October 13 2020, 9:24\u00a0a.m.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With migrant deaths approaching levels not seen in years, humanitarian aid volunteers in southern Arizona say that the U.S. Border Patrol is using Covid-19 as a pretext to quietly dump large numbers of immigrants in one of the most remote and potentially dangerous communities in the Sonoran Desert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Volunteers who have visited the dusty community of Sasabe, in the Mexican state of Sonora, in recent weeks, say that they have witnessed U.S. immigration agents continually off-loading large groups of people throughout the day, overwhelming the town\u2019s limited immigration resources and placing individuals at significant risk of being targeted by organized criminal groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe believe that Border Patrol is getting away with these horrible deportation numbers because no one knows,\u201d Dora Rodriguez, a Tucson-based humanitarian aid volunteer<\/a>, told The Intercept. \u201cIt is really easy for them to just dump people there and that\u2019s it. Nobody says anything.\u201dJoin Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you.I\u2019m in<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rodriguez and a growing group of humanitarian volunteers began turning their attention to Sasabe in mid-September, making biweekly visits to bring food and water to migrants after learning of the explosion in arrivals to the resource-strapped community. With a population of approximately 2,500 and a single town store, the port of entry at Sasabe has long been described<\/a> as one of the quietest official crossings in the state. There is no migrant shelter in the town, and the influence and power of organized crime in the area is well known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n View of the border between Mexico and the U.S in the community of Sasabe in Sonora state, Mexico, on January 13, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Alfredo Estrella\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent visits, Rodriguez has been joined by Sister Judy Bourg, a nun with the Sisters of Notre Dame, and Gail Kocourek, a volunteer with the Green Valley Samaritans, one of Arizona\u2019s longstanding humanitarian groups. The women told The Intercept that they have personally seen groups of migrants numbering in the dozens gathered outside of Sasabe\u2019s tiny immigration office. Through a visit to a local stash house and conversations with local contacts, the women were told that the Border Patrol is dropping upwards of 100 to 120 people in the community each day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe totally didn\u2019t expect this,\u201d Kocourek, a longtime volunteer in the Sasabe area, told The Intercept. \u201cWe\u2019ve got hungry people being dumped into this community by the hundreds.\u201d Kocourek added that Border Patrol enforcement activity in the area is unlike anything she has ever seen before. \u201cIt\u2019s just tremendous right now,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen so much activity in that area.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Operating under an order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in March the Border Patrol began rapidly expelling migrants at the border in the name of defending against the spread of Covid-19. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported<\/a>, however, pressure to enact the order did not come from public health officials, but instead from Stephen Miller, the president\u2019s ultra-hardline immigration adviser. Miller, who recently contracted Covid-19 himself, has long sought<\/a> to connect immigrants to disease as means to close off immigration at the border.\u201cWe\u2019ve got hungry people being dumped into this community by the hundreds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not only Mexican nationals who are being dropped in Sasabe, Rodriguez said, noting that she had she met Salvadorans, Hondurans, and a father from Guatemala, who had been expelled with his 16-year-old son, during recent visits. \u201cI understand when there are tons of people in Nogales and in Tijuana and in Sonoyta,\u201d she said, referring to more well-known border communities where the Border Patrol often deposits migrants. \u201cBut they have resources \u2014 even if they\u2019re limited, there are some resources. But in Sasabe, it\u2019s nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rodriguez and the other advocates say that the expulsions are making an already dangerous situation worse. Following a blistering hot summer \u2014 in Phoenix, the hottest in recorded history \u2014 more human remains have been recovered in the Arizona desert this year than at any point since 2013. On top of the rising death toll, the expulsions have come at a time of escalating tension in the desert, with the Border Patrol executing two militarized raids on a humanitarian aid station in the region in three months, federal agents arresting<\/a> and tear-gassing<\/a> Indigenous activists protesting border expansion on sacred lands, and the state\u2019s for-profit immigration detention centers<\/a> becoming some the nation\u2019s leading hot spots for Covid-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Generally lasting no more than a couple hours from encounter to removal, the so-called Title 42 expulsions have radically altered the shape of migration and immigration enforcement along the border. The Border Patrol has long relied on a deterrence strategy that funnels migrants into the border\u2019s deadliest terrain, pushing its land checkpoints deeper into the interior of the country and forcing migrants to walk further into the desert in the hopes of linking up with a ride. Agents will sometimes track a group of migrants for days before making an arrest, allowing physical exhaustion to assist in their apprehension efforts. Now, with the expulsions in effect, those exhausted migrants can be swiftly booted from the country. According to data<\/a> from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the government has expelled more than 147,000 people along the southwest border using the order.Read Our Complete CoverageThe War on Immigrants<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n While Mark Morgan, the senior official performing the duties of the commissioner of CBP, has described the expulsions as a \u201cgame changer<\/a>,\u201d advocates say that the expulsions rob migrants of due process rights and subject them to extreme danger when their removals involve being dumped in unfamiliar and remote communities with entrenched organized crime. Bourg, who has spent a decade providing humanitarian on the border, told The Intercept that the expelled migrants whom she met on a recent visit to Sasabe looked physically depleted. \u201cThey came in beat-up looking,\u201d she said. Their eyes were red and glassy, she added. \u201cThey didn\u2019t just cross and walk for half a day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past week, The Intercept has repeatedly requested a breakdown of the Border Patrol\u2019s data on expulsions in the agency\u2019s Tucson sector, as well as an interview with an official who could explain how determinations are made as to which ports migrants will be expelled through. The Border Patrol has provided neither. In April, an agency spokesperson acknowledged that Sasabe was seeing a \u201cmild uptick<\/a>\u201d in expulsions but provided no numbers to assess the claim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Immigrants walk in line through the Arizona desert near Sasabe, Sonora state, in an attempt to cross the Mexican-U.S. border, on April 6, 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Omar Torres\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the Border Patrol\u2019s expulsion protocol remains unclear, what is evident is that 2020 has been a particularly deadly year for migrants attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert. For years, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner has shared its data on suspected migrant death cases with Humane Borders, a humanitarian group that charts the data on an interactive online map<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As of this week, the medical examiner\u2019s office has logged 181 cases of suspected migrant deaths recovered in its area of operations this year. The last time the office saw a higher total was in 2013, when 186 sets of human remains were recovered. The record for most human remains recovered in a single year was set in 2010, when 224 were found. With two and a half months yet to go in the year, advocates worry that 2020 could exceed that grim milestone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think by the end of year, it\u2019ll be the highest since 2010,\u201d Mike Kreyche, the mapping coordinator with Humane Borders, told The Intercept. \u201cI hope we don\u2019t get up that high, but I think we\u2019re going to approach it.\u201dThis year, there has been a marked increase in the recovery of remains indicating a recently deceased individual, particularly in the brutally hot summer months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s particularly alarming about this year\u2019s data, Kreyche explained, is the column of information labeled \u201cpostmortem interval,\u201d the estimated amount of time between an individual\u2019s death and the discovery of their remains. In recent years, that number has generally been more than six to eight months \u2014 in some cases, remains discovered in the field could be years old. This year, however, there has been a marked increase in the recovery of remains indicating a recently deceased individual, particularly in the brutally hot summer months. In September, roughly two thirds of the recoveries recorded by the medical examiner\u2019s office suggested a death in the prior three months. Overall, the 2020 data show that more than half of the recoveries of suspected migrant remains \u2014 107 of 181 cases \u2014 indicate a death that occurred at some point less than six to eight months prior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere have been a lot more deaths,\u201d Kreyche said, \u201cparticularly recent deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Montana Thames, a volunteer with the humanitarian organization No More Deaths, said the past several months have been \u201cvery active\u201d for volunteers providing aid on the ground. With temperatures continuously breaking 100 degrees, \u201cpeople need help, people need aid,\u201d Thames told The Intercept. \u201cThere have been a lot of people who haven\u2019t made it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last week, the Border Patrol raided<\/a> No More Deaths\u2019 humanitarian aid station outside of Arivaca, Arizona, approximately 25 miles northeast of Sasabe, for the second time in three months. The first raid<\/a> was launched in the middle of a heat wave and featured members of the Border Patrol\u2019s tactical team, known as BORTAC, pointing rifles while agents slashed through the organization\u2019s tents with knives, confiscated sensitive medical records and dumped out gallon jugs of water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Efforts to engage in a dialogue with the Border Patrol since then went nowhere, Thames said, and last Monday night BORTAC was again deployed in a heavily militarized operation that involved agents in night-vision goggles trashing the organization\u2019s belongings. Twelve migrants were arrested, including some who were chased through Arivaca before being taken into custody. While the raid was \u201cshocking\u201d and unacceptable, Thames noted, \u201cThis is literally the everyday reality of migrants and undocumented communities in general.\u201dRelatedAs the Coronavirus Descended on the Border, the Trump Administration Escalated Its Crackdown on Asylum<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rodriguez visited Sasabe the morning after the raid on the No More Deaths camp. She described witnessing multiple rounds of expulsions and said that at one point, as many as 50 people were gathered outside the overwhelmed Mexican immigration office. She was told that some of the migrants in town that day were among those arrested in the raid the previous night. Rodriguez spoke to one young man from El Salvador. His shoes were tattered, and his toes poked through at the ends. He said that he had spent 15 days in the desert. Rodriguez, who nearly died crossing the border as an asylum-seeker herself in 1980, was both moved and troubled by the young man\u2019s story. \u201cThey are putting these people in the most horrible danger,\u201d she said. \u201cThey have nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Driving back into the U.S. last Tuesday, Rodriguez and the other advocates encountered an enormous Border Patrol caravan heading south. \u201cThat road always has a lot of Border Patrol, but this was exceptional,\u201d Bourg said. Rodriguez said the area was \u201clike a war zone,\u201d adding, \u201cThey\u2019re running their own show over there and it\u2019s a secret.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although humanitarian aid volunteers are now coordinating food and water supply runs sufficient to support 700 people in Sasabe each week, Rodriguez said more must be done. She believes the Border Patrol\u2019s expulsions into the town need to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s like a playground for BP,\u201d she said. \u201cNo one is making them accountable for this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n![\"GettyImages-631941108\"](\"https:\/\/theintercept.imgix.net\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2020\/10\/GettyImages-631941108.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=650\")
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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nA Grim Milestone<\/h3>\n\n\n\n