DROWNINGS ROSE AS MIGRANTS RUSHED AHEAD OF TEXAS BORDER CLAMP DOWN

 

An investigation by The Washington Post and other news organizations found more deaths than Mexico or the U.S. have reported. Many were in Eagle Pass, where the Texas governor’s border crackdown is concentrated.

By Arelis R. Hernandez, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud,

Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and
Miriam Ramirez
The Washington Post

EAGLE PASS, Texas — Angelica had journeyed with her parents, older brother, aunt and uncle by foot from South America through a muddy jungle, ridden atop sooty train cars and slept in noisy city plazas hoping to reach the United States.

Now it was dawn and the 4-year-old girl’s family could see their destination from across the Rio Grande. The adults sent messages to relatives back in Venezuela before stepping into the river with the two children.

“Ya no aguantamos más,” wrote Robiet Farías, Angelica’s uncle, saying he could not bear waiting anymore to enter the United States.

The family held one another’s hands and formed a chain with other migrants crossing the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass that November day in 2023. But as they got deeper into the river, something went wrong. Panic set in. The Farías family disappeared into the water.

This stretch of the Rio Grande has become a graveyard as the number of people dying while trying to cross rises. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported. And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.

The news organizations collected death records from every Texas county and Mexican state that borders the Rio Grande since 2017, when President-elect Donald Trump first took office pledging to crack down on illegal migration, to examine the effects of enforcement and migration policies on asylum seekers, and whether these factors have increased drownings.

The data shows that at least 1,107 people drowned trying to cross the river in the seven years from 2017 to 2023. The deaths peaked in 2022 as the number of people trying to enter the United States soared. A rising number of women were among the dead. In 2023, more than 1 in 10 drownings involved a child.

The spike in deaths coincided with a record surge in people attempting to cross into the United States illegally. Many of those migrants chose to cross the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, a city of 28,000 that has emerged as a flash point in the nation’s debate over migration. Abbott and the Biden administration have clashed over how to respond to the surge, with the Texas governor installing dozens of miles of razor wire, shipping containers and buoys, and the White House accusing the state of blocking its access to the river.

Migrants often choose Eagle Pass because it is across the river from a part of Mexico that is considered safer than other regions controlled by criminal gangs. But the river there has a significant current in certain areas, and gets deeper as people reach the midpoint. Weeds and rocks can make it difficult to get one’s footing.

The records obtained by the news organizations show drownings in Eagle Pass have risen significantly in recent years. The Post and its partners mapped the fatalities there using location data provided on death records. The analysis shows that as the number of deaths rose, bodies increasingly began washing up in new locations.

From 2017 to 2020, more than half the victims in Eagle Pass were found near the downtown area. After 2021, the year that Operation Lone Star began, drowning victims were largely discovered away from the city’s center.

The Post and its partners documented 858 migrant drownings in Texas from 2017 to 2023, while U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 587 along the entire southwest border during that time. The agency is required under federal law to record how many people die trying to enter the country each year, though federal investigators have acknowledged the data is incomplete.

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