This is an urgent situation, my friends.
As you can read from this powerful photo-journalism by Dudley Althaus in yesterday's San Antonio Express News, the situation for immigrants is dire along the vast, parched, and remote Presidio-Ojinaga Big Bend area of the Texas-Mexico border. This region is arguably the most dangerous, unforgiving stretch of the border.
In recent days and weeks, "dozens have been found dead from heat and dehydration." According to Althaus, "smuggling gangs" lie to immigrants about the real distance that they must walk, abandoning them to their own fates. Sadly, even in "more hospitable" contexts, border deaths are an ongoing, issue. (Read: "The Real Death Valley: The Untold Story of Mass Graves and Migrant Deaths in South Texas," as well as "Every Year, Hundreds of Migrants Die or Go Missing in Brooks County. A New Documentary Tells Two Families’ Stories.")
In Brooks County alone, where the small town of Falfurrias is located, an estimated three to six hundred immigrants die every year from exhaustion and dehydration. Such staggering numbers! And so little public or media attention to this human rights issue.
Do read the story and take action. Support the South Texas Human Rights Center directed by Eddie Canales, a dear friend of mine and hero to countless immigrants whose lives that he and his staff have saved. He is one of my heroes, too. May his kind multiply.
Eddie and his staff regularly set up water stations and re-fill them with water throughout the secluded borderlands that the immigrants traverse. They conduct search and rescue; call families about the fate of their kin, an all-too frequent and lamentable situation; and in partnership with various universities, they engage in forensic recovery and identification.
I just spoke with him. He could barely talk to me as he was in the middle of "saving"—his words—a 48 year old man who had slipped from them yesterday as he had "changed coordinates" yesterday, making it difficult to find him.
In the few minutes that we spoke, he said that they need funds to build capacity in the Presidio-Ojinaga Big Bend area where he is actually already working and located at this very moment—all under the brutally hot Texas sun.
Please make a contribution at this link. No donation is too small.
-Angela Valenzuela
@SouthTexasHRC #HumanRights #NoMoreDeaths
@NoMoreDeaths #WaterIsAHumanRight
Death in the desert
CANDELARIA — Here in the unforgiving parched lands of West Texas, the first half of the year has been marked by a surge of undocumented migrants equipped, guided and all too often abandoned to their fate by Mexico’s smuggling gangs.
Local police and Border Patrol agents have detained thousands of migrants found crammed into cars, trucks, horse trailers, train cars and recreational vehicles. They’ve caught others who trekked for days through the desert in smuggler-led columns.
High-speed police chases of smugglers’ vehicles have become common. Desperate migrants beg for rescue at isolated homes and on rural roads. Ranchers tending livestock on the far reaches of their land also have encountered migrants.
And dozens have been found dead from heat and dehydration.
Lucio Lopez, a migrant from the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, looks at photos of his family.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-NewsThe numbers passing through the Big Bend region remain a small fraction of the nearly 900,000 people detained along the entire 2,000-mile border since October. But they are much higher than have ever been seen in these parts, residents and officials say.
Nerves have become more than a bit jangled.
“Human trafficking has just exploded,” said Sheriff Ronny Dodson of Brewster County, which envelops Big Bend National Park. “President Biden wasn’t even in office when they started coming our way. He has got to get control of this.”
The increase in illegal crossings has fueled criticism from Republicans about Biden’s border policies. It’s a main talking point for Gov. Greg Abbott, who has set aside $250 million in state money to build more border walls and said he will direct state troopers to arrest immigrants for trespassing, a tactic that previously was blocked in Arizona by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Maribel Aguilar, 27, passes her days at the only shelter for Central American migrants returned to Mexico in the border city of Ojinaga. Aguilar tried crossing the border with her 13-year-old daughter and a friend. The other two made it across and now Aguliar waits in hopes of getting more money to make the journey again.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-NewsVisiting the border Friday for the first time as vice president, Kamala Harris touted the “extreme progress” the Biden administration has made in addressing the migration surge.
Noting much of the issue is about “families, children and suffering,” Harris said the administration’s approach “has to be thoughtful and effective.”
“This isn’t politics,” she said. “This is cartel. This is human trafficking.”
With an eye on the 2022 midterm congressional elections, former President Donald Trump is expected to visit the Texas border with Abbott on Wednesday, where he is expected to repeat claims that Biden policies have spurred the current migration increases.
Migrant crossings in the Big Bend are just a blip compared with the lower Rio Grande Valley. But here is where many suffer and die in the desert.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News‘Occupied territory’
For all the local angst it has stirred, this year’s migration through the Big Bend doesn’t amount to much on a national scale.
The little more than 25,000 migrants detained by U.S. border agents in the Big Bend sector amount to just under 3 percent of the nearly 900,000 arrested along the entire border from last October through May.
Nine in 10 migrants detained in the Big Bend Sector, which includes 570 miles of the Rio Grande, were traveling as single adults. By comparison, more than half the migrants detained in the lower Rio Grande Valley, which includes the McAllen and Brownsville areas, were unaccompanied minors or parents traveling with small children.
No one can be certain just how many people slip through the net.
Maribel Aguilar, 27, passes her days at the only shelter for Central American migrants returned to Mexico in the border city of Ojinaga. Aguilar tried crossing the border with her 13-year-old daughter and a friend. The other two made it across and now Aguliar waits in hopes of getting more money to make the journey again.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-NewsMore people are migrating with the intention of avoiding capture — driven by poverty and violence in many places or pulled by the promise of jobs. Many migrants say they’ve been encouraged by the rebounding U.S. economy and by the toning down of the last administration’s harsh rhetoric.
But U.S. detection and prevention efforts have also improved.
The vast desert here is seeded with motion detectors and cameras. An aerostat radar surveillance balloon hovers high overhead. Border Patrol agents have been backed up by National Guard soldiers, state troopers, local officers and sheriff’s deputies. Coordination between the agencies has been greatly enhanced in recent years.
“When I was in school, I was not happy about Big Brother,” Sheriff Dodson said. “Now I live for it.
“We call ourselves occupied territory because we have everyone here,” he joked of the law enforcement crush. “It’s not quite a police state, but it’s getting that way.”
Migrants have been crossing in large numbers near the border town of Presidio.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-NewsMisled by smugglers
With once favored routes more heavily monitored, hiking migrants and drug packing smugglers have plied more remote desert. In recent months, smugglers have clad many of the migrants — and others packing illicit drugs in backpacks — in cheap new boots and camouflage outfits.
The goal is to reach either U.S. 90 or Interstate 10. On both thoroughfares, relatives or smuggler vehicles spirit the migrants west toward California or east into the U.S. heartland. More than 50 miles of desert separate the border from the towns of Marfa or Alpine, both prime destinations.
The hike is less than half that farther northwest near Valentine, but the terrain can be even more challenging.
“The smugglers will tell them it’s four or five hours walking to get to the highway. It’s four or five days,” said Dianne Burbach, manager of the Chinati Hot Springs, near the famed local peak of that name, 7 miles from the border.
“It’s a very big problem,” she said. “How many more kids will be abandoned out there? If it’s this bad now, just imagine what this winter is going to be like.”
So far this year, federal agents have recovered more than two dozen bodies in the region. County officials have recovered still more. Officials say any tally is all but certainly an undercount.
In sparsely populated Hudspeth County east of El Paso, anchored by the the town of Sierra Blanca, officials have recovered the bodies of nine migrants since January, meeting the annual average toll even before the summer scorch begins in earnest.
The sun rises over the desert near Candelaria where migrants have been crossing in large numbers. Migrants can spend days walking through the mountains and desert terrain under the dangerous sun in hopes of a better life.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-NewsResponders recovered four bodies in the past week alone, said Joanna MacKenzie, the Hudspeth emergency management coordinator.
“This is all dehydration and exhaustion,” MacKenzie said. “We are an extremely vast county. We know there are bodies out there that may never be found.”
Severe drought has emptied many livestock tanks that migrant guides rely on for water. Emergency responders recently recovered the body of a man next to one of those tanks, MacKenzie said. He had an empty water bottle in his hand.
Despite their worries about the rising numbers — fueled by a drumbeat of news reports about the police pursuits, columns of migrants and large-scale detentions — many area residents express sympathy for the migrants.
Lucio Lopez washes his hands on a hot afternoon at the threadbare shelter in Ojinaga.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-NewsRanchers here depended upon undocumented Mexican workers for decades. And many residents have family ties or friends in Mexico. The desert’s scorching heat, prickly brush and ankle-twisting terrain is a shared human challenge.
Ranchers and other residents carry extra water and food when driving on rural roads, at times giving rides or calling in help when they encounter migrants in distress.
“Historically, we are part of the problem,” said Albert Miller, 71, a fourth-generation rancher who serves as the senior elected official in the farming hamlet of Valentine. “We have employed these people for cheap labor for years, for generations.
“They are coming because there is opportunity,” Miller said, echoing the suggestion of many on the border that some sort of solution involving legal work permits is the answer. “And I can’t say I blame them.”
The long-deserted house where Miller and his siblings spent their early years was burned down earlier this year by a migrant apparently signaling for help after being abandoned by smugglers.
The incident provoked outrage among some in the area. But Miller seems more saddened by the building’s loss than angered by the migrant’s action.
“I guess his group went off and left him, and he was terrified,” Miller said.
In the small town of Candelaria, which sits on the border with Mexico, the Rio Grande is dry.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-NewsDried-up Rio Grande
Travelers jumping into the West Texas badlands from Mexico through Candelaria, a flyspeck village 50 miles up two-lane blacktop northwest of Presidio, might be deceived by the prevailing verdant quiet.
They also might be forgiven for not noticing the international line.
The Rio Grande, upstream from where it’s replenished by Mexico’s Conchos River, is little more than a tree-shrouded creek bed, no wider than a mobile home. The river channel is completely dry now, as it is much of the year unless it rains. A decade of severe drought and upstream irrigation has taken its toll.
Many of Candelaria’s 100 or so residents were born in the neighboring Mexican community, San Antonio del Bravo, or live in both places at once. Officials say the Mexican villages farther along the border are prime staging areas for human smugglers.
On a recent day, three SUVs and two pickup trucks sat unattended in a grassy clearing on the Mexican side. Large canisters of liquid, perhaps for drinking, filled the pickup beds. A sign implores visitors not to throw trash; only a single plastic bottle and a cup litter the clearing.
Dried-up Rio Grande
Travelers jumping into the West Texas badlands from Mexico through Candelaria, a flyspeck village 50 miles up two-lane blacktop northwest of Presidio, might be deceived by the prevailing verdant quiet.
They also might be forgiven for not noticing the international line.
The Rio Grande, upstream from where it’s replenished by Mexico’s Conchos River, is little more than a tree-shrouded creek bed, no wider than a mobile home. The river channel is completely dry now, as it is much of the year unless it rains. A decade of severe drought and upstream irrigation has taken its toll.
Many of Candelaria’s 100 or so residents were born in the neighboring Mexican community, San Antonio del Bravo, or live in both places at once. Officials say the Mexican villages farther along the border are prime staging areas for human smugglers.
On a recent day, three SUVs and two pickup trucks sat unattended in a grassy clearing on the Mexican side. Large canisters of liquid, perhaps for drinking, filled the pickup beds. A sign implores visitors not to throw trash; only a single plastic bottle and a cup litter the clearing.
A simple gate sits at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The river here is completely dry, making crossings into the desert land easier.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-NewsMarooned in Mexico
Most of the detained migrants are quickly returned to Mexico under regulations put in place by the last administration that suspended normal due process.
Those returned to Ojinaga, a raw city of about 30,000 that is the largest Mexican community in the region, have met a widely indifferent, sometimes openly hostile, reception. Unlike those in other Mexican border cities, outgoing Mayor Martin Sanchez has refused to allow non-Mexican returnees to stay at the city’s charity shelter.
“We don’t have the budget to handle this kind of situation,” Sanchez said recently, explaining his policy. “It’s not just food. They arrive here barefoot, without clothing. We have to give them everything.”
While praising the few Cuban nationals who have been marooned in Ojinaga in recent months, Sanchez dismissed the far more numerous Central Americans in the city as “undisciplined, rude and ignorant.”
“It’s worse where they are from than is this whole journey,” Sanchez said of the migrants. “Because it’s not easy to get here. They don’t want to go home. They want to try to cross again.”
Maribel Aguilar, 27, passes her days at the only shelter for Central American migrants returned to Mexico in the border city of Ojinaga. Aguilar tried crossing the border with her 13-year-old daughter
and a friend. The other two made it across and now Aguliar waits in hopes of
getting more money to make the journey again.
Jessica Phelps, Staff photographer / San Antonio Express-News
With few other options, humanitarian officials with Mexico’s immigration agency drop the most destitute of the returnees, most of them Central Americans, at a threadbare shelter set up several years ago by an evangelical preacher and his wife on the hardpan outskirts of Ojinaga.
During the high migration season last winter, Pastor Jose Medrano and his wife, Reyna Madrid, tended to dozens of migrants at a time, with little financial help.
Men bedded down on donated cots or sleeping mats in the concrete and tin-roofed chapel attached to the family’s home. The far fewer women and children slept in two small rooms flanking a simple kitchen.
“The Bible speaks of the pilgrim,” Madrid, 60, said. “We have to help these people. They have no support, no guardian angels. We are their protectors, sent by God.”
Most the men in the shelter said they planned to return home after several failed attempts to slip into the U.S. A few were waiting for family and friends to send more money to pay for another try.
Lucio Lopez, a migrant from the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, looks at photos of his family inside the stuffy room at the Ojinaga shelter.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Many of the men said smugglers had told them that crossing in the Big Bend area was both faster and more assured than through Arizona or California. Some crossed in groups of about a dozen people, others with columns of up to 60. All were caught either quickly or after days of hiking toward U.S. 90 or Interstate 10, as much as 55 miles distant.
“We heard the desert is a shorter route,” said Anselmo Arzate, 44, a Guatemalan father of two daughters. “But everything here is difficult. ”
Arzate said he was captured on a first attempt after walking four days and on a second after a weeklong trek in which his group stumbled upon the bodies of four other migrants.
“It’s just not worth the effort,” Arzate said. “At least we tried.”
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
Last week, only a few Central Americans were staying at the shelter.
Lucio Lopez, 30, a father of two from Guatemala’s Maya highlands, had tried four times to slip into El Paso. U.S. officials sent him to Ojinaga after the final attempt, hoping the desert would discourage him more than the border fence of the city.
Honduran Maribel Aguilar, 27, said she had tried several months ago to ask for asylum at El Paso with her 13-year-old daughter and a friend.
U.S. officials admitted the other two, and they are now living in Florida. Aguilar was returned to Ojinaga, where she has been stuck at the shelter plotting her next move, awaiting funds that may never come. Whatever happens, she said, returning to Honduras isn’t an option.
“I have faith in God that I am going to get in,” she said in a whisper.
The moon rises over the desert near Candelaria where migrants have been crossing in large numbers.
Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News
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