F A C T S H E E T

Militarization and "Prevention through Deterrence"

Deaths at the Border - A Human Rights Crisis

The result was a crisis of death and disappearance that continues today.

Migration is as old as humanity, but high rates of migrant death are not. Today, we face a human rights crisison the U.S.-Mexico border.

Beginning in the mid-1990's, the U.S. government implemented new enforcement strategies which targetedheavy surveillance and personnel at traditional and safe entry points along the Southern border. Thesemilitarization policies rested on the theory of "prevention through deterrence", but, despite initial predictions, didnot deter would-be migrants from crossing. Instead, they funneled migration paths into remote and treacherousareas of the desert, making any attempt to cross more deadly than ever before.

Operation Hold theLine is implementedin El Paso, Texas

1993

1994 OperationGatekeeper begins inSan Diego, California

As the 21st century approached, the U.S. government expandedprevention through deterrence strategies to address the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

Per design, increased border militarization pushed migrants away from safer urban crossing areas and furtherinto the borderland terrain. As a consequence, we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of peopledying in their attempts to cross the border. Prior to 2000, the average number of migrant deaths per year inArizona was 12. From 2001 to 2014, that average rose more than tenfold to 165 deaths per year.

Since 1998, more than 6,330 men, women, and children have lost their lives while crossingthe U.S.-Mexico border. In Arizona alone, at least 2,202 people died between the years 2001 and 2013.

Copyright © 2015. Colibri ́ Center for Human Rights. All rights reserved.

The Missing and Unidentified

In the heart of the Sonoran Desert, theTucson sector of Arizona became the mostheavily traversed and deadliest crossingcorridor along the border. In more recentyears, there has also been a significantincrease in the number of deaths occurringin the Rio Grande sector of South Texas.

The figure to the right represents thenumber of migrant remains examined bythe Pima County Office of the MedicalExaminer in Tucson, Arizona. As thisgraph shows, migrant deaths increaseddrastically around 2001-2002 following thenew enforcement measures.

Today, we continue to see heavyenforcement and militarization on theborder. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol(CBP) is now the largest federal lawenforcement agency in the nation andaccounts for 21 percent of the entireDepartment of Homeland Security budget.

In fiscal year 2014, U.S. Border Patrol reported findingthe remains of 307 individuals believed to be migrants,down from 445 in fiscal year 2013. Many officials havecited this slight drop in annual deaths, along with areported decrease in overall migration, as successesof militarization tactics. Unfortunately, thesearguments fail to consider two essential realities onthe border. First, although less people seem to bemigrating—a trend that experts have attributed toeconomic fluctuations and the incredible dangersmigrants face traveling through Central America andMexico—the rate at which people are dying along theborder remains alarmingly high. This means that theirpassage is becoming even deadlier. Second, allestimates on the number of dead are incomplete andonly account for those remains that have beenrecovered from the U.S. side of the border. There arecertainly many more thousands of people whoseremains have simply never been found in this vastand remote terrain.

In 2012, it was estimated that the U.S. spent a total of $18 billion on all immigration enforcement initiatives,exceeding the combined total spending of the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service and ATF by nearly 24

percent.

This devastating loss of life is compounded by the number of people missing and the families who search forthem, often not knowing where to turn for help.

Colibrí has records for more than 2,500migrants reported missing by their families.

Meanwhile, hundreds of remains that have beenrecovered from the desert have yet to beidentified, labeled “John” or “Jane Doe” in countymorgues and city cemeteries across the region. Atthe Pima County Office of the Medical Examinerthere are nearly 900 unidentified remains believedto be migrants. An unknown number of dead arestill lost in the borderlands.

Families suffer each day a loved one is missing.Their situation is made worse by the difficultrealities of navigating intricate legal systems,overcoming language barriers, and risking the painof deportation and abuse. To these families,information is medicine.

Copyright © 2015. Colibri ́ Center for Human Rights. All rights reserved.

Copyright © Marc Silver. All rights reserved.

Colibrí - Working to Change Our BorderThe crisis we face on the border is a complex one. Vital data for finding and identifying people is scatteredthroughout the U.S. and Latin America. There is no uniform procedure for handling migrant cases, and policiesvary across the region, often leading to a tragic mishandling of migrant remains. Furthermore, in the growingnational debate on immigration, the voices and stories of the families most hurt by this tragedy are largelysilenced.

Over the past decade, we have partnered with families, forensic scientists and humanitarians to find themissing, identify the dead, and advocate for those who have lost someone on the border. We see an importantgap in the immigration debate in our country and believe Colibri ́ is uniquely positioned to address it. Throughour programs—Family Advocacy, Arts + Storytelling, and Policy Reform—we work to bring an end to thishuman rights crisis. The same information that is healing to families has the power to change our border.

Source LinksBinational Migration Institute (2013). "A Continued Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: Undocumented BorderCrosser Deaths Recorded by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990-2012"http://bmi.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/border_deaths_final_web.pdf

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (2014). Southwest Border Deaths By Fiscal Year Oct. 1st through Sept. 30th.http://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Deaths%20FY1998%20-%20FY2014_0.pdf

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2013). FY 2013 Budget In Brief. U.S. Department of HomelandSecurity. http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/mgmt/dhs-budget-in-brief-fy2013.pdf

Contactwww.colibricenter.org

Email: info@colibricenter.org Phone: +00 1 520-724-8644Mailing Address:Colibri ́ Center for Human Rights 3849 E. Broadway Blvd, #206 Tucson, AZ 85716

Copyright © 2015. Colibri ́ Center for Human Rights. All rights reserved.