Authors of journal’s special issue share findings on migrant deaths along the border

Donald Kerwin set the tone for an Oct. 16 webinar on migrant deaths with a clarifying statement: “Accounting for deaths, it means more than accurately counting them or enumerating them. … What it means is identifying decedents, investigating deaths, determining their causes and repatriating remains to loved ones.”

Kerwin, editor of the Journal on Migration and Human Security and former executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, made the comments in his opening remarks for the webinar on “The Untold Story: Migrant Deaths along the U.S.-Mexico Border and Beyond.”

He provided a glimpse into the webinar’s focus on the journal’s special edition issue, titled “Forced Migration, Deterrence, and Solutions to the Non-Natural Disaster of Migrant Deaths along the US-Mexico Border and Beyond.”

He explained that this collection of papers explores myriad topics — from the idea of establishing a more centralized, systematic approach to document and enumerate deaths to the causes of migrant deaths and how asylum restrictions like Title 42 have only contributed to their increase — are meant to paint a somber yet revealing picture of “the situation we are at.”

Title 42 is a provision of a 1944 U.S. public health law allowing curbs on migration in the name of protecting public health. Starting in March 2020, it was enforced during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Trump administration and continued into the Biden administration until January 2023.

“They are human beings in every single case, and they deserve a dignified closure,” Kerwin said before introducing the lineup of speakers for the day: Courtney Siegert, forensic anthropologist at Texas State University and postdoctoral scholar with Operation Identification, which seeks to identify and repatriate unidentified human remains; Heather Edgar, professor and forensic anthropologist for the Office of the Medical Investigator of New Mexico; and Daniel Martinez, associate professor of sociology and co-director of the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona.

An author of the paper “The Texas Landscape: Accounting for Migrant Mortality and the Challenges of a Justice of the Peace Medicolegal System,” Siegert delved into the intricate post-pandemic, post-Title 42 world and how it has engendered a shift in migration and migrant deaths.

“We are seeing a change in routes along the Texas-Mexico border,” Siegert stated, explaining that, while deaths predominated around the Rio Grande Valley in the past, presently cities in the Southwest at the border, like Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande, have been overwhelmed with crossings and deaths.

Demographics have also shifted, Siegert said. With people from diverse countries of origin flocking to the border, “we are increasingly becoming aware that this is a global issue, with many individuals, that our project has recently identified, originating outside of the Americas,” she said.

Siegert cited the deteriorating diplomatic relationships, particularly with countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, and the lack of access to available resources as key challenges facing the medicolegal community.

At the beginning of her presentation, Edgar described New Mexico as “a black hole as far as information in the past,” not because the state has not been disclosing information about migrant deaths, but because it was simply not a destination for migrants in the past.

“Our rate of migrant deaths over decades was extremely low and could be dealt with within our standing medical-legal system,” she said, adding that “it’s only been since 2021 that we’ve seen some changes.”

Unlike Texas, Edgar explained, which has a decentralized system, New Mexico has a centralized medical examiner system with a sole medical examiner, the Office of the Medical Investigator situated at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, serving the entire state.

When the Border Patrol finds a deceased individual in the desert, Edgar said the process to follow involves calling local law enforcement, which, in turn, “calls our central office who assigns a field investigator to the case.”

“As long as we have some law enforcement agency and a field investigator, we can investigate a death at the scene, recover the body — whatever state that it’s in — and body transport brings that individual to the office up in Albuquerque,” she said.

Regarding the process of identification, Edgar said fingerprints are a fundamental tool. However, when the deceased individual is not in the Border Patrol’s system, they have to resort to other techniques, including visual identification, dental X-rays or other radiographic comparison and DNA, the latter of which can be challenging and costly.

“We don’t have a lab anywhere in the state of New Mexico currently that has the ability to process DNA from bone, and so that means relying on commercial labs, and that can be quite expensive,” she added.

The third speaker of the day, Martinez, shared information on research findings about the state of Arizona, specifically the Tucson sector. He disclosed that, over the last decade, “migration has shifted from predominantly young Mexican males migrating for economic purposes to remit money back home” to “men, women, children and family units from diverse countries arriving at the US-Mexico border to seek asylum.”

Answering the question “how has the state responded to these demographic changes at the border, particularly this influx of asylum-seekers?” Martinez said that, even though, according to U.S. and international law, migrants have a right to petition for asylum at the border, “rather than denying people access to the asylum system, the state has made it increasingly more difficult to start or even complete the asylum process.” A clear example of this is the Title 42 expulsions, he said.

“Title 42 expulsions … used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext for preventing asylum-seekers from even being able to initiate the asylum process,” he said.

Martinez went on to say that an association has been established between migrant deaths and the state’s effort to try to impede access to the asylum system by drawing on the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner’s records of over 4,000 recovered remains between 1990 and 2023 in southern Arizona.

“The remains of 4,000 individuals have been recovered from southern Arizona, but what does that mean?” he said, “That means that each one of these individuals is somebody’s mother, somebody’s father, somebody’s sister, brother, niece. These are people who are connected to communities back home, connected to communities here in the United States.”

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