Migrant Deaths Along the US-Mexico Border: Causes, Counts, and What the Future May Hold
The Accounting for Migrant Deaths Working Group has a simple but ambitious goal – to ensure an accurate count of migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border and to reunify with their loved ones the remains of persons who died “trying to avoid dying.” The Working Group consists of medicolegal authorities (medical examiners, forensic anthropologists, justices of the peace) and scholars who investigate border-crosser fatalities in US communities.
The Working Group has faced extraordinary challenges, not the least being the sheer number of deaths and insufficient resources for this work, particularly in the primarily rural US counties where many migrants perish. Partially due to a lack of resources for DNA testing, for example, unidentified bodies are buried in temporarily marked pauper’s graves, with the records sometimes lost to posterity due to the failure to follow proper burial and documentation protocols.
In 2023, the UN’s International Organization of Migration identified the US-Mexico border as the world’s deadliest land migration route. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported a record 895 deaths in FY 2022, its most recent publicly available annual tally. (The time lapse in “official” counts may impede effective remedial action to prevent deaths.) In 2024, the Working Group, the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona, and the Center for Migration Studies of New York collaborated on a special edition of the Journal on Migration and Human Security devoted to this immense problem.
Together, the 11 papers analyzed migrant deaths in every US state abutting the US-Mexico border and in counties leading from it. Among other issues, they focused on the accuracy of CBP counts and the causes of migrant deaths.
As it stands, neither CBP nor any other entity accurately enumerates migrant deaths that occur in Mexico or elsewhere along the harrowing routes of irregular migrants to the US. Nor do “official” US counts include remains not found. Finding remains is a significant challenge along migrant trails in remote, sparsely populated, difficult-to-access, and often privately owned lands. Finally, CBP does not count a significant percentage of bodies that are found in the US, with this undercount occurring across the US-Mexico border.
The agency has been less likely to count skeletal remains, remains without identifying documents (e.g., voter ID cards, driver’s licenses), those discovered by civilians or local law enforcement agencies, or (historically) bodies outside enforcement zones targeted by the agency. In this fundamental sense (people perishing), the territory patrolled by CBP is insecure, but reducing deaths has not been a high institutional priority for the nation’s border security agency.
To do so requires an understanding of their causes. Many politicians and media figures blame migrants for this tragedy, falsely characterizing them as criminals or invaders, rather than as human beings seeking a better life who are (often) in flight from perilous situations. CBP highlights the role of predatory criminal syndicates and traffickers in migrant deaths. It also blames the deaths on “nature,” attributing them to environmental exposure or drowning, or other direct (factual) causes like physical trauma from car accidents or falls from the heightened, reinforced border wall. While these explanations may be accurate in a limited way, they hardly tell the whole story.
Many scholars have attributed migrant deaths to US “prevention through deterrence,” or PTD, policies. PTD strategies seek to make migration so difficult and life-threatening that others will not migrate (general deterrence), and individual migrants will not try to migrate again (specific deterrence) due to “consequences” that can include criminal prosecution, multi-year bars on reentry, detention, and even family separation. Yet, research shows that migrants mostly understand the risks of irregular migration from their own family members, neighbors, and public education campaigns. However, the risks do not deter them from migrating because they view the conditions they have fled as more certain and severe.
From the start of the PTD strategy in 1994, it has been clear that redirecting migrants to more difficult routes both endangers them (leading to fatalities) and places them in the throes of smugglers and organized criminal syndicates. This enforcement tactic both causes and can alter the geography and types of deaths, as indicated by the surge of deaths in South Texas over the past decade and, more recently, in New Mexico.
Other enforcement tactics also contribute to deaths. Migrants die trying to circumvent vehicle checkpoints. They die trying to access US territory and its asylum system, as demonstrated by a study in this volume. As the papers document, they also increasingly die and are maimed due to falls from the heightened and reenforced border wall.
In our co-authored paper, which introduces the special edition, we distinguish between the underlying “legal” causes that lead to migrant deaths and their immediate “factual” causes. Among the former are the conditions that uproot migrants (war, persecution, poverty, criminal violence, the effects of climate change), combined with the paucity of legal migration channels. Most forced migrants have no option but to resort to irregular migration, which exposes them to all manners of danger. The paper makes the obvious point that while migrants may die due to “exposure to the elements,” “that is not all that is killing them” — policy choices contribute to the causes of migrant deaths.
Will the Trump administration’s mass deportation, border blockade, and restricted use of humanitarian admission programs succeed in deterring irregular migration? Will it lead to decreased deaths?
This is unlikely. These policies will do little to change the underlying conditions driving desperate people to migrate. Moreover, the administration’s indiscriminate termination of US funding for humanitarian programs, including for refugees, will almost certainly lead to more suffering, instability, conflict and forced migration. As former Secretary of Defense and General James Mattis once testified, diminished diplomacy and foreign assistance invariably leads to funding requests for “more ammunition.” CBP “encounters” with border crossers have fallen steadily since the second half of FY 2024 and in the first months of the new administration. However, this trend may not persist. As a case in point, during the first Trump administration in FY 2019, illegal entries spiked to their then-highest level in decades.
It is also likely that deaths will increase, particularly in Mexico and along other migration routes outside the US, where they will be less visible. This may be the case both for those trying to reach the US and for “mass” deportees forced to return home. Meanwhile, the families of the decedents will suffer from not being able to reunify with their loved ones and (in many cases) from the pain and ambiguity of not even knowing what happened to them – forever marked by this permanent family separation.
The best course would be for the United States to work with migrant-sending states to create conditions allowing their nationals to “stay” and thrive at home and, if impossible, to migrate legally and safely. That sensible and pragmatic approach could save lives, weaken cartels and traffickers, and strengthen ties with key migrant-sending states – goals that have long aligned with the nation’s humanitarian and foreign policy interests. We echo Josiah Heyman, as he concludes his article in the special edition, this “is the least we can do in the memory of the people who have died at the border.”
