The Deadliest Crossing: Arizona desert has claimed thousands of migrants' lives
alongside asylum seekers rounded up by Customs and Border Protection. Adults are crammed into standing-room-only cells, and families with young children sleep in caged areas on concrete floors. At least seven children have died in CBP custody since last year, after nearly a decade of the agency reporting no child fatalities.
It’s estimated that nearly 9,000 people have died trying to cross the Sonoran since the 1990s, though the number is likely much higher, as only a fraction of the bodies are recovered due to the vastness of the terrain. Photograph courtesy of Aguilas del Desiertoa sleepy desert oasis, with low-slung homes and a whitewashed Spanish Colonial Revival-style plaza ringed by towering palm trees.
Castillo took me up to the local museum he manages and dug up a story from the July 10th, 1980, edition of the“Grueling desert search finds 13 alive, 13 dead.” A group of Salvadoran migrants fleeing the country’s civil war had lost their way in the Growler Valley, the same death trap where Warren was charged for leaving water.
The government’s readiness to punish humanitarians has left their ranks uneasy, but locals say they are not cowed. Volunteers continue to make regular water drop-offs in Cabeza Prieta and other off-limits areas, and the Ajo Samaritans recently opened a migrant-aid station at the southern end of town. “If anything, this crackdown has made us more resolved to make sure work continues,” says one. “People of conscience must act.
A map posted at a migrant shelter in Sonoyta, across the border from Lukeville, Arizona, shows key reference points in the desert. Photograph by Jason Motlaghhand-drawn map of the borderlands posted at the Sonoyta shelter.
And the Sinaloa cartel, the dominant drug mafia in the region, knows this. Migrants who can’t afford to hire a coyote will sometimes mule for the narcos, whose well-worn routes and high-tech smuggling tools up the odds of skirting Border Patrol and surviving the treacherous desert crossing.
Cartel scouts are known to rape migrant women and summarily execute people who wander into their borderlands territory without approval. One high mountain pass has a “rape tree” draped with the trophy bras and panties of violated women, and migrant bodies have been found decapitated. I drive out there one morning, past shuttered garages and food stands. The road is dead quiet save for the occasional tractor-trailers that whoosh past en route to Mexicali and Nogales. Less than 40 yards separates the pavement from the border, nothing more than a post-and-rail barrier meant to stop vehicles from plowing through. On April 16th, buses pulled up here and nearly 400 migrants walked across, the largest single group ever apprehended by CBP, mostly families with children.
On a Saturday in June, about 50 volunteers in fluorescent-green shirts gather at a pass that runs into the Growler Valley. A wildlife ranger wearing a bulletproof vest and a Stetson drives up to inspect everyone’s permits. To stay in the law’s good graces, the Aguilas play by the rules and report any encounter with migrants, dead or alive. Everyone loads up on water bottles and puts fresh batteries in their walkie-talkies before filing down into the valley.
We press deeper into a Mars-like plateau of dark volcanic rock, and another volunteer collapses from heatstroke, which brings everything to a halt. Ricardo grumbles in frustration, and when we resume searching he breaks away from the line to trawl a dried-up creek bed. The tangles of mesquite and palo verde that line its banks offer pathetic cover from the sun, but it’s something: Scattered in the underbrush, we find water jugs, torn shirts, empty tuna cans.
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