Borderland Deaths of Migrants Quietly Reach Crisis Numbers

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/25116-borderland-deaths-of-migrants-quietly-reach-crisis-numbers


Undocumented migrants pass a boy between two cars on a moving northbound freight train known as "The Beast," because of rampant accidents and violent crime, as it passes through Tenosique, Mexico, July 2, 2014. (Photo: Meridith Kohut / The New York Times)

The sun-bleached bones of a human skeleton lay in disarray: the skull rolled on its crown, an S-curved spinal column about two feet away. Leg bones were in a haphazard pile. There were personal items too - a wallet, pair of walking shoes and a dirt-caked T-shirt.

They belonged to a man, most likely a migrant who had faced off with the Sonoran Desert in an attempt to come north. While most attention on immigration has been directed recently at the human drama unfolding around a surge of children fleeing from Central American countries, the immigrant death toll on the US-Mexico border has quietly exploded, even as undocumented migration overall has plummeted.

The bones were found by Aguilas del Desierto (Eagles of the Desert), an all-volunteer search-and-rescue organization, in the blistering Arizona desert heat of the Organ Pipe Cactus national park just south of Ajo, a sparsely populated region of Pima County that neighbors the Mexican border. As many were hunkering over barbecues or lighting off fireworks, these men rolled out of California on a 300-mile trek across Interstate 8. I rode shotgun in long-time volunteer and Marine Corps veteran Vicente Rodriguez's old red Forerunner.

Roughly once a month, they leave their families and personal lives to take these trips and plunge into some of the country's most inhospitable landscapes. They hail from different walks of life - a roofer, a photographer, a medical supply importer, a gardening business owner, a water technician. But their common goal is finding at least some of the hundreds who die every year traversing the borderlands.