Apps, 911 services and cell phones do not compensate for the deadly effects of more restrictive border policies

The US-Mexico border will once again be a deciding factor in the US presidential election.

With voters ranking immigration high on their list of concerns, both Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump have pledged to strengthen border security and curb the flow of asylum seekers across the country’s southern border.

As an academic and a daughter of immigrants, I wanted to understand what restrictive migration policies had accomplished in the past. Digging through newspaper archives, government reports, and NGO accounts from the early 1990s to the present, I found that while laws and policies intended to slow migration at the U.S.-Mexico border generally did not reduce migration, they consistently led to more migrants dying along the way.

I also discovered that innovations in mobile phones that were supposed to make asylum safer and easier are not as helpful as they were hoped.

More migrations

Since 1993, decades of economic instability, political instability, increasing violence and the effects of climate change across Latin America have caused migration rates to rise as people flee life-threatening situations. In 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded about 2.5 million apprehensions and deportations of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, a 750% increase since 1992.

This increase in the early 1990s roughly coincided with Operation Blockade, a federal effort to tighten security at the relatively porous border checkpoint in El Paso, Texas. By deploying about 450 border patrol agents along a 20-mile stretch to verify that all those entering the U.S. had a visa or other authorization, the U.S. aimed to deter illegal crossings at El Paso.

To avoid document checks, a growing number of migrants have begun taking longer and more dangerous routes through the desert to reach the U.S.

Many of them are asylum seekers fleeing persecution and other dangers at home, with the goal of reaching the U.S. and filing an asylum application. This is called filing a “defensive” asylum application, as opposed to a “positive” application, which is filed before traveling to the U.S.

It’s a once-common process that has become even more difficult in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration began requiring migrants to remain in Mexico and apply for asylum in the U.S. from there under Title 42. After that rule expired in May 2023, the Biden administration created a new federal rule that allows border officials to deny asylum to nearly any migrant at an official port of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border who had not previously applied for asylum en route to the U.S.

Under the new rules, asylum seekers must apply for asylum before they arrive at the border using the new CBP One mobile app, developed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

This mobile innovation was supposed to streamline the asylum process. But the app is notoriously buggy, and the agency has not added enough additional time slots to its calendar for the flood of new asylum nominations that would otherwise be “defensive.”

Asylum seekers, unable to legally enter the U.S. until they file an application, remain trapped on the Mexican side of the border for an average of seven months while waiting to see a Customs and Border Protection officer.

Migrants staying in shelters in Mexican border cities say they live in fear that the persecutors they fled will find them there. They are also vulnerable to the violence and kidnappings that have targeted asylum seekers along the border.

Death now or later?

As the United States has tightened security at official border checkpoints over the years, as it did in El Paso, migrants have begun crossing into remote areas of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.

This treacherous route has made an already dangerous journey even deadlier. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that border fatality rates more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, even though there was no increase in the number of registered migrants entering the U.S. during that time.

In 2023, nearly half of the 686 migrants who died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border died in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, mostly due to extreme heat and cold. Before Operation Blockade, fewer than a third of those died trying to cross into the U.S.—205 in 1993.

“The punishment of difficult terrain” constitutes a distinct migration policy, to paraphrase scholar Jason De Léon from his 2015 book The Land of Open Graves.

To reduce migrant deaths in the Arizona desert, in 2008 the relief organization Humane Borders negotiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to install public safety communications equipment on watchtowers along the border that year. The equipment allowed migrants to call 911—but no one else—to seek help.

But migrants risk deportation by calling 911. A 2023 report by the humanitarian organization No More Deaths found that nearly all 911 calls for help from suspected migrants in Pima County, Arizona, were being directed to Customs and Border Protection instead of immediate search-and-rescue support. Border Patrol agents can then pinpoint the caller’s location using the tower’s monitoring equipment, including radar, imaging sensors, and edge-processing equipment.

Like local emergency dispatchers, border guards are required to assess needs and provide emergency medical care. However, they can also detain undocumented migrants for deportation.

“As soon as you try to call someone to come get you,” one migrant told researchers in a 2017 study, Border Patrol agents “know where you are and they’ll start looking for you.”

Those struggling with dehydration or trauma face a grim choice. If they don’t call 911, they could die in the desert. If they do, they could die later, either in U.S. immigration detention centers — where dozens of people die each year from preventable medical or mental health problems — or at home, if they’re sent back to the dangers they fled.

Research suggests that while some migrants feel safer carrying a phone, knowing that they or smugglers can call for help in an emergency, others are too afraid of detection to carry or use a mobile phone.

The ability to call for emergency help has prevented several deaths on America’s border. The Tucson 911 call center reported receiving about 40 calls a day from the border region in 2021 alone. But restrictive border policies make it difficult to save lives with a cell phone.

The need and desire to emigrate to the U.S. has increased in recent decades, but interest in immigration to the country has declined, with deadly consequences.

This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.