Category Archives: Abuse documentation

Abuse documentation

US-Mexico Border Death Map and Database

August 4 2025

No More Deaths releases database of migrant mortalities along US-Mexico Border

Today, No More Deaths released a comprehensive database and map of recovered migrant remains for the entire southern land border. This data will not bring anyone back or undo the decades of suffering and death caused by US border policy and perpetrated by the United States Border Patrol (USBP), and it does not account for the tens of thousands lost or missing in the borderlands—but it does provide the most comprehensive statistical record to date of people who died on their journey into the United States. Through this data we find the following:

  • Depending on the sector, we document anywhere  from 20% to 40% more migrant deaths than CBP’s official count. We also found that USBP makes regular errors when  recording basic information such as name, age, nationality, and date of death.
  • We show that CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has failed to record the vast majority of BP-related deaths (including deaths in custody, by pursuit, falls from the border barrier, use of force, and medical distress). Wall fall deaths are especially underreported and have increased drastically since the first Trump administration.
  • Our database confirms cases of people seeking asylum when they died, and hints towards many more. Since the erosion of asylum protections under the first Trump administration, and increasing under Biden, there has been a massive increase in the deaths of migrants of nationalities more likely to be seeking asylum.
  • Many cases were individuals who resided in the United States. These ranged from people who had travelled to Mexico to visit family and had to make a difficult crossing to return home, to people who were returning after a very recent deportation to a place where they likely had few or no connections. With the new administration’s push for mass deportation, we will likely see more of our neighbors killed by violent US border policy.

Map: https://nomoredeaths.org/migrant-death-mapping/ 

Database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRVeemioXDJKhz6II5RBxPwWwSEr7tWp4gtAO0M7CL2vS45O1LU6sEiE0bEWTdDlFRj-6CHLutuDwkk/pub?output=xlsx
Findings: https://nomoredeaths.org/us-mexico-border-death-map/ 

Methodology: https://nomoredeaths.org/methodology/ 

Recommendations
The death toll from thirty years of Prevention Through Deterrence border policy is staggering. The death of each person listed in the database here, as well as the thousands more who died in Mexico or in a place where data was unavailable or difficult to access, and the likely tens of thousands more whose remains were never found, who disappeared in remote areas of the border, is a tragedy directly caused by increasingly violent US border enforcement and immigration policies, and by the actions of Border Patrol, an agency that has proved time and again that it cannot be reformed. 

  • We call for the end of Prevention Through Deterrence and the abolition of the United States Border Patrol, an agency directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
  • We also call for the abolition of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been empowered and emboldened to create and invisibilize more and more of the harms described here.
  • To ensure that human rights and international law are respected, we echo our open letter of December 2023 in calling for ports of entry to be reopened to asylum seekers. We must also reopen legal asylum pathways which are our responsibility under international law and decades of precedent.
  • We urge medical examiners, justices of the peace, and coroner’s offices to follow the lead of the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, and the El Paso Office of the Medical Examiner in recording migrant deaths. This would go a long way towards creating an alternative to the highly flawed CBP database, and toward ensuring accountability and promoting better understanding of individual causes of death, and of the crisis of mass border death more broadly. 

We’ve pointed at just a few preliminary findings from the large amount of data collected in this database. We hope others can use the database as a resource for continued research, advocacy, and direct aid.

Abuse documentation, featured

Newly Released – El Paso Sector Migrant Death Map and Database

On March 18, No More Deaths released a searchable map, database, and report documenting the upsurge in migrant deaths in the New Mexico and the far West Texas borderlands. The “El Paso Sector Migrant Death Database” provides the most comprehensive account to date of the past 15 years of migrant deaths along the US/Mexico border in CBP’s El Paso Sector, which includes all of New Mexico, as well as El Paso and Hudspeth counties in Texas. 

The El Paso Sector Migrant Death Database comprises a downloadable database and map, similar to the OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants published by Humane Borders for the state of Arizona, along with a report briefly analyzing this data. We found that:

  • CBP is undercounting migrant deaths in the El Paso Sector: From 2012 to 2022, our database shows a higher number of deaths than CBP’s data for the sector, with some years showing as much as two, three, or even four times (in 2020) as many deaths.
  • 15% of all migrant deaths were caused by use of force, wall falls, Border Patrol chases, or were deaths that occurred in custody. CBP’s records report only a fraction of these CBP-related deaths. In some cases, field investigators stated that they were obstructed from performing a proper investigation or from interviewing BP agents involved in a death.
  • Along with a sharp increase in overall deaths in BP’s El Paso Sector, women now account for more deaths than men, a statistic unprecedented anywhere else along the border, for any year. One explanation for this is the increasing inability of people to seek asylum at official ports of entry, which forces people not prepared for a desert journey into more remote areas.
  • Remains are increasingly recovered closer to populated areas. While the US border policy of Prevention Through Deterrence initially drew inspiration from the “success” of El Paso’s Operation Hold The Line in pushing migrants away from urban areas, our data show that, due to increased border militarization, an urban area can be essentially as dangerous and deadly as the middle of nowhere.

Demands and recommendations

CBP and the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) have time and again proven themselves dishonest in their accounting of migrant deaths and of CBP-related deaths. In this report, we reveal one small piece of what is missing from their data. But data and transparency will never bring back the lives lost, or stop the ongoing crisis of death and disappearance that is a direct result of US border policy. The only way to prevent the death and suffering that have become so commonplace in the US-Mexico borderlands is to end the policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, abolish the US Border Patrol, and dismantle the border barriers that have divided so many communities. At a minimum, we demand the following:

  1. While CBP should make good on its obligation to the GAO to provide complete data on migrant deaths and take transparency seriously, their accounting will never be trustworthy. Entities independent of border enforcement agencies must provide oversight, data collection, and accountability, working with state and county medical examiners, justices of the peace, law enforcement, and other organizations to make their data reflect the best information available. 
  1. CBP and the OPR must apply CBP-related death designations consistently and transparently, and allow outside oversight of this process.
  1. Restrictions on asylum, like Texas’ Senate Bill 4, or those proposed by the White House and US senators for 2024, will cause death, injury, and suffering on the US-Mexico border, as people escaping violence, poverty, and climate change are forced to find alternative ways to enter the United States. In accordance with US and international law, CBP must open ports of entry to asylum seekers and remove all restrictions on access to the asylum process, including illegal policies of turnbacks and metering.
  1. End the practices of vehicle and foot chases which have made CBP the deadliest federal law enforcement agency in the nation.
  1. The border wall is a humanitarian disaster. Our data show the number of deaths caused by the wall are far higher than CBP reports. Walls have not reduced migration, but serve only to cause untold suffering; they must all be taken down.
Abuse documentation, News coverage
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NEW REPORT FINDS PIMA COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT HAS HISTORY OF NOT RESPONDING TO CALLS FROM LOST MIGRANTS

Danyelle Khmara, AZPM News, 20 November 2023

A new report found that the way the Pima County Sheriff’s Department responds to distress calls from undocumented migrants lost in the desert is discriminatory, violates the department’s own standards of conduct, and has led to deaths and disappearances that could have been avoided. The sheriff’s department disputes these findings.

Advocacy group No More Deaths reviewed more than two thousand 911 calls handled by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department from the summer of 2016 to the summer of 2018, a sample of 64 emergency calls transferred to Border Patrol in June 2022, and another 4 cases of English speakers calling for emergency search and rescue during the same month, which No More Deaths obtained under public records law.

Continue reading →
Abuse documentation, News coverage
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NO MORE DEATHS REPORT: “SEPARATE AND DEADLY” REVEALS DISCRIMINATORY 911 CALL SYSTEM IN US/MEXICO BORDERLANDS

ImmigrationProf Blog, 15 November 2023

Yesterday, No More Deaths released Separate and Deadly: Segregation of 911 Emergency Services in the Arizona Borderlands. The report is the latest installment of Disappeared, a four-part series that examines the Border Patrol’s role in the deaths and disappearances in the U.S./Mexico border region. Separate and Deadly analyzes the Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Department’s emergency response system. The report finds vastly different responses to the distress calls on 911 of migrants based on their citizenship status. Migrant distress calls are routinely transferred to the Border Patrol, which No More Deaths says has “demonstrated a deadly negligence when it comes to emergency response and rescue.”  In 2023, the remains of 175 people have been found in Arizona. Countless more remain disappeared.

Abuse documentation, News coverage, Updates
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REPORT FINDS ARIZONA 911 DISPATCHERS FAIL TO HELP LOST MIGRANTS

Tanvi Misra, High Country News, 14 November 2023

On June 27, 2022, around 1:44 a.m., a man lost in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona called 911. An emergency services dispatcher for Pima County answered. The man, clearly distressed, tried to describe his surroundings and explain that he was lost, wet and freezing. But before he could finish, the dispatcher interrupted him, saying, “I don’t understand, un momento,” and abruptly transferred the call to the U.S. Border Patrol. The agent who picked up shushed the caller as he started to speak —“Cállate!” (“Be quiet!”) — and spoke to the dispatcher instead, in English. Then they hung up, leaving the man to the agent. An incident report suggests that no actions were taken to follow up or locate the lost caller: “No additional calls have come from the subject. … At this time the caller has not been identified and not located.” 

Continue reading →

Abuse documentation, featured

NEW REPORT: “Separate and Deadly” Reveals Discriminatory 911 Call System in US/Mexico Borderlands

TUCSON, Arizona – On November 14th, No More Deaths released Separate and Deadly: Segregation of 911 Emergency Services in the Arizona Borderlands. The report is the latest installment of Disappeared, a four-part series that examines Border Patrol’s role in the crisis of mass death and disappearance in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Separate and Deadly analyzes the Pima County Sheriff’s Department’s emergency response system and the segregation of 911 calls in the border region. The findings of the report shed light on a discriminatory system in which vastly different responses are allocated to callers based on their perceived citizenship status. For people migrating through the region, their distress calls to 911 are customarily transferred to Border Patrol – an agency that has already demonstrated a deadly negligence when it comes to emergency response and rescue.

From the report:

“In March 2018, a man contacted 911 eleven times over the course of ten hours. He was lost and alone. As the hours passed, his condition clearly deteriorated, and his voice began to fade. It appeared that Border Patrol was not actively searching for him… Pima County dispatchers continued to transfer his call to Border Patrol every time he called… The county’s own Search and Rescue team was never notified, and the county never activated a search for him. Eventually the man stopped calling. The outcome of his case is unknown.”

The No More Deaths team reviewed thousands of 911 calls and took testimony from humanitarian aid volunteers, in addition to other relevant data sources. In 99% of the calls where the caller was presumed to be undocumented, no intake or assessment was conducted, in 68% of the calls the dispatcher lacked fluency in Spanish to be able to communicate effectively and 50% of the callers were given no notice before being transferred to Border Patrol. 

“Not only is call segregation based on presumed immigration status unlawful, the consequences of such practices are deadly,” says Parker Deighan, one of the report’s contributors. “The findings of this report raise serious questions about the county’s complicity in the ongoing crisis of death and disappearance.”

In 2023 alone, the remains of 175 people have been found in Arizona. Countless more remain disappeared.

Abuse documentation, Local, Press releases, Updates

Multiple remains recovered this week

TUCSON, AZ:  On Sunday, May 5th, No More Deaths launched a search and rescue mission in the West Desert outside of Ajo, AZ, resulting in the ultimate recovery of four sets of human remains.  The remains were encountered in the Growler Valley, the same valley in which Dr. Scott Warren was issued as citation for leaving water in summer 2017. Dr. Warren has been on trial the past two days and continuing into today for charges related to that incident

The search and rescue was launched in response to a call that came through the No More Deaths Missing Migrant Hotline after family members calling the hotline asked for support in urging Border Patrol’s Search and Rescue arm to initiate a rescue operation and CBP refused to mobilize resources.  The first day of the search resulted in the team encountering a set of skeletal human remains that had been found and reported to the Pima County Sheriff in December 2017 by the Armadillos del Desierto, a San Diego based search and rescue organization. The Sheriff never recovered the body. The second day of the search, volunteers found three more sets of remains within a few miles of a newly installed rescue beacon.

The Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, where the remains were recovered, is one of the deadliest migration corridors of the US/Mexico borderlands.  The Refuge does not grant No More Deaths and others humanitarian groups access to administrative roads, even in emergency situations. Search groups must embark on foot from the edge of the wilderness boundary – greatly diminishing response time and scope.

Dr. Warren has testified in court to his spiritual beliefs that compel him to provide humanitarian aid on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge  The discovery of four sets of remains in two days confirmed Warren’s testimony that “the Growler Valley is the area of highest and most need.

The No More Deaths abuse documentation team is investigating systemic governmental inaction to reported emergencies from distressed migrants in the desert. The findings will be published in Part III of The Disappeared report later this year.

The remains from the past two days have been reported to the Pima County Sheriff. The missing person has not been found.

Note: The image above reflects remains recovered in April of 2019 and does not include data about the individuals mentioned in this article.