Officials on both sides of the U. S. -Mexico border were looking for more sick people Saturday after at least nine migrants died while seeking to cross the Rio Grande, a damaging attempt to cross the border into a domain where the river had grown more than 2 feet on a single day.
U. S. Customs and Border ProtectionU. S. officials and Mexican officials found the patients near Eagle Pass, Texas, thursday after days of heavy rain.
U. S. officials recovered six bodies and the Mexicans discovered three, according to a customs and border coverage statement.
It is one of the deadliest drownings on the U. S. -Mexico border in history.
The river, which was just over 3 feet deep this week, reached more than 5 feet on Thursday and the water was flowing five times faster than normal, according to the National Weather Service.
U. S. teams rescued another 37 people from the river and arrested 16 others, while the Mexican government arrested 39 migrants.
U. S. Customs and Border Protection specified which country(ies) the immigrants arrived from and provided more information on rescue operations. The local Texas agencies involved responded to the data requests.
Among the bodies discovered in the river by the Mexican government were a pregnant man and a woguy, and their nationalities were unknown, said Francisco Contreras, a member of civil coverage for the Mexican border state of Coahuila. discovered.
The Border Patrol’s Del Rio domain, which includes Eagle Pass, is temporarily enabling the busiest room for illegal crossings. Officers arrested about 50,000 immigrants in the domain in July, and the Rio Grande Valley lagged behind with about 35,000. Eagle Pass is about 140 miles southwest of San Antonio.
One of the reasons the region is popular with immigrants is that it’s not as heavily controlled by drug cartels and is perceived as a little safer, said Stephanie Leutert, director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the University of Texas Strauss Center. . for external security and the law.
“It may just be another price. This may be safer. This can take you away from notoriously harmful cities,” Leutert said. “These cities [in the Del Rio area] definitely have a reputation for being safer than, say, Nuevo Laredo. “
The region attracts immigrants from dozens of countries, many of whom are families with young children. About 6 out of 10 stops in Del Rio in July were immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua.
The region has also been a popular crossing point for immigrants from Haiti, thousands of whom have been stranded in border towns since 2016, when the Obama administration halted a policy that allowed them to enter on humanitarian grounds in the first place.
The area, which stretches 245 miles along the Rio Grande, has been particularly damaging because the river’s currents can be deceptively fast and change quickly. Crossing the river can be tricky even for swimmers.
“There are places where the water point is low where you can wade, however, when the river is at the top, it’s incredibly dangerous, especially if you’re using young children or if you’re looking to help someone who is a smart swimmer,” Leutert said.
In a press release last month, customs and border coverage said it had found the bodies of more than two hundred migrants who died in the domain between October and July.
This year is poised to break last year’s record for the most deaths at the U. S. -Mexico border since 2014, when the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration began keeping records.
The organization has counted more than 4,000 deaths at the border since 2014, based on news reports and other sources, totaling 728 last year and 412 in the first seven months of this year, from dehydration or drowning.
June is the fourth deadliest month on record, with 138 deaths.
The Border Patrol has released official counts since 2020.
In June, 53 migrants were discovered dead or dying in a trailer on a San Antonio highway in the deadliest tragedy documented for claiming the lives of migrants smuggling across the border from Mexico.
“The total vacation is a testament to people’s desperation,” Leutert said. “They know that crossing the river is dangerous. They know that walking on ranches is dangerous. They know that crossing Mexico as a foreigner is dangerous. But they are willing to do so because what they leave behind is, for them, a worse option than facing a threat and seeking greater opportunity in the United States.
Some of the busiest border crossings, adding Eagle Pass and Yuma, Arizona, were quiet two years ago and now largely attract immigrants from outside Mexico and the so-called Central American Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Mexico agreed to receive migrants from the Northern Triangle countries, as well as its own nationals, if they are deported from the United States Title 42, the pandemic rule in place since March 2020 that denies the right to apply for asylum for preventing the spread of COVID-19.
It is very likely that people from other countries will be released to the United States on humanitarian parole or on notices to appear in immigration court because the U. S. will not be released to the United States. The U. S. government is struggling to bring them home due to costs, strained diplomatic relations, or other considerations.
In the Del Rio area, about 25 percent of arrests in July were dealt with under the pandemic rule, and about a portion at the rest of the border, according to government figures.
Venezuelans were by far the most detected nationality by Border Patrol agents in the Del Rio domain in July, accounting for 14,120 of the 49,563 arrests, or nearly 3 in 10.
They were followed by Cubans, who were detained 10,275 times, and then Mexicans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Colombians, in that order.
As more and more people crossed South Texas in the 2010s, Brooks County became a death trap for many immigrants seeking to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint in the town of Falfurrias, about 70 miles north of the border.
The smugglers left them in front of the checkpoint and managed to pick them up on the other side, but some perished dehydrated along the way.
Arizona’s Baboquivari Mountains and ranches in Brooks County, Texas, still attract Border Patrol agents and bereaved families hoping to rescue migrants or, if not, locate bodies. Harmful as the domain has one of the most popular places to enter the United States illegally.
Not all the sick are immigrants. In April of this year, the body of a Texas National Guard was found in the Rio Grande. He had jumped to come out to the aid of a migrant suffering in the water.
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