Immigration Policy Brief – A Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: New Estimates of Deaths Among Unauthorized Immigrants

“For almost a decade now, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of deaths each year among unauthorized border-crossers in the deserts and mountains of southern Arizona. The official statistics compiled by the U.S. Border Patrol consistently undercount the actual number of deaths in Arizona and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border. But various academic and government studies estimate that the bodies of between 2,000 and 3,000 men, women, and children have been found along the entire southwest border since 1995, including at least 1,000 in the inhospitable terrain of southern Arizona. Experts, including the U.S. Government Accountability Office GAO, now explain this crisis as a direct consequence of U.S. immigration-control policies instituted in the mid-1990s.1

The Binational Migration Institute BMI of the University of Arizona’s Mexican American Studies and Research Center has undertaken a unique and scientifically rigorous study of all unauthorized border-crosser UBC deaths examined by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office PCMEO from 1990-2005.2 [Read the complete BMI study] Because the PCMEO has handled approximately 90 percent of all UBC recovered bodies in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, an analysis of such deaths serves as an accurate reflection of the major characteristics of all known unauthorized border-crosser deaths that have occurred in this sector since 1990.”

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