note: opinion on amount of border crossers compared to official count
and they still seem to have good access to ironwood
Death toll mounts for border crossers
2 more bodies put area on grim, record-setting pace
By Brady McCombs
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.28.2007
The discovery Thursday of the bodies of two illegal border crossers
northwest of Tucson has added to a record-breaking year in Pima
County for border deaths.
There were 152 illegal border crossers found dead in the county from
Jan. 1 through July 25, a pace that is well ahead of 2006 and
eclipses the record set in 2005, when there were 131 at this same
time, said Dr. Bruce Parks, chief medical examiner at the Pima County
Office of the Medical Examiner.
"It's scary," Parks said.
Deputies were called at 7:45 a.m. Thursday by two residents who found
a body southwest of Marana at North Trico and West Magee roads, said
Dawn Hanke, spokeswoman for the Pima County Sheriff's Department.
Deputies could not determine the sex or age of the decomposed body,
she said.
Later Thursday, deputies assisted the Border Patrol at about 3:30
p.m. after residents called to say they found a body at 5400 N. Agua
Dulce Ranch Road, southwest of Marana in the Ironwood Forest National
Monument. Muddy roads forced the deputies to travel north to Toltec
— a small town between Eloy and Casa Grande — and then take dirt
roads to reach the remote area where the body was found, Hanke said.
The 152 bodies found in Pima County this year are 21 more than in the
same period in 2005, a 16 percent increase. The total for all of 2005
was 197 deaths, Parks said.
It is also 31 more bodies that were found during the same period in
2006, a 25 percent increase. The 2006 final year tally was 174
deaths, he said.
The increased number of deaths calls into question the Border
Patrol's assertion that reduced apprehensions in the Tucson Sector —
down 11 percent from 2006 through June — indicate a decrease in
border crossings.
To the contrary, says the Rev. Robin Hoover, the founder of Tucson-
based Humane Borders, which places water tanks throughout the desert.
About 30 percent to 40 percent more people are crossing this summer
than usual, said Hoover, who travels often to Altar, Sonora, where
people come from all across Mexico and Central America to prepare to
cross in the Altar Valley.
"The economy is the biggest player, always has been and always will
be, so jobs must be picking up somewhere," Hoover said.
The other factor might be the weather, which has been harsher this
year compared with last summer when cool cloud cover was more common,
he said.
The increase demonstrates again that the Department of Homeland
Security's border enforcement strategy is part of the problem, said
Isabel Garcia, co-chair of Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos
Humanos, and Melissa McCormick, senior research specialist at the
Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. The
increasing number of agents and presence of the National Guard pushes
illegal entrants into more remote routes.
"The more difficult you make it for people to cross without taking
care of the underlying issues, the more deaths we're going to see,"
Garcia said.
The Border Patrol objects to the blame and says that preventing
deaths is a top priority. The agency has 45 agents in Borstar (the
agency's search, trauma and rescue team) and brought in 14 more this
summer from California and Texas. That means there are 10 to 12
Borstar agents in the Tucson Sector per shift.
From Oct. 1 through June 30, agents had rescued 318 people in 118
incidents in the Tucson Sector, which covers New Mexico to the Yuma
County line, agency numbers show.
● Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com
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