UA develops clearer way to count deaths on border
by Claudine Lomonaco on Feb. 17, 2007, under Local, Nation/WorldUniversity of Arizona researchers have developed a test for counting border deaths of illegal immigrants and recommend the federal government and medical examiners in border states use it.
The U.S. Border Patrol has come under repeated criticism from academics, humanitarian groups and most recently former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for undercounted border deaths. Frist called the deaths a “humanitarian crisis.”
Last summer, the Government Accountability Office found that the Border Patrol undercounted deaths in the Tucson sector by 32 percent in 2002, 43 percent in 2003 and 35.4 percent in 2004. The report attributed the Border Patrol’s undercount to a narrow set of criteria that at times excluded deaths in which Border Patrol agents were not involved, such as bodies found by other agencies.
UA’s Binational Migration Institute released the criteria Wednesday in a report that analyzed border deaths processed by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office from 1990 to 2005. Southern Arizona has been the epicenter of migrant deaths for the past five years, with Pima County examining most recovered bodies.
Researchers developed the criteria based largely on the work of Pima County Medical Examiner Bruce Parks, who began identifying and counting the bodies of illegal immigrants in 2001, when the deaths spiked in southern Arizona. Parks counted all bodies that appeared to be those of illegal immigrants, regardless of which agency found or handled the body.
Criteria used by the researchers include whether the body was found near or on a known migrant trail or with objects common to migrants such as backpacks, jugs of water or Mexican identification.
Many medical examiners along the border still do not identify or count migrant deaths in a separate category, making it difficult to have an accurate count of known migrant deaths across the entire border.
“Dr. Parks has been at the forefront of this effort,” said Melissa McCormick, who co-wrote the study and is a senior researcher with the institute.
In 2005, the Tucson sector of the Border Patrol revised the way it counted deaths by maintaining regular contact with the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“I was surprised that we weren’t as accurate as we needed to be,” said Tucson Sector Chief Michael Nicley, who implemented the change.
McCormick, along with three other researchers, spent a year analyzing all of Pima County’s autopsy reports to gain an accurate count of border deaths.
In 1990, they counted nine deaths. In 2005, they counted 201. In total, they counted 927 deaths in the 15-year period for Pima County.
The report attributed the increasing deaths to the government policy of “funneling” illegal immigrants away from urban areas in Texas and California and into Arizona’s harsh deserts during the 1990s. Officials initially believed the policy would deter migrants once they encountered the forbidding terrain. But it did not, and by 2002, deaths in southern Arizona jumped to triple digits.
McCormick said she hoped the government would use the criteria to reform the Border Patrol’s method and provide local medical examiners with the financial support and technical skills to begin categorizing the deaths. Accurate statistics are vital to understanding the effect of federal policies, she said.
“If our policies are causing more deaths, then we need to know that,” she said.
The study was funded by the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
In analyzing the data, researchers found the percentage of dead from southern and central Mexico increased significantly, whereas those from northern Mexico decreased.
More than 80 percent of the dead were under 40 years old, and there was an upward trend in the death of minors, who were 3.4 times more likely to die in motor vehicle accidents than adults. The total did not include incidents in which women who had been pregnant survived, but whose embryos and fetuses did not, because such deaths are not reported to the medical examiner’s office.
McCormick stressed that the report represented only the bodies recovered, not the true number of deaths.
“We can never know that,” she said.
