[Agents routinely ignore emergency search and rescue calls and
push people into harsh terrain as part of a “deterrence” policy,
reports say. ] [[link removed]]

BORDER PATROL POLICIES KILL HUNDREDS OF MIGRANTS EACH YEAR—AND THEY
WERE DESIGNED TO  
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Tina Vásquez
February 5, 2021
Prism
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_ Agents routinely ignore emergency search and rescue calls and push
people into harsh terrain as part of a “deterrence” policy,
reports say. _

This is a monument for those who have died attempting to cross the
US-Mexican border. Each coffin represents a year and the number of
dead. It is a protest against the effects of Operation Guardian. Taken
at the Tijuana-San Diego border., Tomas Castelazo © Tomas Castelazo,
www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

 

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 series of reports [[link removed]]
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, detailed
[[link removed]]
the 1994 Border Patrol policy “Prevention Through Deterrence” in
which the United States militarized urban border areas in an effort
[[link removed]]
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, detailed
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Border Patrol’s practice of destroying life-saving humanitarian aid
left by volunteers for migrants.

Part three in the series
[[link removed]]
published Wednesday—_Left to Die: Border Patrol, Search and Rescue,
and the Crisis of Disappearance—_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.

UNDOCUMENTED AND IN DISTRESS

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 _New York Times _published an
interactive feature
[[link removed]]_
_that included a few of the hundreds of calls that Border Patrol has
ignored over the years.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

FAMILIES TAKE MATTERS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS

Hannah Taleb, one of the report’s authors, told Prism that it’s
unhelpful to talk about disappearances “in a vacuum.”

“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.”

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.

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 other humanitarian organizations
[[link removed]] that perform searches
in the borderlands. But these groups also face obstruction from Border
Patrol, including the agency’s practice of criminalizing and
harassing
[[link removed]]
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.  

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.

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.
 

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.

“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.

DEADLY DISCRIMINATION

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.

“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.”

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.  

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

CALL TO ACTION

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 No More Deaths website
[[link removed]].

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.

“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.”

In 2020, the remains of 227 people were recovered in the borderlands
of southern Arizona—the highest of any year on record.

 
_Tina Vásquez is the senior reporter at Prism. She covers gender
justice, workers' rights, and immigration. Follow her on Twitter
@TheTinaVasquez. [[link removed]]_

 

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