Contemporary Migration and the Detention Through Prevention Policy

Migration is a human right. Migration is also one of the most impactful and rapidly growing global phenomena of the 21st century. According to the U.N. International Migration 2020 Report, “Growth in the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 percent of the world’s population, [with] two thirds of all international migrants [living] in just 20 countries. The United States of America remains the largest destination, hosting 51 million international migrants in 2020, equal to 18 percent of the world’s total.” The dream of a better future, poverty, violence, and climate change are among the main causes that compel people to leave their countries of origin. With regard to climate change and migration, the World Bank warns that “reduced agricultural production, water scarcity, rising sea levels and other effects of climate change could cause up to 216 million people to leave their homes and migrate within their own countries by 2050.”

At the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of detained migrants is on the rise. According to an article by NPR published on October 23,2021, “The Border Patrol recorded nearly 1.7 million migrant apprehensions at the Southern border over the past year — the highest number ever, eclipsing the record set more than two decades ago.” While detention numbers can be used to measure migrant influx, they are not infallible. It is important to remember that 25 years ago, prior to increased surveillance and militarization of the border, migrants were able to cross much more easily, without being detained, and so these numbers are historically skewed. Additionally, the migrant population has changed, often dramatically, in recent years: whereas in the past the “typical” migrant was a Mexican or Central American male, now many more migrants from other countries of origin (e.g., Haiti, Latin American countries such Colombia and Perú, and India) are crossing and dying along borders. Finally, many more women and children are migrating from Mexico and Central America, often in big groups with the goal of seeking asylum in the United States.

As reported in the news, not only adults and families, but also unaccompanied Central American and Mexican children fleeing poverty and threats of violence in their home countries attempt to cross the border in search of the mythological “American dream.” Sarah Pierce from the Migration Policy Institute summarizes, “More than 102,000 unaccompanied children (UACs) from Central America and Mexico were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the U.S.-Mexico border between October 1, 2013 and August 31, 2015. The rapid influx of child arrivals in the spring and summer of 2014, which caught the attention of a concerned public and policymakers, briefly overwhelmed the systems in place for processing and caring for these children.” The arrival and detainment of unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border has not stopped since then, and there were spikes in 2014 under President Obama; in 2019 under President Trump; and yet another recent spike, in 2021, under President Biden. In August 2021, 18,534 Central American and Mexican minors were detained at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These are all “cold” numbers and predictions, but behind the statistics, there is the lived reality of human suffering and struggle. There is also a longstanding history of countries fervently (and often violently) opposing migration—and the United States is one example. In 1994, the U.S. Border Patrol put forward the immigration enforcement strategy and set of policies known as Prevention Through Deterrence. As a note sponsored by the humanitarian group No Más Muertes/No More Deaths explains, “Prevention Through Deterrence… sought to control the Southwest border by heightening the risks associated with unauthorized entry. To do so, the agency concentrated enforcement and infrastructure to reroute migration away from urban ports of entry and into wilderness areas. By pushing traffic into remote and hostile terrain, the agency speculated that border crossers would now find themselves ‘in mortal danger’ when attempting to enter the United States without authorization. The increased danger was intended to then deter other people from considering the journey, with the overall goal of preventing migration.” The group’s assessment of the “success” of such deterrence-based preventive policies is somber: “Over the past 20 years, Prevention Through Deterrence has caused 7,000 known deaths and countless more disappearances [it is estimated that for every body found, there five more the borderlands will never give back]. It has failed to halt the mass movement of people without papers into the U.S. interior. However, it has succeeded in proliferating border deaths, disappearances, and informal economies of violence, converting the region into an increasingly deadly arena.”

Migrant Death: The Southern Arizona Case

The southwest border is a 1,954-mile-long, increasingly weaponized stretch that separates the United States from Mexico. It crosses four border states and diverse and distinct topographies and landscapes. This stretch of land from Texas to New Mexico, Arizona to California, includes the wide and dangerous Rio Grande; expansive cattle ranges surrounded with barbed-wire; vast deserts that are not always flat, but often endless successions of rolling hills; and imposing mountains darkening the horizon.

Migrants encounter dunes and red mesetas, saguaros and organ pipe cacti, rugged mountain ranges, and the surreal scene of a border wall diving into the sea in San Diego, California. They also encounter a “wall” that is either non-existent (remote barren land doesn’t need a wall, for example, since it is in itself a lethal “horizontal” barrier) or a collection of different “models.” As the USAToday Interactive Border Wall map compellingly shows, the wall is made of long stretches of so-called “pedestrian fencing” (built to impede pedestrians from crossing) with gaps in between. This is particularly true in Texas: “The longest contiguous unfenced stretch of the border—more than 600 miles total—is in the middle of Texas. There is no major city here on either side of the border.” Besides pedestrian fencing (or long and numerous stretches of no fencing), the border is also peppered with so-called “vehicle barriers” meant to stop cars from crossing but unable to stop pedestrians from doing so. Lastly, of the three border states, Texas is the one that remains largely unfenced, because “of treaty provisions, private-property rights, litigation and floodplains. Fencing was easier to build in New Mexico, Arizona and California, where the federal government controls a 60-foot-wide strip of land adjacent to the border.”

At the U.S.-Mexico border, where there are no fences, nature often presents life-threatening challenges to migrants seeking asylum. The waters of the Río Grande are famously treacherous and numerous migrants die in them every year. And the deserts in Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Texas act as horizontal walls, more effective and lethal than their vertical counterparts. When the U.S. Border Patrol designed and implemented the Prevention Through Deterrence strategy, it leveraged the inherent danger of these natural landscapes and militarized urban ports of entry. This forced migrants to cross through more remote and unpopulated areas, which in turn has exponentially increased the risk of dying. Shortly after the implementation of this strategy, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) experienced the dire consequences of such lethal measures. Before 1994, the year the Prevention Through Deterrence set of policies was implemented, the number of migrants whose remains migrants arrived at the Tucson morgue would oscillate between 10 and 15 at most; however, by 2000, the number of bodies retrieved from the Arizona desert had skyrocketed.

According to the PCOME, out of 3,275 recovered remains, as of 2020, 1,192 remain unidentified.

When Águilas del Desierto find migrant remains on dusty desert soil, under the precarious shade of a palo verde or semi-buried in the loose sands of an arroyo, they immediately inform the sheriff, for the site is considered a crime scene until further determination. The sheriff then retrieves the body and the personal belongings on or around the remains; once the remains are at the morgue, efforts at identification begin. Forensic examiners and forensic anthropologists rely on different methods that include visual identification if the face is recognizable, and identification via X-rays, dental records, fingerprints, and DNA testing. Once a migrant is identified, the consular agency representing the country of origin of the deceased conveys the tragic news to the family and initiates the process of repatriation of the body.

Activism in the Borderlands: From the Sanctuary Movement to Águilas del Desierto

Marisela Ortiz, co-founder of Águilas del Desierto with her husband, Ely Ortiz, receives up to 30 calls each day from families in Mexico and Central America. She hears from mothers who share that their children are missing, that coyotes (people smugglers) left them behind. She consoles brothers and sisters who haven’t heard from their siblings in months and who don’t know what to do. Marisela is available day and night. She never turns off her phone and never ignores a plea for help. Once she has enough information to initiate a search and rescue operation, Águilas volunteers drive their trocas (pickup trucks) from San Diego, California, to southern Arizona. At least once a month they make the trip on Friday evening, sleep two or three hours in their cars or tents, and devote Saturday and Sunday to searching for missing migrants. They walk for eight to 10 hours on the harsh desert terrain, determined to help their migrant brothers and sisters, and to bring peace to families and loved ones. They have been participating in search and rescue operations since 2012, when Ely Ortiz found the lifeless bodies of his brother and cousin in the southern Arizona desert and made it his mission to create and lead Águilas.

Águilas, the PCOME, and the Colibri Center for Human Rights are part of a tight network of migrant support that is particularly rich in the southern Arizona desert and the Tucson area. A number of nonprofit organizations, such as No Más Muertes/No More Deaths, the Tucson, Green Valley, Ajo Samaritans, and Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas put out water, food, and clothing in the desert for migrants, report on violations of migrant rights and human rights, and even keep an interactive map on migrant death that is a search tool for families and friends looking for their loved ones. This tool, called the Map of Migrant Mortality, was created by Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas and uses the data provided and routinely updated by the PCOME to signal with a red dot the exact geospatial location where migrant remains were found.

Artists, or “artivists,” also heavily contribute to what a New York University initiative has aptly called the ecologies of migrant care. When Tucson-based Colombian artist Alvaro Enciso saw the Map of Migrant Mortality for the first time in 2013, he began going into the Sonoran desert every Tuesday, rain or shine, to place crosses at the exact points where migrants had died. Other examples of awareness-raising artistic interventions in support of migrants are the Migrant Quilt Project, created and directed by Jody Ibsen: every year (since 2000), female embroiderers make a memorializing quilt with all the names of the migrants whose bodies were found that particular year. Additional artistic interventions include Valarie Lee James’s Bordando Esperanza initiative that helps distribute and sell napkins, or bordados, embroidered by female asylum seekers at the border in Nogales; Tom Kiefer’s series of photographs of personal belongings of apprehended migrants that he was able to retrieve from the trash when he worked as a janitor at a Border Patrol detention center; Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), a participatory art project sponsored by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) and led by UCLA antropologist Jason de León—an installation of “over 3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona” and that are then geolocated on wall maps at a large number of national and international institutions; and the installation Mujer Migrante Memorial, a virtual and urban memorial in honor of female migrants whose bodies were recovered from the southern Arizona desert. MMM was created by Maite Zubiaurre (the co-director, co-producer, and co-writer of the documentary Águilas) in collaboration with graduate students from the Mellon-sponsored Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA.

Lastly, it is important to note that the exceptionally rich and intricate ecologies of migrant care described above, and of which Águilas del Desierto is such an important component, firmly stand on an illustrious precedent: Tucson, Arizona, is not only the base of operation of contemporary activism in solidarity and support of migrants, but is also the cradle of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. A church in Tucson, Southside Presbyterian, famously became the temporary refuge to more than 13,000 migrants who were escaping the horrors of war and torture in Central America.