Death in the Desert
NO matter how the Supreme Court rules this month in Arizona v. United
States, which will determine the fate of Arizona’s aggressive illegal immigration law, the national conversation about illegal immigration has shifted. As recent data from the Pew Hispanic Center
and the United States Border Patrol indicate, illegal immigration is on
the wane, with arrests of migrants trying to cross the United
States-Mexico border at a 40-year low and with net migration to the
United States at a standstill — and perhaps even reversing direction. In
the eyes of many, this is cause for celebration: no more straining the
resources of border states while migrants risk life and limb for a shot
at a better life.
But this rosy image of “success” ignores the larger, sobering picture of
which migrant death and suffering is still very much a part. To see
this, all you need to do is visit the southwest desert of Arizona, where
migrants crossing into the United States continue to perish in tragic
numbers. While it’s true that illegal immigration numbers are down
overall, migrants are dying in the desert at the same rate that they
have been for years (roughly between 150 and 250 deaths a year),
according to statistics compiled by the Arizona Recovered Human Remains Project and the human rights group No More Deaths. In the past 10 years alone, some 2,000 migrants — men, women, children and the elderly — have died this way.
Why does this number remain so disturbingly high? Because of the “funnel
effect” created by the militarization of the United States-Mexico
border: hundreds of miles of physical barriers, high-tech
infrastructure, highway checkpoints and other security enhancements have
combined to reroute migrants away from highly trafficked and relatively
safe urban crossing zones and into remote and perilous stretches of
scorching, waterless desert. Fewer migrants may be crossing, but those
that do face more treacherous journeys.
During months of research about immigration in southern Arizona, I heard
many tales of death and suffering in the desert.
Consider the all-too-typical story of Josue Ernesto Oliva-Serrano. A
Honduran illegal immigrant living in Oklahoma with his American wife and
their two children, Mr. Serrano was deported last year following his
involvement in a minor traffic accident. (An illegal immigrant does not
automatically become a United States citizen when he marries an
American.) In September, he perished in Arizona in a desperate attempt
to be reunited with his family. He had paid a coyote, or
smuggler, to take him from Honduras to the United States-Mexico border,
where he joined up with a group of roughly 20 other migrants to enter
the United States through the desolate and searing terrain of the Tohono
O’odham American Indian reservation in southern Arizona.
According to accounts from the other migrants, the coyote told
Mr. Serrano that Phoenix was only a day’s walk away (when in fact it was
four days under the best of conditions) and that the two gallons of
water he was carrying would suffice. The temperatures soared to triple
digits the day the group set out. They ran out of water within hours and
resorted to drinking water from cattle ponds. Mr. Serrano soon fell
ill. He succumbed to the heat, a victim of hyperthermia
and dehydration, the most common causes of migrant death. His mummified
remains were found many days later by Tohono O’odham tribal members
whom Mr. Serrano’s wife had contacted to help locate her husband.
Or consider the plight of female migrants. Many suffer atrocious abuses
at the hands of their smugglers: they are robbed, sexually assaulted or
simply abandoned in the desert. When I was in Arizona, I spoke with a
man known as Sundog, the caretaker (and sole resident) of a ghost town
named Ruby located in the mountainous area northwest of the city of
Nogales. One afternoon, Sundog said, he saw a woman fleeing down a
hilltop in his direction, screaming wildly. Close on her heels was the
woman’s smuggler, who had already raped her friend and was coming after
her.
Another story: On Christmas Day last year, several volunteers from one
of Tucson’s humanitarian aid groups came across a woman with broken ribs
and a punctured lung during one of their desert runs. She was still
alive; she had managed to fight off her coyote when he tried to rape her. “The question is not if a female migrant will be raped,” Shura Wallin, an aid worker in Arizona, told me, “but when and how often. Things are getting so much worse here.”
When it comes to illegal immigration, low numbers are one way to measure
success. Another is in terms of death and human heartbreak. If you
spend even just a day in southern Arizona talking to aid workers, or
across the border at a migrant shelter in Mexico teeming with recent
deportees, or with Border Patrol agents (who have their own sad tales to
tell), the numbers begin to look different. They look different in
light of the corpses on gurneys, the empty water jugs littering the
desert, the children who have lost their fathers, the crosses hanging on
the United States-Mexico border wall that bear the names of the dead —
or the crosses that simply say desconocido: “unknown.”
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