A new report maps more than 20 years of deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The report, put together by the aid group No More Deaths, uses data gathered from public records requests from Customs and Border Protection, local law enforcement and coroners offices, and Mexican agencies along the border in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico documenting migrant deaths between 2002 and April of this year — with some, largely from Pima County, dating back as far as 2000.
It builds on another map of Arizona-based deaths maintained by Humane Borders. Researcher Bryce Peterson with No More Deaths says it includes people who were confirmed or suspected to be asylum seekers.
“Generally we can see these trends of like, more women, young people from west Africa, South America, southeast Asia — all these other places that you just kind of almost never see represented in the death data," Peterson said.
Peterson says the report also found concrete evidence of people having been asylum seekers — like one case of a Guinean woman who died in an open-air detention site in California waiting to be processed by the Border Patrol in 2023.
He says those deaths began showing up around 2019 and have been present in larger numbers from 2021 on — coinciding with increasingly restrictive asylum policy at the border.
