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US-Mexico Border Death Map and Database

August 4, 2025 No More Deaths

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.

Updates

Desert Aid Trainings: Capacity Building Through Knowledge and Skill Shares

July 2, 2025 Paige Corich-Kleim

By a desert aid volunteer

No More Deaths began as a fully volunteer-run

organization, but over the years it has evolved and grown.

Thanks to the support of our donors we now provide

stipends for some volunteers and have staff positions.

However, most of the day-to-day work in the desert remains

unpaid.

People come from all over the world to support our work,

we have a base of aid workers in Southern Arizona and over

the past 21 years over 1000 people have joined us to

provide humanitarian aid in the borderlands.

For out-of-town volunteers, we offer housing, travel, and

food stipends, as well as access to our gear-lending library.

BIPOC volunteers are eligible for additional financial

support. Volunteers participate in initial in-town training

and field training before beginning their time with us. After

volunteers have spent time with us in the field, they can

become desert aid working group members where they

participate in decision-making and have access to more

trainings as well as stipends.

The work our volunteers and staff do is dynamic and

challenging, most days we have at least one team of 2-4

people driving a truck to remote areas to leave life-saving

supplies in the desert. During these trips they may come in

contact with people who are lost, injured, and in distress,

they may find somebody who has passed away. Because of

this, our training does not stop after the first week.

Volunteers and staff continuously mentor each other,

teaching new skills and coordinating trainings to better

respond to the needs of people crossing the border. Over

the past few years these are some of the trainings volunteers

and staff have attended:

Wilderness First Aid, Wilderness First Responder: In

partnership with numerous borderlands humanitarian aid

groups and with financial support from Mutual Aid Disaster

Relief and other humanitarian aid organizations, volunteers

became certified Wilderness First Aid providers and

Wilderness First Responders, free of charge. The trainings

were put on by Larkspur Rescue and NOLS. Instructorswere able to contextualize course content for the particular

environments volunteers work in.

Criminalization of Humanitarian Aid and Protocols: We

maintain that humanitarian aid is never a crime, and work

within our protocols, which have been reviewed by legal

counsel. However, we also recognize that during the current

administration, like the last Trump presidency, the targeting

of migrant communities will expand and include those who

stand in solidarity with them. Volunteers reviewed the

criminal charges that Scott Warren and others in the

organization have faced over the years and learned more

about our Foundations of Borderland Humanitarian Relief

(full document available on our website) and our desert aid

protocols. These documents are based on the Red Cross

Code of Conduct and a human rights framework.

Chainsaw Safety: Over the winter No More Deaths, along

with local Samaritans chapters and Humane Borders,

supported a camp along the border wall where asylum

seekers would often have to wait for hours or overnight to

be picked up by Border Patrol. NMD’s main contribution

was firewood. We hosted a chainsaw safety course for

volunteers to learn how to cut firewood down to size. The

course was put on by volunteers who work as arborists and

wildland firefighters.

Media Interviews and Public Presentation: The No More

Deaths’ Media Coordinators put on a training for volunteers

and staff to learn about No More Deaths talking points and

media strategy, as well as reviewing materials made for

public presentations and outreach.

Do you have a skill you would be willing to share with our

volunteers? Please reach out!

Possible topics include wilderness medicine, know your

rights, meeting facilitation, search and rescue/recovery,

vehicle maintenance, overland navigation, conflict

mediation, and many more! Remote and Southern Arizona

opportunities are appreciated.

Abuse documentation, featured

Newly Released – El Paso Sector Migrant Death Map and Database

March 18, 2024 No More Deaths

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:

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.

CBP and the OPR must apply CBP-related death designations consistently and transparently, and allow outside oversight of this process.

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.

End the practices of vehicle and foot chases which have made CBP the deadliest federal law enforcement agency in the nation.

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, featured

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

November 14, 2023 No More Deaths

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.

Updates

Left To Die Virtual Release

February 3, 2021 No More Deaths

Updates

NEW REPORT: Left to Die: Border Patrol, Search & Rescue and the Crisis of Disappearance

February 3, 2021 No More Deaths

Today, along with La Coalición de Derechos Humanos, we released the third installment of our report series, Disappeared: How US Border Enforcement Agencies are Fueling a Missing Person’s Crisis. The report, Left to Die: Border Patrol, Search and Rescue, and the Crisis of Disappearance finds that Border Patrol systematically ignores and mishandles search and rescue emergencies in the borderlands.

Read the full report Here

Border Patrol has inserted itself as the sole responder for undocumented migrants in need of rescue. When someone crossing the desert calls 911, county governments transfer the calls to Border Patrol.

By looking at emergency calls received by the Coalición de Derechos Humanos 24-hour Missing Migrant Crisis Line, we find that Border Patrol did not conduct a confirmed search or rescue mobilization in 63% of cases. This includes 40% of cases where Border Patrol directly refused to take any measures in response to a life-or-death emergency. When Border Patrol did respond, the searches were severely diminished in time and resources when compared to searches for US citizens.

Check out this short video of the findings:

Press releases, Updates

Second Military Style Raid in Two Months: Border Patrol detains 12 people receiving humanitarian aid

October 7, 2020 No More Deaths

Arivaca, AZ: After sunset on October 5th, US Border Patrol entered No More Deaths’ humanitarian aid station, Byrd Camp with a federal warrant, for a second nighttime raid in two months. Volunteers were held for 3 hours while 12 people who were receiving medical care, food, water, and shelter from the 100+ degree heat were detained.

In a massive show of armed force, Border Patrol, along with the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), descended on the camp with an armored tank, ATVS, a helicopter, and many marked and unmarked vehicles. Agents armed with assault rifles chased and terrorized those that were receiving care, all while the helicopter hovered low above them kicking up dust and debris, making it nearly impossible to see. Border patrol smashed windows, broke doors, and destroyed essential camp infrastructure as well as supplies.This was after heavily surveilling the camp and patrolling its perimeter, creating an antagonistic and distressing environment for those receiving care, since late Saturday night on the 3rd.

Since the previous raid on July 31st, Border Patrol has refused on multiple occasions to meet with volunteers to discuss previous shared agreements that upheld the right to provide humanitarian aid. The sector chief sent No More Deaths representatives a formal letter asserting this refusal.

Border Patrol’s continual surveillance and harassment of Byrd Camp keeps patients from receiving essential care. This criminalization of the humanitarian aid and medical care we provide is only a furtherance of the agency’s deadly policies. Border Patrol detains people in unsafe and deadly facilities where medical neglect is rampant and human rights abuses are well documented.

Paige Corich Kleim, a volunteer present for the raid yesterday said this about the previous raid in late July “Once again, Border Patrol is concentrating their resources on interfering with humanitarian aid during the most deadly time of year for people crossing the border, People are dying in the desert because of border enforcement policy, and now Border Patrol wants to prevent people from accessing life-saving assistance. We view this as a clear violation of international humanitarian law.”

Since 2004, Byrd Camp has been a location where people crossing through the harsh Sonoran Desert can find food, water, medical care, and respite. Byrd Camp has always operated openly and transparently and offered humanitarian aid according to Red Cross protocols. No More Deaths affirms the right of all people, regardless of nationality, to give and receive humanitarian aid. Our volunteers are specifically trained to respect autonomy when providing care as is standard practice in the medical field and only call 911 and Border Patrol with patient consent. We will continue to be a presence in the desert as long as Border Patrol policies create a crisis of death and disappearance.