More Than 6,000 Bodies Found Since 2000 Reveal the Cost of Lives on the US-Mexico Border Eric London - WSWS.org | |
go to original May 6, 2017 |
High human cost for illegal migrants trying to get into US (Al Jazeera English)
Between 2000 and 2016, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has discovered the remains of 6,023 undocumented people who died crossing from Mexico into the United States.
This shocking figure, cited in a May 4 article in the New York Times, underreports the total death toll. According to one Texas sheriff, “I would say for every one [body] we find, we’re probably missing five.” That is, the number of undiscovered bodies could be in the tens of thousands.
Bodies turn up along the US-Mexico border “with stunning regularity,” the Times report notes. In one border area, Brooks County, Texas, 550 bodies have been discovered since January 2009, the month of Barack Obama’s inauguration. At a single ranch in Texas, 31 bodies have been discovered since 2014. CBP unceremoniously throws some of the bodies together in “cluster graves,” often without removing them from biohazard bags.
Many of the bodies are unrecognizable, charred from the desert sun or picked away by vultures. Along well-traveled migrant paths, “the dead line the way.” Cadavers belonging to children are found alongside their stuffed animals. One woman who froze to death was found wearing a plastic trash bag for warmth.
In 2015, Francisco Gonzalez, a former machinist from Mexico, called emergency services from the middle of the desert, begging border patrol to arrest him to save his life. He told the dispatcher he was returning to the US to meet his newborn daughter for the first time, after having been deported for driving under the influence by the Obama administration. When officials could not locate him, Gonzalez gave the dispatcher his wife’s phone number and said, “Call her and tell her I didn’t make it. Call her and tell her I love her and for her to take care of our baby.” He died in the desert shortly thereafter.
Daniel Martinez, an assistant professor of sociology at George Washington University, told the Times, “If this were any other context, if these were deaths as a result of a mass flood or an earthquake or a major plane crash, people would be talking about this being a mass disaster.”
Indeed, the Times notes that the total number of bodies is greater than the total number killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined. And despite the drop in immigration since the election of Donald Trump, the number of bodies found in the first months of 2017 already equals the number found in all of 2010.
Read the rest at WSWS.org
Related: There Is a Wall Along the Mexico-U.S.A. Border and I Want To Show What It Really Looks Like (Global Voices)
Related: When the US Government Comes Calling on the Mexico Border, 'Don't Sign Anything' (NBC News)
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