A deadly detour: Migrant deaths spike outside El Paso

SUNLAND PARK, N.M. — In each of the last two summers, Laura Mae Williams, who recovers bodies for the New Mexico Medical Investigator’s Office, has had to visit the U.S.-Mexico borderlands multiple times a week. 

“It’s not uncommon for me to come down for one body that’s been found, and then Border Patrol finds another one or maybe even two additional ones in different locations,” Williams said. 

It used to be rare for migrants to die after having crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert just west of El Paso, Texas, over the state line. The Medical Investigator’s Office, part of the University of New Mexico Health System, used to recover only a handful of bodies a year. But this year so far, the office has recovered 121 such sets of remains, breaking last year’s record of 116. It’s more than a thirteenfold increase from five years ago. 

Unlike the vast, remote deserts of Arizona, where migrants have died in significant numbers for years, the area experiencing this spike in deaths is relatively small, hemmed in by highways and the western exurbs of El Paso.

In many cases, people have died within a few yards of suburban subdivisions and paved roads. 

Most of the deaths are heat-related. Although it is a relatively small stretch of desert, it routinely reaches temperatures well into the triple digits in summer, with sand temperatures at times reaching 150 degrees. 

“In those extreme conditions, even if you’re well-hydrated and well-fed, it’s going to wear on the body,” Williams said. And in many cases, people who have migrated are not well-hydrated or well-fed, having spent days in smugglers’ safe houses in poor conditions. 

First responders, elected officials and advocates in New Mexico attribute the spike in deaths largely to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which hardened the border in El Paso’s urban core and prompted smugglers to attempt routes west of the city in New Mexico. 

Abbott’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, blamed the deaths on the federal government. “Operation Lone Star helps deter illegal crossings, redirecting migrants to use one of the 29 international bridges on the Texas-Mexico border where they can safely and legally cross,” Mahaleris told NBC News in a statement. 

The deaths fit a historical pattern. Migrants often begin dying in greater numbers after enforcement efforts push smuggling routes outside urban areas and into more remote and dangerous crossings.

Officials, including the New Mexico Medical Investigator’s Office, also blame smugglers for the deaths, noting that in many cases they abandon people who fall behind — but only after they take their phones.

“It raises an important question,” said Dr. Heather Jarrell, the chief medical examiner at the Medical Investigator’s Office, whose office marks the deaths as accidental. “If you leave a person in the middle of the desert to die, why is this not homicide by neglect?”