Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Migrant deaths, 2024 budget, S.B. 4
by
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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A report and database from No More Deaths document a rapid increase in the number of migrant remains recovered in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which covers far west Texas and New Mexico. A preponderance of deaths occur in or near the El Paso metropolitan area, within range of humanitarian assistance. CBP meanwhile released a count of migrant deaths through 2022, a year that saw the agency count a record 895 human remains recovered on the U.S. side of the border. Heat and drowning were the most frequent causes of death.
Nearly six months into the fiscal year, Congress on March 21 published text of its 2024 Homeland Security appropriation. As it is one of six bills that must pass by March 22 to avert a partial government shutdown, the current draft is likely to become law with few if any changes. Congressional negotiators approved double-digit-percentage increases in budgets for border security agencies, including new CBP and Border Patrol hires, as well as for migrant detention. The bill has no money for border wall construction, and cuts grants to shelters receiving people released from Border Patrol custody.
Texas’s state government planned to start implementing S.B. 4, a law effectively enabling it to carry out its own harsh immigration policy, on March 5. While appeals from the Biden administration and rights defense litigators have so far prevented that, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court have gone back and forth about whether Texas may implement the controversial law while appeals proceed. As of the morning of March 22, S.B. 4 is on hold. Mexico’s government has made clear it will not accept deportations even of its own citizens if carried out by Texas.
A new report and database from No More Deaths, an organization that has mainly worked in Arizona, provided the first documentation of migrant deaths in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico. Its mapping finds that a majority of deaths are happening not in remote areas of the Chihuahuan Desert, but in or near the metropolitan area of El Paso and neighboring Sunland Park, New Mexico. This means many migrants are dying painful and preventable deaths within a short distance of help.
The report confirms local organizations’ longstanding contention that Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) estimates of migrant deaths on U.S. soil, which total over 9,500 between 1998 and 2022, under-report the true number.
The No More Deaths dataset records more migrant deaths than CBP in each of the last 12 years except for 2023, when CBP counted 149 and No More Deaths 140. Both sources show a dramatic increase in deaths in El Paso, which between 1998 and 2022 has been eighth in recovered remains among Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.
CBP on March 18 released its own reporting on migrant deaths—for fiscal year 2022, which ended nearly 18 months ago. The agency’s Border Rescues and Mortality Data document reported the recovery of 895 migrants’ remains in 2022, a record by far.
The increase accelerated since 2021, coinciding with larger overall numbers of migrants after the pandemic—but also coinciding with the Title 42 policy in place between March 2020 and May 2023. Title 42 made it nearly impossible for people from several countries to seek asylum, expelling them into Mexico instead. This created an incentive to seek to avoid detection by migrating through dangerous wilderness areas, instead of turning themselves in to Border Patrol to ask for protection.
Where cause of death could be identified, 43 percent of 2022 deaths were heat-related and 20 percent were water-related (mainly drowning). The deadliest of Border Patrol’s nine sectors that year was Del Rio, Texas (29 percent), where drownings in the Rio Grande are frequent, followed by the Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and Arizona’s Tucson. Of the 23 nationalities that could be identified, 64 percent were citizens of Mexico. Of remains whose gender could be identified, 79 percent were men.
Data tables: Nationality – Age – Gender – Type of Death
On the morning of March 21 the congressional appropriations committees made public the text of the 2024 Homeland Security appropriations bill, along with an explanatory statement. This is one of six budget bills that Congress needs to pass by the end of March 22 to avert a partial government shutdown, and it is likely to pass in coming days without changes.
The legislation provides the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with $61.8 billion for fiscal year 2024, which is nearly half over. DHS has been operating at 2023 funding levels since October 1. The bill’s overall amount is an increase of about 6 percent from 2023, well over the inflation rate. Provisions include:
Though the bill’s spending increases reflect many Republican border priorities, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) will need Democratic votes to get it through his chamber, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority. A group of 41 ultra-conservative House Republicans wrote a letter urging their colleagues to reject any appropriations bill that lacks “core elements” of H.R. 2, a bill approved on party lines in May 2023 that would, among other things, all but end the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing on the morning of March 20 to consider whether to maintain a stay on the state’s controversial migration restriction law, S.B. 4, which is currently on hold as appeals of legal challenges continue.
S.B. 4 would allow Texas state law enforcement to arrest people suspected of migrating from Mexico without authorization, and to imprison them if they do not allow state authorities to deport them to Mexico. Rights advocates worry that this would allow Texas to carry out its own immigration enforcement—a federal responsibility—while upholding spurious claims that asylum seekers constitute an “invasion” and creating incentives for racial profiling throughout the state.
A March 19 dissent from Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the law “will disrupt sensitive foreign relations, frustrate the protection of individuals fleeing persecution, hamper active federal enforcement efforts, undermine federal agencies’ ability to detect and monitor imminent security threats, and deter noncitizens from reporting abuse or trafficking.”
The March 20 hearing culminated several days of judicial about-faces that generated uncertainty and confusion along the border and throughout Texas. The story since December (covered in prior WOLA Border Updates) has been as follows:
“We fundamentally disagree with the Supreme Court’s order allowing Texas’ harmful and unconstitutional law to go into effect,” read a White House statement issued March 19, after the Supreme Court’s decision allowing S.B. 4 to go ahead.
Mexico’s government, too, responded with a strongly worded statement refusing to receive migrants deported by Texas state authorities. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador condemned S.B. 4 as “dehumanizing” during his morning press conference on March 20. Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said that the law could cause “phenomenal chaos.”
It is unclear how the appeals panel that met on March 21 will decide on whether to allow Texas to implement S.B. 4 while appeals proceed, or when that decision might come. Judges’ comments during the hearing indicated clear disagreements. The three judges in yesterday’s proceedings were a Biden nominee, a Trump nominee, and a George W. Bush nominee. The Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, is considered the most conservative of the federal judiciary’s 13 appeals courts.
Texas state lawyers told judges that the state does not plan to carry out its own deportations—Mexico refuses to accept non-federal deportees—but instead to turn captured migrants over to CBP personnel at ports of entry. But the Biden administration’s DHS has declared that it would not cooperate with enforcement of S.B. 4, a law that it is challenging in court.
The appeals court will hold another hearing on April 3 about S.B. 4’s overall legality, not just the question of whether it can be implemented during appeals.
Gov. Abbott has been claiming that S.B. 4 and other crackdowns under what Texas calls “Operation Lone Star” have caused migration to the state to decline this year, pushing border-crossers to Arizona and California. Tucson and San Diego have recently moved to number one and two in migrant encounters out of Border Patrol’s nine border sectors. There may be something to this: any policy change tends to place would-be migrants and smugglers into “wait and see mode,” bringing a short-term drop in numbers.
Additional causes may also be at work, though: weekly apprehension updates from Border Patrol sector chiefs’ Twitter accounts in Tucson and San Diego are also showing some recent stagnation and decline in migration. Drops in migration are unusual in March, when improved springtime weather conditions usually bring some of the year’s most rapid increases.
