patrol recorded only 3,069 deaths during the same period, an almost 17 percent difference between the two figures.
“Border Patrol undercounts tend to underestimate the number of migrant deaths occurring along the U.S.-Mexico border relative to forensic medical authorities in the relevant regions,” said , a sociology professor and co-director of the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona who participated , published in the Journal on Migration and Human Security.
According to the researchers’ data, the largest discrepancies in numbers occurred in 2021 and 2020, when Pima County recorded 225 and 206 migrant deaths, respectively, compared with Border Patrol data, which totaled 78 and 43.
‘True scale’ is unknown
The U.S.-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land migration route, according to the International Organization for Migration. As of August, at had died or disappeared along it since 2014, with record numbers since 2021.
“We simply don’t have a solid understanding of how many people are actually dying in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and a lot of this is due to a lack of quality data across the border — this situation diminishes the true scale of the humanitarian crisis,” Martinez said.
“At the end of the day, we have to keep in mind that each of these individuals was someone’s mother or father, someone’s cousin, brother or sister. I think it’s problematic not to be able to understand the humanity of migrants,” he said.
Migration along the U.S.-Mexico border has changed substantially since the mid-2010s. Apart from the increase in the number of migrants arriving at the border, “migration has shifted from predominantly young Mexican men, who migrate for economic purposes to send money home, to men, women, children and family units from various countries arriving at the border to request asylum,” Martinez said.
In June, an of records in 23 border counties in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida found that more than 1,500 people lacking immigration documentation were in morgues, laboratories or cemeteries waiting to be identified and repatriated. In Arizona, there were from Pima, Cochise and Santa Cruz counties.
Andrade said multiple factors make it difficult to locate and identify the bodies of deceased migrants — which he deals with on a daily basis, he said.
He said organized crime leaders order the coyotes, or smugglers, not to divulge the exact locations where migrants have died so the territory is not identified. “We believe that there are more than 1,000 cases of remains that have not been found,” Andrade said.
Border Patrol changes and their impact
Martinez and his team of researchers noted that the discrepancies in the numbers of migrant deaths between coroners’ offices and Border Patrol began to increase in 2013 and have not stopped growing.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection said the differences result from a specific change in the agency’s work.
Under a border security initiative that ended in 2012, Border Patrol was responsible for trying to find as many deaths as possible in border counties.
But when the initiative ended, it began tracking only the deaths and remains it found in daily patrols and enforcement activities, as well as through its collaboration with nongovernmental organizations, local residents and local law enforcement agencies.
“If we find remains, we count them because it is something we come into contact with. It is very likely that cases where we do not know or do not have all the information, we will not count them,” the CBP spokesperson said.
The official stressed that the agency is not trying to hide anything or downplay the number of deaths and that the Pima County coroner’s data is reliable because, by law, the county is responsible for counting those numbers.
“That is true,” said Gene Hernandez, Pima County’s supervisor of medicolegal death investigators. “We work for Cochise, Santa Cruz and Pima counties, which are the ones that are right next to the border. And, by law, the authorities have to bring all the remains to our office. Since 2000, we have processed the remains of almost 4,000 migrants who have died in the desert.”
Because of an increase in crossings in Arizona — shows that in the last fiscal year more than 460,000 migrants were detained in the Tucson sector alone — the new 35,000-square-foot forensic facility in Pima opened this year, featuring six autopsy stations and specialized laboratories.
“We have new facilities with great capacity. That is why I ask people, if they have a missing relative, to contact us,” Hernandez said. “In many cases, we have their belongings, their clothes and documents that can help identify them. It is better if the families can help us, and they do not have to be afraid because we are not going to ask them if they have papers.”
Immigration laws and their effect
In the last election, Arizona voters approved a ballot measure to give state and local law enforcement agencies greater authority to enforce immigration laws that are typically left to the federal government.
Among other things, the measure makes it a state crime for immigrants to provide false information when they apply for jobs or public benefits, to enter Arizona illegally from foreign countries — unless doing so through ports of entry — or to refuse to return to their home countries if they are ordered to do so by courts.
“This measure will increase deportations, and that makes crossing more dangerous for migrants. In addition, we are receiving more and more reports from the Mexican side that cartels are recruiting migrants and forcing them to commit crimes,” Andrade said. “Our advice is not to cross anymore; there are too many risks.”
President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans humanitarian parole and the CBP One mobile-based asylum system. Among other actions, Trump also that offer migrants more protections from deportation.
Trump has also said he plans , the measure he established in his first term during the Covid-19 pandemic that allowed the immediate expulsion of undocumented immigrants who cross the border; it expired in May 2023.
In his research, Martinez found that migrant deaths in southern Arizona increased from an annual average of 133 per year in the six years before Title 42 to 198 while the policy was in effect — a 48% increase.
The researchers found that growing immigration restrictions have resulted in migrants’ crossing through increasingly remote areas in southwestern Arizona, such as Organ Pipe National Monument or Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, where they died at high rates.
Those changes and trends are evident to Andrade and his group of rescuers.
“We know that the routes will always change. The coyotes will bring our migrant brothers through more hostile and dangerous terrain where there is not even a telephone signal,” Andrade said.
While the researchers’ findings pertain to Arizona, they have detected similar trends in other Southwest regions.
Data provided in published this year by the nongovernmental organization No More Deaths based on records from the University of New Mexico Medical Investigator’s Office and the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office “point to a similar pattern in southern New Mexico and near El Paso, Texas,” according to the Arizona-based study.
The CBP official emphasized the importance of warning migrants not to cross the border illegally, especially in the summer, when Arizona’s heat is relentless.
Andrade is well aware of the challenges of trying to help people in such hard-to-reach areas and said his group wants to train itself to better meet the needs of migrants and their families who contact it in times of emergency.
“We are preparing ourselves both physically and mentally to do a better job and to be able to help in collaboration with the patrol and carry out these searches or recoveries of bodies,” he said, “because there will be an increase; these crossings will not stop.”
