Border deaths: El Paso's deadliest summer has claimed at least 136 migrant lives

Lauren Villagran, El Paso Times
·4 min read
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U.S. Border Patrol agents get ready to use horses to track a recent group of migrants who had crossed the border wall in New Mexico in late August 2023.
U.S. Border Patrol agents get ready to use horses to track a recent group of migrants who had crossed the border wall in New Mexico in late August 2023.

Scorching summer heat pushed migrant deaths to a 25-year record in El Paso.

U.S. Border Patrol reports at least 136 migrants have died in El Paso Sector, nearly double the number a year ago and the highest recorded in the sector since the agency began reporting migrant deaths in 1998, according to agency statistics.

At least 100 of the deaths occurred between May and August. With one month left in fiscal 2023, the death toll is 87% higher than in all of fiscal 2022, when Border Patrol recorded 71 migrant deaths.

The toll has shocked even seasoned agents and law enforcement officers.

"Arizona has always had more deaths than we do because the temperatures are more extreme," said Border Patrol spokesman Fidel Baca. "Here, the weird part is they weren't making it far. But migrants have told us they are being held without sufficient food or water on the Mexican side, or they were waiting for hours in the desert for the opportunity to cross."

El Paso Sector spans 268 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, covering the El Paso metropolitan area and stretching from Hudspeth County in the east across New Mexico to the Arizona state line in the west.

U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Fidel Baca tracks a recent group of migrants who had crossed the border wall in New Mexico in late August 2023.
U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Fidel Baca tracks a recent group of migrants who had crossed the border wall in New Mexico in late August 2023.

Faced with reams of concertina wire along the border within El Paso city limits — where deaths have historically been low — hundreds of migrants are crossing unlawfully each day in New Mexico, where the razor wire and Texas National Guard patrols end and push the migrants into more hostile terrain.

The sector's migrant death toll to date in fiscal 2023 is higher than the annual toll recorded in Arizona's two Border Patrol sectors, Yuma and Tucson, combined, over the five years through fiscal 2021, the last year U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported the data.

"As the season and the year progresses we see different types of deaths," said El Paso County Sheriff's Cmdr. Robert Rojas.

"You will see people fall off the border fence and break their neck or suffer a fracture that causes their death," he said. "We are talking about desperate people, and desperate people do desperate things. You or I might think it’s crazy to walk 10 miles anywhere, but they will walk across countries."

More: 'It’s burning out there': Amid record heat, migrant deaths at border surge in Sunland Park

Ground temperatures hit 150 degrees

The hot desert terrain outside El Paso, especially in New Mexico, has been a death trap this summer as triple-digit temperatures blew out heat records and endured for weeks at a time.

New Mexico's Office of the Medical Investigator recorded 72 deaths of "probable border crossers" in Doña Ana County alone since January. Migrants have succumbed to the heat on the rocky slopes of Mt. Cristo Rey, in the burning orange sands of Santa Teresa and even within reach of the neighborhoods of Sunland Park.

OMI investigator Laura Mae Williams, who responds to law enforcement reports of bodies found, said she logs the body and ground temperatures as the scenes of deaths in the New Mexico desert so the pathologists "can truly understand how hot it is."

Cattle from New Mexico use the border wall fence for shade during a warm day in late August.
Cattle from New Mexico use the border wall fence for shade during a warm day in late August.

"The ground temperatures this summer have been running in the 120 to 130s," she said. "I have had the ground temperatures as hot as 150 degrees. The decedent's body temperature, an external body temperature, are running into the 100-and-teens, 120s and even 130s, depending on how long they've been out there."

Although migrant encounters dropped in El Paso Sector after the May 12 end of Title 42 expulsions, a daily average of about 700 encounters has persisted. The majority are adults attempting to evade Border Patrol, and most are crossing on the New Mexico side of the state line.

'It's dangerous': Desert landscape disorients migrants

The desert landscape around the Sunland Park and Santa Teresa bedroom communities of El Paso is deceptive. On a map, it doesn't appear as vast or remote as the Arizona borderland; there are neighborhoods and roadways and El Paso seems within reach.

Highway 9 runs parallel to the border three miles north, through working cattle ranches, but high mounds of creosote and extreme heat can leave migrants disoriented and lost. Falls from the 18- or 30-foot border fence can leave migrants with broken limbs — and desperate groups will press ahead, leaving the injured behind. And those who trek Mt. Cristo Rey can discover that what appears to be a scalable mountain is actually a series of steep slopes and plunging ravines.

A welder fixes part of the border wall that had been breached west of the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in New Mexico in late August 2023.
A welder fixes part of the border wall that had been breached west of the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in New Mexico in late August 2023.

"That terrain is obviously very uneven, very rough and it's dangerous," said Sunland Park Police Chief Eric Lopez, whose agency has been responding to a sharp increase in migrant injuries and deaths this summer. "There's a lot of risk there."

"The elements are real," Lopez said. "The heat is real and the dehydration if they haven't had a proper amount of water. The body can only take so much."

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Record heat leads to El Paso's worst-ever worst-ever migrant death toll