Body Count on the Border

Rocky Yosek After nine years of stunning mortality rates along the Arizona-Mexico border, the medical examiners are fed up. Molly Kincaid on one morgue boss’s battle for Washington’s attention.

So far this year, 203 migrants have died along the Sonora-Arizona border. The number is nothing out of the ordinary. The death rates in this part of the country began rising notably back in 2001, and have not declined over the last nine years.

The body count along the border shows up from time to time in Washington’s immigration debates. But with the president’s agenda crowded with health care, Afghanistan and the aftershocks of last fall’s financial crisis, these fatalities are in danger of getting lost in the shuffle.

“Do we have to have a thousand dead?” asks Anderson. “Do we have to have a bunch of kids? Do have to have—God forbid, I hate to even say this—but do we have to have some indication that we have a bunch of dead terrorists? Would that get Washington’s attention?”

And that has Dr. Bruce Anderson, forensic anthropologist at Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, increasingly troubled. “This is a national disgrace,” says Anderson. The numbers bear him out. The ACLU recently put forth a study that stated the border has claimed over 5,000 lives in the last decade—concluding that this is a full-fledged humanitarian crisis.

Without strong political leadership in the nation’s capital to keep the issue alive, the job of sounding the alarms is increasingly falling to people on the frontlines—people like Anderson, a tall, deadpan sort who has not traditionally been particularly active in politics. His small corner office in the morgue is adorned with statistical charts and maps chronicling the migrant death crisis. Out of approximately 1,470 bodies that have passed through this office since 2001, about 400 remain unidentified and their remains languish here. While he acknowledges that a 70 percent identification rate is admirable given the incomplete information they are working with, these unidentified remains weigh heavily on Anderson’s mind. “I’m seeing young, healthy people dead from crossing our border—because they believed that’s the only way they could get here—to work jobs that I believe most Americans won’t work,” Anderson says. “I think it seems like a pretty stiff sentence to take somebody’s life for wanting to do that.”

Anderson’s views differ from many human-rights advocates, in that his sole priority is to see these deaths stop, even if that means closing down the border completely. “I just wish it was harder for them to cross, or that it was easier,” he says. “I could go either way on this. Just don’t let them into the country and make them risk their lives crossing our desert for a better life. Either don’t let them cross or give them a legal option.”

Anderson recalls the impenetrable borders of South Korea and the former Soviet Union, where he once did forensic work. If we really wanted to stop migration, he posits, we could post a guard every hundred yards or so along the desert. He stipulates that, unlike those countries, where they would “shoot first and ask questions later,” he does not advocate a militarized border.

With billions of dollars allocated to guarding the border, one might think the U.S. is already trying to keep migrants from entering. But much of the desert that envelops the border is not guarded or walled, and many accuse the government of using the inhumane tactic of allowing people to cross here—knowing they will likely die—in an attempt to deter others from crossing.

“It’s called ‘prevention through deterrence,’” says Kat Rodriguez, director of the human-rights group Derechos Humanos. Recently, she and a band of volunteers gathered to hammer together homemade crosses to honor those who’ve died on the border this year. Each one in the huge stack of clean white crosses told its own story and was inscribed with a victim’s name.