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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/10/13/border-patrol-migrants-deaths/">https://theintercept.com/2020/10/13/border-patrol-migrants-deaths/</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Border Patrol Leaves Migrants in Remote Town as Deaths Rise</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Ryan Devereaux - October 13, 2020<br></div></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>With migrant deaths</u>
approaching levels not seen in years, humanitarian aid volunteers in
southern Arizona say that the U.S. Border Patrol is using Covid-19 as a
pretext to quietly dump large numbers of immigrants in one of the most
remote and potentially dangerous communities in the Sonoran Desert.</p>
<p>Volunteers who have visited the dusty community of Sasabe, in the
Mexican state of Sonora, in recent weeks, say that they have witnessed
U.S. immigration agents continually off-loading large groups of people
throughout the day, overwhelming the town’s limited immigration
resources and placing individuals at significant risk of being targeted
by organized criminal groups.</p>
<p>“We believe that Border Patrol is getting away with these horrible deportation numbers because no one knows,” Dora Rodriguez, a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/us-mexico-border-coronavirus/">Tucson-based humanitarian aid volunteer</a>, told The Intercept. “It is really easy for them to just dump people there and that’s it. Nobody says anything.”</p></div><p>Rodriguez
and a growing group of humanitarian volunteers began turning their
attention to Sasabe in mid-September, making biweekly visits to bring
food and water to migrants after learning of the explosion in arrivals
to the resource-strapped community. With a population of approximately
2,500 and a single town store, the port of entry at Sasabe has long been
<a href="http://archive.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/20111115arizona-border-outpost-sasabe.html">described</a>
as one of the quietest official crossings in the state. There is no
migrant shelter in the town, and the influence and power of organized
crime in the area is well known.</p><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/10/GettyImages-631941108.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=650" alt="GettyImages-631941108" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="445" height="289"></p><p class="gmail-caption">View of the border between Mexico and the U.S in the community of Sasabe in Sonora state, Mexico, on January 13, 2017.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images</p></div></div><div><p>In
recent visits, Rodriguez has been joined by Sister Judy Bourg, a nun
with the Sisters of Notre Dame, and Gail Kocourek, a volunteer with the
Green Valley Samaritans, one of Arizona’s longstanding humanitarian
groups. The women told The Intercept that they have personally seen
groups of migrants numbering in the dozens gathered outside of Sasabe’s
tiny immigration office. Through a visit to a local stash house and
conversations with local contacts, the women were told that the Border
Patrol is dropping upwards of 100 to 120 people in the community each
day.</p>
<p>“We totally didn’t expect this,” Kocourek, a longtime volunteer in
the Sasabe area, told The Intercept. “We’ve got hungry people being
dumped into this community by the hundreds.” Kocourek added that Border
Patrol enforcement activity in the area is unlike anything she has ever
seen before. “It’s just tremendous right now,” she said. “I’ve never
seen so much activity in that area.”</p>
<p>Operating under an order issued by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, in March the Border Patrol began rapidly expelling
migrants at the border in the name of defending against the spread of
Covid-19. As the Wall Street Journal recently <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-officials-objected-to-order-turning-away-migrants-at-border-11601733601">reported</a>,
however, pressure to enact the order did not come from public health
officials, but instead from Stephen Miller, the president’s
ultra-hardline immigration adviser. Miller, who recently contracted
Covid-19 himself, has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-immigration-stephen-miller-public-health.html">long sought</a> to connect immigrants to disease as means to close off immigration at the border.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“We’ve got hungry people being dumped into this community by the hundreds.”</p></blockquote><div><p>It’s
not only Mexican nationals who are being dropped in Sasabe, Rodriguez
said, noting that she had she met Salvadorans, Hondurans, and a father
from Guatemala, who had been expelled with his 16-year-old son, during
recent visits. “I understand when there are tons of people in Nogales
and in Tijuana and in Sonoyta,” she said, referring to more well-known
border communities where the Border Patrol often deposits migrants. “But
they have resources — even if they’re limited, there are some
resources. But in Sasabe, it’s nothing.”</p>
<p>Rodriguez and the other advocates say that the expulsions are making
an already dangerous situation worse. Following a blistering hot summer —
in Phoenix, the hottest in recorded history — more human remains have
been recovered in the Arizona desert this year than at any point since
2013. On top of the rising death toll, the expulsions have come at a
time of escalating tension in the desert, with the Border Patrol
executing two militarized raids on a humanitarian aid station in the
region in three months, federal agents <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/09/16/indigenous-activists-border-wall-protest/">arresting</a> and <a href="https://news.azpm.org/p/news-articles/2020/10/12/182016-indigenous-peoples-day-border-demonstration-ends-with-tear-gas-arrests/">tear-gassing</a> Indigenous activists protesting border expansion on sacred lands, and the state’s for-profit <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/07/27/ice-detention-coronavirus-letters/">immigration detention centers</a> becoming some the nation’s leading hot spots for Covid-19.</p>
<p>Generally lasting no more than a couple hours from encounter to
removal, the so-called Title 42 expulsions have radically altered the
shape of migration and immigration enforcement along the border. The
Border Patrol has long relied on a deterrence strategy that funnels
migrants into the border’s deadliest terrain, pushing its land
checkpoints deeper into the interior of the country and forcing migrants
to walk further into the desert in the hopes of linking up with a ride.
Agents will sometimes track a group of migrants for days before making
an arrest, allowing physical exhaustion to assist in their apprehension
efforts. Now, with the expulsions in effect, those exhausted migrants
can be swiftly booted from the country. According to <a href="https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics">data</a>
from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the government has expelled
more than 147,000 people along the southwest border using the order.</p></div><p><a href="https://theintercept.com/collections/the-war-on-immigrants/"><span><span><img alt="The War on Immigrants" src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2018/06/guatemalan-immigrant-cpb-feat-1530033149-promo.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&fit=crop&w=440&h=220" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="440" height="220"></span></span><span><span>Read Our Complete Coverage</span><span>The War on Immigrants</span></span></a></p><div><p>While Mark Morgan, the senior official performing the duties of the commissioner of CBP, has described the expulsions as a “<a href="https://news.azpm.org/p/news-articles/2020/8/7/178098-cbp-head-defends-accelerated-border-expulsions-blames-migrants-for-covid-19-risk/">game changer</a>,”
advocates say that the expulsions rob migrants of due process rights
and subject them to extreme danger when their removals involve being
dumped in unfamiliar and remote communities with entrenched organized
crime. Bourg, who has spent a decade providing humanitarian on the
border, told The Intercept that the expelled migrants whom she met on a
recent visit to Sasabe looked physically depleted. “They came in beat-up
looking,” she said. Their eyes were red and glassy, she added. “They
didn’t just cross and walk for half a day.”</p>
<p>In the past week, The Intercept has repeatedly requested a breakdown
of the Border Patrol’s data on expulsions in the agency’s Tucson sector,
as well as an interview with an official who could explain how
determinations are made as to which ports migrants will be expelled
through. The Border Patrol has provided neither. In April, an agency
spokesperson acknowledged that Sasabe was seeing a “<a href="https://news.azpm.org/p/news-topical-border/2020/4/8/169551-groups-say-border-patrols-accelerated-expulsions-sending-migrants-to-ill-equipped-border-towns/">mild uptick</a>” in expulsions but provided no numbers to assess the claim.</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/10/GettyImages-452923526.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=607" alt="GettyImages-452923526" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="445" height="270"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Immigrants
walk in line through the Arizona desert near Sasabe, Sonora state, in
an attempt to cross the Mexican-U.S. border, on April 6, 2006.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images</p></div></div><div><h3>A Grim Milestone</h3>
<p>While the Border Patrol’s expulsion protocol remains unclear, what is
evident is that 2020 has been a particularly deadly year for migrants
attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert. For years, the Pima County
Office of the Medical Examiner has shared its data on suspected migrant
death cases with Humane Borders, a humanitarian group that charts the
data on an <a href="https://humaneborders.info/app/map.asp">interactive online map</a>.</p>
<p>As of this week, the medical examiner’s office has logged 181 cases
of suspected migrant deaths recovered in its area of operations this
year. The last time the office saw a higher total was in 2013, when 186
sets of human remains were recovered. The record for most human remains
recovered in a single year was set in 2010, when 224 were found. With
two and a half months yet to go in the year, advocates worry that 2020
could exceed that grim milestone.</p>
<p>“I think by the end of year, it’ll be the highest since 2010,” Mike
Kreyche, the mapping coordinator with Humane Borders, told The
Intercept. “I hope we don’t get up that high, but I think we’re going to
approach it.”</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>This
year, there has been a marked increase in the recovery of remains
indicating a recently deceased individual, particularly in the brutally
hot summer months.</p></blockquote><div><p>What’s
particularly alarming about this year’s data, Kreyche explained, is the
column of information labeled “postmortem interval,” the estimated
amount of time between an individual’s death and the discovery of their
remains. In recent years, that number has generally been more than six
to eight months — in some cases, remains discovered in the field could
be years old. This year, however, there has been a marked increase in
the recovery of remains indicating a recently deceased individual,
particularly in the brutally hot summer months. In September, roughly
two thirds of the recoveries recorded by the medical examiner’s office
suggested a death in the prior three months. Overall, the 2020 data show
that more than half of the recoveries of suspected migrant remains —
107 of 181 cases — indicate a death that occurred at some point less
than six to eight months prior.</p>
<p>“There have been a lot more deaths,” Kreyche said, “particularly recent deaths.”</p>
<p>Montana Thames, a volunteer with the humanitarian organization No
More Deaths, said the past several months have been “very active” for
volunteers providing aid on the ground. With temperatures continuously
breaking 100 degrees, “people need help, people need aid,” Thames told
The Intercept. “There have been a lot of people who haven’t made it.”</p>
<p>Last week, the Border Patrol <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2020/10/06/border-patrol-raids-no-more-deaths-camp-again/5898316002/">raided</a>
No More Deaths’ humanitarian aid station outside of Arivaca, Arizona,
approximately 25 miles northeast of Sasabe, for the second time in three
months. The <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/02/border-patrol-raid-arizona-no-more-deaths/">first raid</a>
was launched in the middle of a heat wave and featured members of the
Border Patrol’s tactical team, known as BORTAC, pointing rifles while
agents slashed through the organization’s tents with knives, confiscated
sensitive medical records and dumped out gallon jugs of water.</p>
<p>Efforts to engage in a dialogue with the Border Patrol since then
went nowhere, Thames said, and last Monday night BORTAC was again
deployed in a heavily militarized operation that involved agents in
night-vision goggles trashing the organization’s belongings. Twelve
migrants were arrested, including some who were chased through Arivaca
before being taken into custody. While the raid was “shocking” and
unacceptable, Thames noted, “This is literally the everyday reality of
migrants and undocumented communities in general.”</p>
</div><div><p>Rodriguez visited Sasabe the morning
after the raid on the No More Deaths camp. She described witnessing
multiple rounds of expulsions and said that at one point, as many as 50
people were gathered outside the overwhelmed Mexican immigration office.
She was told that some of the migrants in town that day were among
those arrested in the raid the previous night. Rodriguez spoke to one
young man from El Salvador. His shoes were tattered, and his toes poked
through at the ends. He said that he had spent 15 days in the desert.
Rodriguez, who nearly died crossing the border as an asylum-seeker
herself in 1980, was both moved and troubled by the young man’s story.
“They are putting these people in the most horrible danger,” she said.
“They have nothing.”</p>
<p>Driving back into the U.S. last Tuesday, Rodriguez and the other
advocates encountered an enormous Border Patrol caravan heading south.
“That road always has a lot of Border Patrol, but this was exceptional,”
Bourg said. Rodriguez said the area was “like a war zone,” adding,
“They’re running their own show over there and it’s a secret.”</p>
<p>Although humanitarian aid volunteers are now coordinating food and
water supply runs sufficient to support 700 people in Sasabe each week,
Rodriguez said more must be done. She believes the Border Patrol’s
expulsions into the town need to stop.</p>
<p>“It’s like a playground for BP,” she said. “No one is making them accountable for this.”</p></div></div></div></div>
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