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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.prismreports.org/article/2021/2/5/border-patrol-policies-kill-hundreds-of-migrants-each-yearand-they-were-designed-to">https://www.prismreports.org/article/2021/2/5/border-patrol-policies-kill-hundreds-of-migrants-each-yearand-they-were-designed-to</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Border Patrol policies kill hundreds of migrants each year—and they were designed to</h1>
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<a href="https://www.prismreports.org/tina-vsquez" class="gmail-css-10zwoio">Tina Vásquez</a> ▸ February 5th, 2021
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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><img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/qdbgqekhokuo/1bOxMa6FTpgnFI3IVYDB8X/60d3541ce1571762613f911f461c039e/GettyImages-1096832438.jpg?w=720&q=50" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="422" height="281"></div><p>Each
year, untold numbers of migrants disappear in the borderlands after
being pushed into dangerous and remote terrain by Border Patrol, the
same agency that is then tasked with responding to migrants’ search and
rescue emergencies. A new report released Wednesday found that the
federal agency does not respond to 40% of these emergency calls. In a <a href="http://www.thedisappearedreport.org/">series of reports</a>
published over the course of five years, the southern Arizona
organizations No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos have
cataloged and reported the specific Border Patrol policies and tactics
that have fueled a crisis of death and disappearance in the borderlands.
The first report, released in 2016, <a href="https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2016/12/14/family-members-seek-answers-missing-loved-ones-border-patrol/">detailed</a> the 1994 Border Patrol policy “Prevention Through Deterrence” in which the United States militarized urban border areas <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/355856-border-patrol-strategic-plan-1994-and-beyond.html">in an effort</a>
to steer migrants away from ports of entry and into geographically
harsher and more remote and hazardous regions, leading to their deaths.
The second report, published in 2018, <a href="https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2018/01/18/border-patrols-destruction-humanitarian-aid-killing-migrants/">detailed</a> Border Patrol’s practice of destroying life-saving humanitarian aid left by volunteers for migrants.</p><p><a href="http://www.thedisappearedreport.org/uploads/8/3/5/1/83515082/left_to_die_-_english.pdf">Part three in the series</a> published Wednesday—<i>Left to Die: Border Patrol, Search and Rescue, and the Crisis of Disappearance—</i>details
how when 911 response systems receive calls from people crossing into
the United States without authorization, they transfer those calls away
from local emergency services and to Border Patrol, an agency that for
decades has failed to provide life-saving assistance to undocumented
immigrants who are lost and dying.</p><h3><b>Undocumented and in distress</b></h3><p>The
report outlines dozens of incidents in which migrants en route to the
U.S. were left to die by Border Patrol. In one case, a man named Jaime
contacted 911 11 times over the course of 10 hours. He was lost and
alone in southwestern Arizona. As the hours passed, his condition
deteriorated and his voice faded. His location was traced, but each time
he called 911 he was transferred to Border Patrol, so he stopped
calling. It’s unknown what happened to Jaime. A woman named Flora was
last seen severely dehydrated and losing consciousness in South Texas.
Despite pressure from consulate officials, it was not until 14 days
after Flora was last seen that Border Patrol conducted an interview with
an eyewitness. Flora was never found. In another case, Narciso and his
son were last seen in the remote Arizona desert. Narciso was unable to
walk, so his son went in search of assistance and was encountered and
apprehended by Border Patrol. Despite the fact that his son reported his
father’s emergency to arresting agents, Narciso was never found. In
2019, the <i>New York Times </i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/29/opinion/migrant-crisis.html">published an interactive feature</a><i> </i>that included a few of the hundreds of calls that Border Patrol has ignored over the years. </p><p>After
the implementation of Prevention Through Deterrence, Border Patrol
launched the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit (BORSTAR) in
1998 to address the rising death toll resulting from its enforcement
policy. The unit, which accounts for an infinitesimal portion of Border
Patrol’s budget, is supposed to respond to emergency situations in the
borderlands. However according to the report, “BORSTAR is a relatively
minuscule initiative with little to no capacity to respond to the
massive search and rescue crisis in the borderlands.” Less than 6% of
Border Patrol agents have certified medical training, and less than 1%
are trained in search and rescue techniques. Still, in 2007 surrounding
counties began forwarding emergency 911 calls to Border Patrol from
people perceived to be undocumented and in distress. Up until 2015,
these calls were transferred to a single cell phone carried by a BORSTAR
agent. </p><p>“This ‘emergency’ cell phone was frequently out of
service, out of battery, and at times, turned completely off over the
weekend or overnight. For years, untold numbers of calls from people in
dire need went unanswered,” No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos
Humanos reported. Pima County, Arizona, estimates that 70% of the 911
calls from this period were dropped upon transfer to Border Patrol. </p><p>The
report’s findings are based on data collected in 2015-2016 by the
Derechos Humanos Missing Migrant Crisis Line, a community advocacy
initiative created to assist family members searching for their loved
ones. In 63% of all distress calls referred to Border Patrol by crisis
line volunteers, the agency did not conduct any confirmed search or
rescue mobilization whatsoever—this includes 40% of cases where Border
Patrol directly refused to take any measures in response to a
life-or-death emergency. </p><p>Border Patrol was also found to be more
than twice as likely to take part in directly causing a person to go
missing through deadly enforcement tactics than they are to participate
in locating a distressed person. As a regular part of daily enforcement
operations, Border Patrol agents chase groups of people who are
migrating together. Sometimes these chases are on foot, other times
Border Patrol utilizes helicopters, ATVs, horses, and dogs, causing
people to run in different directions “leaving people disoriented,
exhausted, sometimes injured, and separated from their traveling
companions,” according to the report. Many of the emergency cases
received by the Derechos Humanos Crisis Line are people who have gone
missing as a direct result of a Border Patrol chase.</p><h3><b>Families take matters into their own hands </b></h3><p>Hannah Taleb, one of the report’s authors, told Prism that it’s unhelpful to talk about disappearances “in a vacuum.” </p><p>“What
is happening has been intentional in every way,” Taleb said. “The
findings of our report talk about Border Patrol's enforcement and
non-response [to people in distress], but we really hope that people
focus on the lengths that families have gone to in order to find their
loved ones.” </p><p>When people migrate on foot to the United States,
their cellphones become their life lines. When they are in distress, one
of their final acts before they disappear is using the last of their
cellphone battery to call their family and share information about their
surroundings and their health. In at least 26% of emergency cases, No
More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos found that a family
member received a distress call from their loved one or from an
eyewitness. </p><p>When these loved ones go missing, families contact
Border Patrol for help, only to experience inaction, negligence, and
hostility. Left with no other options—as phone calls to 911 and police
are transferred to Border Patrol—families overwhelmingly turn to the
Missing Migrant Line and <a href="https://linktr.ee/Borderlandssearchandrescue">other humanitarian organizations</a>
that perform searches in the borderlands. But these groups also face
obstruction from Border Patrol, including the agency’s practice of <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/11/23/scott-warren-verdict-immigration-border/">criminalizing and harassing</a>
humanitarian search and rescue volunteers; denying search and rescue
teams access to land jurisdictions; denying humanitarian parole to
family members who want to search for their loved ones; and failing to
provide critical information—like access to eyewitnesses—or providing
outright false and misleading information. </p><p>In one case, the
Derechos Humanos Missing Migrant Crisis Line received a call from the
sister of a man named Manuel, who had been lost in the desert for nine
days and called his family to tell them he could no longer walk. Manuel
wanted to turn himself into Border Patrol, which he told his sister was
nearby, but he couldn’t make it to them. </p><p>Manuel’s family
contacted Border Patrol and asked them to search for Manuel, which the
agency agreed to do. But when it became clear Border Patrol wasn’t
searching for him, Manuel’s brother left his home in Mexico to search
the area of the desert Manuel described in his final phone call. The
family also continued pushing Border Patrol to act, so agents removed
Manuel’s traveling companions from detention to act as eyewitnesses in a
search. According to the report, the eyewitnesses were brought to the
search area, however Border Patrol agents refused to allow the
eyewitnesses to lead them to Manuel’s last known location. Days later,
volunteers with the Crisis Line learned Manuel’s brother crossed the
border himself and found Manuel dead. </p><div><p>Enjoying this article? Get more stories like this right in your inbox.</p></div><p>One
of the report’s authors, Alicia Dinsmore, told Prism that the full
scope of Border Patrol’s violence in the borderlands is hard to quantify
because much of it is unreported or underreported. </p><p>“This is why
we use the language of ‘disappearance.’ So much of the loss of human
life isn’t counted in the death counts [provided by Border Patrol] each
year. There is a real lack of documentation about what is happening. For
example, counties don’t keep recordings of 911 calls for long periods
of time. For years in Pima County, 911 audio recordings were destroyed
after six months. The full scope of what is happening isn’t reflected in
the United States’ official records, but it is reflected in the tragic
loss of lives that families experience—families who never see or hear
from their loved one again,” Dinsmore said.</p><h3><b>Deadly discrimination </b></h3><p>Families
who have lost loved ones because of Border Patrol’s deadly negligence
and inaction have no real recourse for justice or accountability. Taleb
said that the process for filing any form of grievance with Border
Patrol is arduous, often monolingual, and a bureaucratic dead end.</p><p>“Border
Patrol does not have systems built in to be accountable to people
because they're an enforcement agency that is not built around
accountability,” Taleb said. “The conclusion we have come to is that
this is beyond accountability. There is no form of recourse that will
address this crisis that leaves Border Patrol in control of what is
happening in the borderlands. It would be illogical to think you can
hold an agency accountable for a crisis of their own making.” </p><p>Taleb
said she understands that people might read the latest No More Deaths
and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos report in disbelief because it
seems unbelievable that such a well-resourced agency would choose not to
enact searches for people who are dying and calling pleading for help,
but she said it’s important to understand that Border Patrol does not
care about loss of life. “They are not going to use their resources to
find missing people because they use their resources to prioritize
punitive action and enforcement,” the co-author told Prism. </p><p>It’s
important to note that if the population of people calling in distress
were American citizens, there would be a fundamentally different
approach and outcome. The report found that in 37% of cases in which
Border Patrol did mobilize search or rescue measures, the quality and
scope of the agency’s efforts were seriously diminished when compared
with government search and rescue standards for cases involving U.S.
citizens in which there is a near 100% success rate of county-led search
and rescues in the same or similar remote areas. </p><p>In one July
2016 case when a 56-year-old Salvadoran woman named María went missing
in the borderlands, a Border Patrol agent told her family, “It’s not our
problem to look for ‘illegals.’” This profound and deadly negligence is
rooted in racism and xenophobia, and impacted families may be able to
prove in court that Border Patrol engages in discriminatory practices. </p><p>“Governmental
services providing one response to a group of people and not another is
clearly a form of discrimination, and county governments transferring
911 calls to an agency that does not actually search for people is
clearly a segregated system of emergency response that creates different
outcomes based on who you are. It’s a discriminatory system,” Dinsmore
said. “The court system is incredibly complex and the potential
consequences of going into litigation are high stakes, but there is
absolutely a case to be made for pursuing a lawsuit regarding
discriminatory practices.”</p><p>No More Deaths and La Coalición de
Derechos Humanos is in conversation with the Center for Constitutional
Rights regarding a potential lawsuit, though they are currently only in
the research phase.</p><h3><b>Call to action</b></h3><p>The
organizations behind the report included a lengthy series of
recommendations. Of primary importance is for government agencies to
establish borderlands emergency response systems that are fully separate
from immigration enforcement, and for government agencies at all levels
to end discriminatory treatment toward undocumented people reporting
emergencies in the borderlands. A call to action for the report’s
readers can also be found on the <a href="https://nomoredeaths.org/defund/">No More Deaths website</a>. </p><p>The
organizations are also demanding that the Department of Homeland
Security and Customs and Border Protection—the agency that oversees
Border Patrol—immediately demilitarize the border and decriminalize
migration by legalizing border crossing, dismantling all border
enforcement infrastructure, disempowering, disarming, and ultimately
dissolving Border Patrol, and establishing a reparations program for the
families of all people harmed, killed, and disappeared by Border
Patrol.</p><p>“We cannot advocate for an equal system that upholds the
border or that upholds the way in which people are treated at the
border. People who are forced into a deadly situation should be searched
for equally, but the demand cannot stop there,” Taleb said. “People
shouldn't be forced into deadly and remote areas of the desert, period.”
</p><p>In 2020, the remains of 227 people were recovered in the borderlands of southern Arizona—the highest of any year on record. </p><div></div><br></div></div></div>
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