The Chihuahuan Desert reaches north from Mexico into the southwestern United States, a great arid expanse in the rain shadow of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains that covers much of the border between the two countries. Geographers call it a “thermal cradle.” Some areas receive less than eight centimetres of water in a year. Summer air temperatures can climb above 50 degrees. Sands as fine as those on a beach absorb the sun’s rays, heating the surface to 65 degrees. Scrubby outgrowths of mesquite and spiny ocotillo offer little hope of shade.
It is the largest desert on the continent, and it forms the final obstacle for many of those trying to migrate to the U.S., a country they hope will provide permanent respite from the dangers, instability and economic malaise of the homes they left.
For a growing number, it has also become the place where they draw their final breath. Over the past year, the 425 kilometres of the U.S. border that stretch out to the horizons around El Paso, Tex., with nine-metre steel walls and rows of concertina wire, have counted more migrant deaths than at any point in the quarter century since public recordkeeping began.
In that time, the U.S. Border Patrol has seen 175 deaths and 973 migrant rescues in its El Paso sector alone, up from 149 deaths and 594 rescues the previous year. Across the southern U.S. border, migrant deaths more than tripled during the pandemic.
Record numbers of bodies in the desert is not what U.S. President Joe Biden promised when he signed a series of strict new measures in June that he called “the necessary steps to secure our border.” Until then, migrants could simply surrender on U.S. soil and remain in the country, often for years, until they could enter the asylum process. The new measures, which bar most migrants from claiming asylum when crossing illegally, “will help us gain control of our border, restore order into the process,” Mr. Biden said.
Since then, migrant arrivals have fallen precipitously. Last year, the El Paso sector of the Border Patrol apprehended 2,200 illegal migrants on an average day, a number that outraged critics called an “invasion.” In recent weeks, agents have apprehended roughly 400 a day. On Monday, Mr. Biden announced measures to make asylum claims even more difficult for those crossing illegally, lowering the threshold at which the southern border is considered overwhelmed – at which point authorities will reject most such claims.
So few people are now arriving illegally that migrant shelters in El Paso are closing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is no longer dispatching convoys of buses to deliver migrants to Democrat-dominated cities.
Immigration is at the heart of this year’s presidential campaign. It’s an issue that Donald Trump has made pivotal to his re-election efforts, as he stokes public anger over the millions of people who entered the U.S. under Mr. Biden’s administration.
In a country where elections have been decided by tens of thousands of votes, it’s a vulnerability for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who as vice-president was tasked with stemming migration to the country’s southern border. On the campaign trail she, too, has promised a less welcoming approach to unlawful migrants, while pledging also to buttress legal pathways into the country.
But that tough new reality is already taking shape.
Cartels have grown more aggressive across Mexico and the countries to its south, hunting for new ways to bolster the revenue they have derived from migration. It’s a sum the U.S. Border Patrol estimates in the billions of dollars a year, as cartels charge migrants for smoothing their path – and extort those seen as having access to funds.
Meanwhile, an uneasy quiet has settled over the southern edge of the U.S., as the intense political sparring masks a fraught state of affairs.
Migration has not stopped. But those trying to enter the U.S. now have reason to seek more dangerous pathways in order to evade expulsion.
In Sunland Park, N.M., Fire Station #1 looks out over a small stretch of industrial and undeveloped land north of the border, which is just 1,300 metres away. It has become a particularly deadly corner of the country. “I can look out my office window and I can see the area where we find the vast majority of our bodies,” said Danny Medrano, the local fire chief.
Earlier this summer, one crew transported four bodies from the desert in as many hours.
Many migrants are dying not in the remote wilderness, but in places in such close proximity to the air-conditioned trappings of modern American life that their bodies can be located simply by tracing the geographic co-ordinates of their cellphones.
Fire Station #1 has equipment to treat migrants and transport bodies. Mr. Medrano says it had to be specially bolted because the backs of these vehicles weren't designed with passengers in mind.
Sometimes the firefighters find migrants clinging to life, with body temperatures as high as 41 degrees. They place them into body bags and then pour ice inside – a rapid-cooling procedure they’ve done 22 times so far this year. But often, they are too late. The bodies are imprinted by the scalding heat – flesh blistered by sand so hot it sears, feet burned through the soles of shoes. Sometimes the remains are no longer whole, parts devoured by coyotes or vultures.
The firefighters have learned to smear Vicks VapoRub beneath their noses. The pungent ointment masks the odour of decomposition from the bodies they regularly collect. It’s not always enough. “You never forget that smell,” Mr. Medrano said. “It’s ingrained into your psyche.”
Nearby El Paso has for years been one of the country’s main stages for leaders seeking to demonstrate their attention to the southern border. Mr. Trump held the first rally of his 2019 re-election campaign here. Two years later, Ms. Harris arrived for her first border visit as vice-president.
The broad strokes of the policy problems at the border have changed little over the years. “We need to totally redo our immigration system and make it easier for people to come in legally, to do the jobs that Americans don’t want,” said John Cook, a former El Paso mayor. But “the political leaders, they’re looking at it as an opportunity.”
None more so than Mr. Trump, whose promises of a border wall helped him win the 2016 presidential election, and who has pledged mass deportations if voters return him to Washington this year. “A vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your job, stealing your life,” Mr. Trump told a recent rally in North Carolina.
He described “millions and millions of people walking right through” the border. But that is, for now, a thing of the past.
The changes go beyond the border. Under the new U.S. policy, migrants can apply for asylum from southern Mexico, meaning they no longer have to congregate in places closer to the U.S., where cartels are especially active. Authorities in Mexico are offering bus transportation to the border for those who receive appointments to make their U.S. asylum claims. The U.S. has also worked with other countries to keep migrants from coming north. In August, for example, it began paying for flights to deport undocumented migrants from Panama to Colombia.
The result has been dramatic. In April, 2023, Michael DeBruhl counted 1,300 people gathered on the streets around El Paso’s Sacred Heart Church. Inside, there was room for only 120. But the community responded with an extraordinary generosity. “One day I walked out there and it was almost a full professional kitchen. They were feeding everyone,” recalled Mr. DeBruhl, who grew up in El Paso and spent 26 years in the U.S. Border Patrol before spending the past two years in a very different role, overseeing a migrant centre at Sacred Heart.
The sight of migrants was hardly novel, even if the numbers were unlike anything he had seen. “In El Paso, this is a way of life. People have come across this area for hundreds of years. It’s nothing new,” Mr. DeBruhl said.
Now, however, Sacred Heart is preparing to close its doors to migrants in early October. So few people are crossing that there is no longer a need.
What’s more, roughly three-quarters of the people the church now shelters have arrived legally, allowing them to quickly secure Social Security numbers and authorization to work. It’s a reversal from recent years, when the great majority of migrants entered illegally, forcing them to wait years for asylum hearings.
Michael DeBruhl, an El Pasoan who used to work for U.S. Border Patrol, runs a migrant centre operated by the city's Sacred Heart Church, which will soon close.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
At the same time, American sympathies for migrants are waning. Polls show immigration is second in importance only to the economy for supporters of Mr. Trump, who has promised to deport millions if he is re-elected.
For Democratic voters, too, it has taken on new importance. In 2018, 9 per cent of Democratic voters in New Mexico supported building a border wall. That has now risen to 25 per cent, a new poll released in September by Albuquerque-based Research & Polling Inc. found. Overall, 52 per cent of those surveyed in the state now want a wall, said Research & Polling president Brian Sanderoff.
Whether the measures taken by the Biden administration will help Democrats politically is a matter of debate. “Does the fact there isn’t chaos on the border right now help Kamala Harris? I daresay that it does,” said Ruben Garcia, who has spent nearly a half-century in El Paso working with new arrivals.
No longer are migrants streaming across rivers and deserts onto U.S. soil. No longer is live footage of their crossings provoking outrage.
Others aren’t so sure.
“It’s too little, too late,” said Robert Almonte, a former El Paso police officer who now trains local law enforcement. Too many people have already been let into the U.S., he said. “The damage has already been done.”
And migrants continue to arrive. Although now they are caught between a less hospitable U.S. and cartels that have shown new determination to extract revenue by any means.
At Oasis Del Migrante, a small shelter in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, one of those waiting to enter the legal way was Linett Bobadilla, a Honduran woman. “They told me if I went illegally, they would just turn me back,” she said.
But the wait has been so long that she has conceived and given birth to a daughter, Alaia Betsabé, who arrived in September. The arrival of the infant has brought a new set of concerns: The family now has another member, which means new application paperwork and new uncertainty.
Pastor Roman Dominguez is an asylum applicant, like many of the people he helps at Oasis Del Migrante in Juárez.
In the meantime, a local cartel has begun demanding that Oasis Del Migrante pay it US$1,000 monthly, its director, Pastor Roman Dominguez, said. The consequences of failing to pay are clear: A structure next door recently went up in flames. The Globe and Mail viewed security images from mid-September that showed a man arriving at the shelter in a vehicle without licence plates and walking up to the building with a pistol covered in a towel.
Mr. Dominguez was not there at the time, and isn’t sure what the man wanted, but he has not slept at home for months, out of concern for his safety. “The cartel is never going to lose,” he said. He added that he has recently seen greater numbers of kidnappings, behaviour so brazen he will no longer go to the airport or bus station to pick up a migrant, for fear he, too, will be taken away and “sequestered” until he can deliver the cartel sufficient money.
He has also applied for asylum to the U.S. He, too, is waiting.
The precarious uncertainty of those waits may help to explain why the number of migrants crossing into the U.S. has diminished, even as deaths are rising.
“Every time you increase the difficulty factor, they just go to greater extremes to cross,” said Father Bill Morton, a Columban priest whose parish is in Juárez. “Because if they’re going to cross illegally, they’re going to cross no matter what you do.”
With greater extremes come greater risks, and more deaths.
The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator has seen a record number of migrants this year, most killed by overheating and dehydration. The latter is sometimes confirmed by testing electrolytes in eye fluid. Many are young. The most common age among dead male migrants is 25. The vast majority of their deaths are considered medically preventable, said Heather Jarrell, the state’s chief medical investigator.
Examining migrant bodies has forced her to consider difficult moral questions. A CT scan revealed fractures in the foot of one 28-year-old woman who was found two kilometres from the border, without a cellphone. It appears she fell from the border wall, broke her foot and was left behind by traffickers, who took her cellphone and reported incorrect co-ordinates to her family. Such deaths have typically been classified as accidents.
Dr. Jarrell isn’t so sure.
“They left her to die,” she said. “It calls into question – is this a homicide?”
Blame, she said, lies with the traffickers.
But others question how the U.S., a country built on new arrivals, has become a place where death is a commonplace outcome of migration.
“We are not at war with immigration,” said Mr. Garcia, who began working with migrants at the urging of Mother Teresa. “To me, it’s a question of, are we doing right by human beings?”
“We need to make it so that people don’t feel they have to cross through the desert.”
Steel rails lie near the border barrier, where authorities have been busy making it physically harder for migrants to cross.
But the border is growing visibly more difficult to cross. On a recent day, crews on the northern shore of the Rio Grande in Texas used a skid steer to install new rolls of concertina wire. The state’s heavy spending on border security has helped to push migrants toward New Mexico, where arrays of sensors on poles keep autonomous watch alongside an extensive human presence.
A helicopter churned the air in slow passes, occasionally hovering to direct ground agents to intercept people dashing across. Border guards responded in trucks and ATVs.
At one moment, they rushed in a cloud of dust alongside a stretch of border wall more than five metres high. Someone popped their head over the top, saw the approaching vehicles and disappeared again. The Border Patrol agents reached through the fence to pull through a ladder fashioned out of thin strips of rebar, a rickety structure used to scale the heights of the wall.
On a hill nearby, two men stood on the Mexican side of the border, centimetres from U.S. soil, keeping watch. They were cartel lookouts, said Claudio Herrera, a spokesperson for the Border Patrol.
Border Patrol spokesperson Claudio Herrera removes the makeshift ladder that people on the Mexican side were using to climb over.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
A few minutes later, the guards set off to intercept another group that was crossing. This time, they found an El Salvadoran woman and her two girls, six and seven years old. They had already set foot on U.S. soil. The woman, who gave only her first name, Norberta, described fleeing poverty and domestic abuse. In a month of travel, she said, the family was repeatedly threatened.
“When they stopped us, they told us they were going to kill us if we didn’t give them money,” Norberta recalled. She paid US$15,000 to be taken into the U.S., but spent days with little food.
And domestic violence is not often considered grounds for an asylum claim, especially under the much stricter regime imposed by the Biden administration. Mr. DeBruhl, the former Border Patrol agent, said the situation for someone like Norberta “would seem like a difficult case.”
In the new border regime, he added, “the parameters to apply successfully for asylum are very narrow.” Many of those crossing illegally are deported.
It was not clear Norberta understood that possibility. Standing in the desert heat, she and her daughters accepted bottles of water from the Border Patrol.
“The only thing I ask God,” she said, “is that everything will be okay.”
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