New Mexico
Migrant deaths in New Mexico have increased tenfold
A surveillance helicopter traces a line in the sky above the Southwest border with Mexico at Sunland Park, N.M., Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Morgan Lee/AP
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Morgan Lee/AP
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Ten times as many migrants died in New Mexico near the U.S.-Mexico border in each of the last two years compared with just five years ago as smuggling gangs steer them — exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished — mostly into the hot desert, canyons or mountains west of El Paso, Texas.
During the first eight months of 2024, the bodies of 108 presumed migrants mostly from Mexico and Central America were found near the border in New Mexico and often less than 10 miles (6 kilometers) from El Paso, according to the most recent data. The remains of 113 presumed migrants were found in New Mexico in 2023, compared with nine in 2020 and 10 in 2019.

It’s not clear exactly why more migrants are being found dead in that area, but many experts say smugglers are treating migrants more harshly and bringing them on paths that could be more dangerous in extreme summer temperatures.
The influx has taxed the University of New Mexico’s Office of the Medical Investigator, which identifies the dead and conducts autopsies that almost always show the cause as heat-related.
“Our reaction was sadness, horror and surprise because it had been very consistently low for as long as anyone can remember,” said Heather Edgar, a forensic anthropologist with the office.
Forensic anthropologist Heather Edgar with the Office of the Medical Investigator poses for a portrait outside her office in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
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Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
Serving the entire state, the office over two years has added deputy medical investigators to handle the extra deaths on top of the usual 2,500 forensic cases.
“We’d always had three deputies down in that area, and I think we have nine or 10 now,” Edgar said of New Mexico’s eastern migration corridor.
Immigration and border security are among voters’ top concerns heading into the Nov. 5 presidential contest, but the candidates have focused on keeping migrants out of the U.S. and deporting those already here.
The increase in deaths is a humanitarian concern for advocates as smugglers guide migrants into New Mexico through fencing gaps at the border city of Sunland Park and over low-lying barriers west of the nearby Santa Teresa Port of Entry.
“People are dying close to urban areas, in some cases just 1,000 feet from roads,” noted Adam Isacson, an analyst for the nongovernmental Washington Office on Latin America. He said water stations, improved telecommunications and more rescue efforts could help.

New Mexico officials are targeting human-smuggling networks, recently arresting 16 people and rescuing 91 trafficking victims. U.S. Customs and Border Protection added a surveillance blimp to monitor the migration corridor near its office in Santa Teresa, in New Mexico’s Doña Ana County. Movable 33-foot (10-meter) towers use radar to scan the area.
U.S. officials in recent years have added 30 more push-button beacons that summon emergency medical workers along remote stretches of the border at New Mexico and western Texas. They have also set up more than 500 placards with location coordinates and instructions to call 911 for help.
This summer, the Border Patrol expanded search and rescue efforts, dispatching more patrols with medical specialists and surveillance equipment. The agency moved some beacons closer to the border, where more migrants have been found dead or in distress.
Border Patrol says it rescued nearly 1,000 migrants near the U.S. border in New Mexico and western Texas over the past 12 months — up from about 600 the previous 12 months.
Dylan Corbett, executive director of the faith-based Hope Border Institute in El Paso, said 10-member church teams recently started dropping water bottles for migrants in the deadly New Mexico corridor alongside fluttering blue flags.
“Part of the problem is that organized crime has become very systematic in the area,” Corbett said of the increased deaths. He also blamed heightened border enforcement in Texas and new U.S. asylum restrictions that President Joe Biden introduced in June and tightened last month.
This Oct. 3, 2024 image shows the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where experts work to identify scores of presumed migrants whose remains have been found along the border in southern New Mexico.
Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
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Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
New Mexico’s rising deaths come as human-caused climate change increases the likelihood of heat waves. This year, the El Paso area had its hottest June ever, with an average temperature of 89.4 degrees Fahrenheit (31.8 Celsius). June 12 and 13 saw daily record highs of 109 F (42.7 C).
Those high temperatures can be deadly for people who have been on strenuous journeys. Some smugglers lead migrants on longer routes into gullies or by the towering Mount Cristo Rey statue of Jesus Christ that casts a shadow over neighboring Mexico.
Deputy Chief Border Patrol Agent Juan Bernal of the El Paso Sector said migrants are weak when they arrive at the border after weeks or months without adequate food and water in houses smugglers keep in Mexico.
“They’re expected to walk, sometimes for hours or days, to get to their destination where they’re going to be picked up,” he said.
The deaths have continued even as migration has fallen along the entire border following Biden’s major asylum restrictions.
New Mexico’s migrant death numbers now rival those in Arizona’s even hotter Sonoran desert, where the remains of 114 presumed border crossers were discovered during the first eight months of 2024, according to a mapping project by the nonprofit Humane Borders and the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson.

Nearly half of those who died in New Mexico this year were women. Women ages 20 to 29 made up the largest segment of these deaths.
“We are awaiting for you at home,” a family in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas implored in early June in a missing person post for a 25-year-old female relative who was found dead days later. “Please come back.”
After a 24-year-old Guatemalan woman’s remains were discovered that same month, a mortuary in her hometown posted a death notice with a photo of her smiling in a blue dress and holding a floral bouquet.
“It should not be a death sentence to come to the United States,” Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Maj. Jon Day told a recent community gathering. “And when we push them into the desert areas here, they’re coming across and they’re dying.”
New Mexico
New Mexico Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 Day results for April 4, 2026
The New Mexico Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at April 4, 2026, results for each game:
Powerball
03-06-13-41-65, Powerball: 01, Power Play: 4
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Pick 3
Day: 1-3-5
Evening: 4-8-8
Check Pick 3 payouts and previous drawings here.
Lotto America
06-31-35-36-40, Star Ball: 10, ASB: 03
Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.
Pick 4
Evening: 8-7-2-9
Day: 8-4-1-0
Check Pick 4 payouts and previous drawings here.
Roadrunner Cash
04-06-10-18-23
Check Roadrunner Cash payouts and previous drawings here.
Powerball Double Play
20-38-45-58-63, Powerball: 05
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Las Cruces Sun-News editor. You can send feedback using this form.
New Mexico
Fresh produce and local vendors return to Robinson Park in Albuquerque
The Downtown Growers’ Market opened its season at Robinson Park, drawing people out for fresh produce, local goods and breakfast food.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The Downtown Growers’ Market opened its season at Robinson Park, drawing people out for fresh produce, local goods and breakfast food.
The first event of the season happened Saturday morning at Robinson Park in downtown Albuquerque.
The market will return every Saturday morning for the next several months.
Vendors include local farms selling fresh produce, pottery makers and people selling breakfast burritos, bagels, local honey and more.
The market gives people more chances to bring a picnic blanket and enjoy the weather in Albuquerque.
New Mexico
Border wall blasting begins on New Mexico’s Mount Cristo Rey, cherished by Catholics
A stretch of of the US-Mexico border near Sunland Park, New Mexico, is being cleared to make way for an extension of Trump’s border wall.Gaby Velasquez/Puente News Collaborative
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News in partnership with Puente News Collaborative and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On a Saturday morning in March, high school students, mountain bikers and soldiers from a nearby Army base climbed the winding path up Mount Cristo Rey. From the summit, they could see most of El Paso, the sprawling city that dominates a stretch of desert where New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua meet.
They paused to trace the line of the Rio Grande, where it divides Mexico and the United States, and then touched the smooth tiles lining the base of the Christ the King statue, a cherished monument that gives the mountain its name.
Two days later, on a Monday morning, explosions rattled the same site. Contractors were blasting the south side of Mount Cristo Rey to prepare the terrain for construction of the border wall President Donald Trump has long promised would run from San Diego in California to Brownsville in Texas.
After the explosions, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uploaded a video of the blasts to social media. One earlier post boasted the mountain was getting a “face lift” to “secure a historically challenging terrain.”
The sarcasm didn’t sit well with thousands of residents from both sides of the border, who looked forward to the annual Good Friday pilgrimage to the mountain summit. This year, they would be walking above an active construction zone.
Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park, New Mexico, from the Mexican metropolis of Ciudad Juárez. But building a wall on the rugged slopes of Mount Cristo Rey was long considered impractical. Eventually, the mountain’s slopes became the only significant gap without an imposing border fence in the binational metro area of more than 2.5 million people.
In recent years, Sunland Park and the area around Mount Cristo Rey saw high numbers of unauthorized crossings. Migrant deaths in the nearby desert soared. In lieu of a wall, Border Patrol agents blanketed the mountain and stationed themselves, along with surveillance equipment, on nearby roads.
Border crossings in the El Paso sector slowed during the final year of the Biden administration and have plummeted since Trump returned to office. The second Trump administration is intent on sealing every border gap.
SLSCO, a Texas company based in Galveston, has a $95 million contract to build a 1.3-mile wall on Mount Cristo Rey and two other barriers near El Paso. CBP waived environmental and historical preservation laws in June 2025, clearing the way for a border wall on the mountain. Over the objections of the local Catholic diocese, which owns most of the mountain, work began at the site in January.
Robert Ardovino, a business owner in Sunland Park, is no stranger to the traffic of Border Patrol vehicles and undocumented migrants crossing into New Mexico. But he was appalled to see the side of the mountain being shaved off. “Electronics would have made more sense than destroying a whole mountain,” Ardovino said on a recent afternoon. “But they’re doing what they’re doing.”
He predicted that when the Good Friday pilgrims ascended the mountain, many would be shaking their heads at the destruction. “There is no accountability,” he said. “And the damage will be irreparable.”
“CBP has environmental monitors present during these activities to ensure construction best management practices are being followed and implemented by the construction contractor,” an agency spokesperson said.
An environmental summary report, completed in lieu of an environmental impact assessment, is not available to the public, the spokesperson said.
Mount Cristo Rey is where the land border between the US and Mexico ends and the Rio Grande becomes the dividing line. This point, for centuries called Paso del Norte—the northern pass—has been a crossroads for Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers and later settlers traveling west on the early transcontinental railroads.
Once the railroad reached El Paso in 1881, the city grew quickly. A brick company opened on the flanks of Mount Cristo Rey, and a quarry was carved into the mountainside. Later, a copper smelter rose in its shadow. Mexican American workers lived nearby in a company town called Smeltertown.
A priest at Smeltertown’s Catholic church first proposed building a statue on the mountaintop. The 29-foot limestone statue of Christ was dedicated in 1939. The mountain, previously known as Cerro de los Muleros, or Mule Driver’s Mountain, was renamed Mount Cristo Rey.
Smeltertown was demolished in the 1970s. But descendants of several families who lived there still volunteer with the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee, which maintains the trail and monument. They keep a watchful eye on the thousands of people, the religious and the secular, who join the Good Friday walk.
During the first Trump administration, in 2019, a group called We Build the Wall, that included Steve Bannon, tapped private donations to build a half-mile wall on the eastern side of Mount Cristo Rey. Fisher Sand and Gravel, which has received billions of dollars in border wall construction contracts under the Trump administration, built this section of wall on private property. CBP cut a dirt road across the south side of the mountain.
Bannon later pleaded guilty to defrauding donors. Lights illuminating the wall, which separates Mexico from the United States and El Paso from New Mexico, were turned off when the builders’ bank accounts were frozen.
Border wall construction largely stopped during the Biden administration. But once Trump returned to office, Mount Cristo Rey became a priority. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived more than two dozen laws on June 3 to expedite construction of the wall across the mountain. The REAL ID Act of 2005 granted DHS the authority to “waive all legal requirements” necessary to expedite construction of border barriers. Among the laws waived were the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.
Geologist Eric Kappus considers Mount Cristo Rey one of the premier sites anywhere for geology education.
CBP announced plans for a 30-foot-high barrier that would run along the south side of the mountain and loom over the Anapra neighborhood in Ciudad Juárez. Agency plans state the wall will consist of steel bollards spaced four inches apart. It will require drainage gates and access roads.
Funding for CBP’s El Paso Anapra 16-4 Wall Project, which includes Mount Cristo Rey, dates back to DHS 2020 border wall appropriations. Since then, the agency has received 224 written statements about the proposal. According to the summary, 211 comments opposed the wall.
Notably, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces urged the agency to exclude Mount Cristo Rey from its barrier plans. In its comments, the diocese referred to the mountain as a place “where faith transcends borders.”
“A grant of entry onto land [the diocese] owns for CBP purposes, whether temporary or permanent, would deter those pilgrims and migrants from exercising their religion as they have done for almost one hundred years,” wrote the Diocese’s general counsel, Kathryn Brack Morrow. “A place of hope, faith, and communion would become a place of fear, exclusion and division.”
Morrow wrote that the Diocese had received multiple requests for access to its property from the Department of Justice, which were denied.
The trail to the summit has not been disturbed by construction. But last year, the area along the border in Sunland Park and at Mount Cristo Rey was designated a National Defense Area, part of the US Army’s Fort Huachuca. People who enter a National Defense Area can be charged with trespassing.
Contractors are blasting the mountain along a 60-mile strip of federal property known as the Roosevelt Reservation. The City of Sunland Park also owns property on the mountain. A city spokesperson said Sunland Park has no jurisdiction over the area where construction is occurring.
The construction company JOBE also owns property on the mountain and declined to comment.
To the untrained eye, Mount Cristo Rey, like many Chihuahuan Desert locales, can appear desolate. A local CBP spokesperson compared it to a “moonscape” in a local news interview. “It’s just rock and sand.”
But for geologists like Eric Kappus, Mount Cristo Rey is a “treasure.”
Kappus discovered a series of dinosaur footprints at Mount Cristo Rey in 2002 while he was a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso. The prints were formed between 80 and 100 million years ago when Iguanodons and theropods plodded through mud on the edge of what was then a vast sea.
Kappus said he spent thousands of hours exploring Mount Cristo Rey, looking for fossils and prints. After working as an exploratory geologist and teaching across the country, he still considers it one of the premier sites anywhere for geology education.
“I could teach 75 to 80 percent of an introductory geology class in the field at Mount Cristo Rey,” he said. “It’s like a giant chalkboard.”
“The border wall is quite disrespectful to a lot of work that’s been undertaken by numerous government agencies.”
The prints, preserved in sandstone, were exposed during excavation for the brick yard. The site was later donated to the non-profit INSIGHTS El Paso Science Center. The dinosaur tracks site is not threatened by border wall construction.
William Lukefahr, an INSIGHTS tour guide, led a group down a rocky trail to the dinosaur tracks on a warm March morning. He slowed down to look for plants and animals. He pointed out a Black-spined prickly pear cactus and a Mormon Tea shrub. Then he spotted a spider web encasing a cocoon-like structure made of debris—the home of a desert shrub spider. “This mountain is very unique,” he said. “But there hasn’t been a lot of scientific research done here.”
Other creatures commonly seen on Mount Cristo Rey include coyotes, canyon wrens, and the greater earless lizard. Scruffy sotol and creosote shrubs dot the mountainside. Lukefahr explained that Mount Cristo Rey creates a corridor connecting the mountains in Juárez with those on the western and northern flanks of El Paso.
In their public comments to CBP, more than 80 people expressed concern for Mount Cristo Rey’s prized environment. The agency’s summary statement, in response, explained that a biological survey yielded no federally listed threatened or endangered species. The survey deemed that the habitat has a “low to moderate” suitability for wildlife.
“CBP has also determined there is minimal impact to vegetation and behavioral patterns of wildlife since the project area is flanked by existing barrier and an active patrol road,” the agency wrote.
Ardovino, the local business owner, said that wildlife activity in Sunland Park diminished after Border Patrol was “unleashed” to drive across the desert and carve new roads.
Years ago, he said, there were 18 pairs of burrowing owls, a diminutive variety, on his property. That was until Border Patrol vehicles repeatedly disrupted their habitat. “They’re gone now,” he said. “Concern for the environment is last on [the CBP] list.”
Myles Traphagen coordinates the borderlands project of the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. He said building the border wall will counteract federal efforts to foster endangered species, including the Mexican gray wolf.
US and Mexican government biologists collaborate on wolf reintroduction, with pups from New Mexico transported to Northern Mexico to grow the population and increase genetic diversity. “The border wall is quite disrespectful to a lot of work that’s been undertaken by numerous government agencies,” he said.
In 2017, Traphagen tracked the movements of a Mexican gray wolf outfitted with a GPS collar. The wolf traveled north from Chihuahua into New Mexico, then followed the Rio Grande to Mount Cristo Rey, where it crossed back into Mexico.
He said the border wall will close off this wildlife crossing point.
Ardovino owns property less than a half mile from the blast site. He said his interactions with local Border Patrol agents have always been respectful, although he was not notified before the blasting began. The boom of an unexpected explosion signaled that construction was underway.
The neighborhood of Anapra in Juárez is just feet away from the blast site. Warning signs were posted in the neighborhood in January.
Morrow, the attorney for the Diocese, said she has yet to receive notification from federal agencies of the blasting. Neither has Ruben Escandon Jr., spokesperson for the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee. “Hopefully,” blasting would not occur during the Good Friday walk, he said.
The CBP spokesperson said landowners would be notified, but that there are no landowners in the blast zone.
The Wildlands Network’s Traphagen said that contractors at Mount Cristo Rey are defying common blasting protocols. Blast impact goes well beyond the thin strip of land where construction is underway, he said, and nearby residents and landowners should be notified for safety.
Construction activities are so far limited to the government’s Roosevelt Reservation. But it is unlikely the wall can be built without access to the diocese’s property on the mountain. The Diocese’s attorney was adamant the church will not sell.
The CBP spokesperson said that if the agency is unable to purchase property for border wall construction through voluntary sales, the Department of Justice can use eminent domain.
In public comments, the diocese attorney said attempts to seize the land would violate religious freedom and the right to worship, protected by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
For now, the diocese is holding on to its sacred space. On Good Friday, thousands of people would climb Mount Cristo Rey, as they have every year going back almost a century.
But blast by blast, border wall construction is coming for Mount Cristo Rey.
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