Illegal border crossers face a deadlier trek than ever across Arizona's desert.

The risk of dying is 1.5 times higher today compared with five years ago and 17 times greater than in 1998, the Arizona Daily Star's border-death database shows.

That's a significant increase considering the initial spike of deaths in Arizona occurred in 2000-02.
Through the first seven months of fiscal year 2009, there were 60 known deaths per 100,000 apprehensions in the area covered in the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector. That's up from 39 known deaths per 100,000 apprehensions in 2004.

The increased risk of death parallels the historic buildup of agents, fences, roads and technology along the U.S.-Mexico border, calling into question one of the Border Patrol's mantras that a "secure border is a safe border."

Even with 3,300 agents, 210 miles of fences and vehicle barriers, and 40 agents assigned to the agency's search, rescue and trauma team, Borstar, illegal immigrants are still dying while trying to cross the Border Patrol's 262-mile-long Tucson Sector.

Border county law enforcement, Mexican Consulate officials, Tohono O'odham tribal officials and humanitarian groups say the buildup has caused illegal border crossers to walk longer distances in more treacherous terrain, increasing the likelihood that people will get hurt or fatigued and left behind to die.

"We are pushing people into more deadly areas," said Kat Rodriguez, coordinating organizer for Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a Tucson-based group that tracks the deaths. "When enforcement goes up, death goes up. We've been saying that for years."

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada and Sgt. David Noland, the Cochise County Sheriff's Office search and rescue coordinator, say body recoveries in their counties show that people are trekking through increasingly remote areas.

The Border Patrol doesn't stop anyone from coming; it only shifts the locations where they cross, said Rev. Robin Hoover, president of Tucson-based Humane Borders. His group's maps show that bodies are being found farther away from principal roads and water sources each year.

"The presence of the Border Patrol makes the average migrant hungrier, thirstier, more tired and sicker," Hoover said.

Border Patrol officials point to their rescue efforts as evidence that their presence prevents deaths rather than causes them.

"Our presence is greater; we are getting to these people sooner," said Robert Boatright, deputy chief of the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector. The agency rescued 160 people through mid-May, compared with 151 at the same time last year.

He attributes the continued rise in deaths to better recovery methods and more thorough record-keeping.
"When somebody loses a loved one, a lot of times we're getting better information back and going back and finding those," Boatright said.

The agency concentrates its agents and rescue teams in the desert west of Sasabe, where most of the bodies are found, to move them out of the most dangerous areas, he said.

Continue reading this story by Brady McCombs in the Arizona Daily Star

Deaths of illegal immigrants have risen along the U.S.-Mexico border in the past six months despite a nearly 25 percent drop in Border Patrol arrests that suggests far fewer people are entering the country unlawfully.
The number of migrant deaths along the roughly 2,000-mile border increased by nearly 7 percent between Oct. 1 and March 31, the first six months of the 2009 federal fiscal year. The biggest increase occurred in the patrol's Tucson Sector, the nation's busiest corridor for illegal immigrants coming through Mexico.
In all, the remains of 128 people were found, compared to 120 in the same six-month period the year before, according to just-released Border Patrol statistics.

Yet, apprehensions of people crossing illegally from Mexico into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California dropped to less than 265,000 — a decrease of more than 24 percent from the comparable period a year ago and 37 percent from the first six months of the federal fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2006. The number of arrests is generally considered an indication of how many people are illegally crossing the border into the U.S. The more apprehensions, the more people are thought to be coming.

Migrant-rights groups say there's a direct correlation between the number of deaths and increased enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.

"What we've seen is that the death rate has gone up even though the number of people crossing has gone down, the direct result of more agents, more fencing and more equipment," said the Rev. Robin Hoover, founder of the Tucson-based group Humane Borders, which provides water stations for migrants crossing the Southern Arizona desert. "The migrants are walking in more treacherous terrain for longer periods of time, and you should expect more deaths."

Nearly half the dead were found in the Border Patrol's rugged Tucson Sector, which saw a 30 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. Deaths also rose in the Laredo and Del Rio sectors in Texas, and in the El Centro Sector of southwestern California.

No sector approached Tucson's sheer numbers: The remains of 60 people were found during the first half of the 2009 fiscal year.

Read the complete article by Arthur H. Rotstein in the Arizona Daily Star

PHOENIX (Reuters) - A U.S. federal jury awarded more than $70,000 in damages to a group of illegal immigrants who claimed they were held at gunpoint by an Arizona rancher after slipping over the border from Mexico five years ago.

The civil jury at the U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona, found Roger Barnett liable for assault and intentionally inflicting emotional distress in the incident in March 2004. It ordered him to pay four women $73,352 in damages, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which backed the suit, said the group of Mexican nationals was resting in a dry streambed in Douglas, Arizona, when they were approached by Barnett, who was armed with a gun and accompanied by a large dog.

The suit alleged Barnett held them captive at gunpoint, threatening that his dog would attack and that he would shoot anyone who tried to leave.

David Hardy, an attorney representing Barnett, said his client was found not liable on claims of battery, false imprisonment and violation of civil rights, and planned to appeal.

The trial highlighted the issue of vigilante violence in southern Arizona, which is a major thoroughfare for illegal immigrants and the place where several civilian border patrols have operated in recent years.

"This verdict in favor of the plaintiffs sends a strong message condemning vigilante violence against immigrants," MALDEF staff attorney Marisol Perez said in a statement.

Barnett, who claims to have detained more than 10,000 people who crossed the border illegally from Mexico and handed them over to the U.S. Border Patrol, has faced previous civil action.

In November 2006, a jury found Barnett responsible for holding a Mexican-American family at gunpoint during a hunting trip, and awarded them nearly $100,000 in damages.

Read the article by Tim Gaynor in Reuters.

Evidence keeps accumulating that the tide of immigration is ebbing. Tough enforcement laws passed by states like Arizona and Oklahoma and localities like Prince William County, Va., have reportedly spurred Latino immigrants to move elsewhere. Tougher enforcement of federal immigration laws may be having the same effect.

Classrooms in Orange County, Calif., are suddenly half-empty. Latino day laborers seem to be less thick on the ground at their morning gathering places. Remittances to Mexico and other Latin countries are down, and men are returning to some villages from the United States.

Latinos appear to account for a disproportionate share of mortgage foreclosures. The Census Bureau estimates that net immigration in 2007-08 was 14 percent lower than the average for 2000-07, and those estimates don’t cover the period after June 30, when the recession really started hitting.

Demographic forecasters tend to assume that the long-term future will look a lot like the short-term past. That’s why the Census Bureau estimates that there will be more than 100 million people classifying themselves as Hispanics in 2050, compared to 45 million today. But history tells us that trend lines don’t go on forever. Sometimes they turn around and go downward.

The apparent downturn in immigration in the past 18 months is surely not unrelated to the recession that began, the National Bureau of Economic Research now tells us, in December 2007. The gaming industry in Las Vegas - then and for most of the preceding 20 years the nation’s fastest-growing metro area - started declining in 2007, and net immigration to Nevada was down 16 percent in 2007-08 from the 2000-07 levels. And reports are coming in of Latinos leaving town as construction of giant hotels on the Strip is shut down by foreclosure.

But immigration is not just about economics. People move, I have come to think, in pursuit of dreams - or to escape nightmares. One of those dreams - home ownership in America - now seems much less attainable than it did just six months ago, with thousands of foreclosures and with subprime loans to low-income buyers presumably a thing of the past. Meanwhile, birth rates in Mexico and much of Latin America took a sharp turn downward around 1990, which means that those entering the work force there in years hence will have less competition for jobs - fewer nightmares.

Since Congress considered and failed to pass a comprehensive law in 2006 and 2007, we have learned that tougher enforcement of existing law is possible and can reduce illegal immigration. Now we face a sharply different economic situation, which is presumably less conducive to immigration. This may make the need for a comprehensive law less pressing and at the same time make it politically more palatable.

Our history is one of great surges of migration, immigrant and internal, which begin without much in the way of warning and which end unexpectedly. It’s possible - not certain, maybe not likely, but possible - that we’re witnessing the beginning of one of those endpoints now.

Read this article by Michael Barone in the Boston Herald.

The Mexican government has opened a special call center in Arizona to provide a sympathetic ear for citizens caught up in crackdown on illegal immigration in the desert state.

Officials at the Mexican consulate in Tucson said they opened the center last week. It is available 24-hours-a-day to field complaints from Mexican nationals about their treatment in the border state, where as many as half a million illegal immigrants live and work in the shadows.

"We want to offer a human voice at the other end of the line, so they can feel protected and know that someone is here for them," Alejandro Ramos, head of the consulate's Department of Protection, told Reuters.

Feelings run high about illegal immigration in the United States, where an estimated 12 million undocumented workers and their children hide from authorities.

After the U.S. government failed to pass legislation overhauling immigration laws last year, many U.S. states and some local authorities have acted to clamp down on illegal immigrants, including Arizona, which passed a law to block the hiring of illegal workers.

Read the entire article by David Schwartz on Reuters.