The volume of illegal border crosser deaths over the past decade really hits home when you look at a map of Arizona’s border region with red dots for each body recovery. I’ve posted one such map with the locations of bodies found from 1999-2009 in the “Related Documents” link to the left.
This map shows the GPS coordinates for 1,755 border deaths from 1999-2009. It is courtesy of Humane Borders, Inc. The cartographic and design and data development is by John F. Chamblee and Michael T. Malone.
In our special report, Decade of Death, we included a map of Arizona and a map showing the breakdown of deaths by Border Patrol sectors, but we didn’t include a map like the one above. That’s because, in addition to not having enough room in the print edition, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to create a map that included GPS coordinates for all the illegal border crosser bodies found from 2001-2010.
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Fortunately, others are hard at work on creating this map.
Chamblee, of the University of Georgia, is working along with Gary Christopherson, of the University of Arizona’s Center for Applied Spatial Analysis, to create a detailed map of all the border crosser deaths over the last 10-plus years. Their work is part of a Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office project called OGIS that is being funded by anonymous $200,000 donation. They are also creating a database of unidentified and missing persons and developing a computer program that can find matches between the two. The map and database will be a tremendous tool for the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, which handles most of the illegal border crossers who die in Arizona.
Here’s a story about the OGIS project from June 2008: Anonymous $200K gift gets ball rolling
Even though Chamblee and Christopherson aren’t finished yet with the complete map, they have already made some key findings, such as this:
• Between 2003 and 2007, between Nogales and Lukeville, there was an overall increase of approximately 1.5 miles in the distances between deaths and major roads, and about a 450 foot increase in the distance between deaths and all roads, including jeep trails and two-tracks.
This finding backs what many experts have been saying for years: the massive buildup of agents, fences and technology along Arizona’s border has pushed illegal border crossers into ever-more-remote terrain, making the trek more dangerous.
It will be interesting to see if this trend has continued through 2008-2010.
Chamblee and Christopherson were able to figure this out because, with the help of UA graduate student Michael Malone, they have worked over the past two years to determine GPS coordinates for all illegal border crosser bodies recovered in Arizona, which is a huge feat.
You see, not all law enforcement in Arizona record GPS locations when they make a body recovery. Some locations are recorded like this: “3 miles southwest of milemarker 101, Arizona 86,” or worse, “Desert area, Amado, Ariz.”
I can’t overstate how important this is for everybody studying the border deaths. When their map is complete, we will have a more comprehensive map of Arizona border deaths than anything created to date. Up until now when the Arizona Daily Star, Humane Borders or anybody else wanted to map the bodies, we had to rely solely on Border Patrol data. Since the agency requires its agents to take GPS coordinates for all border deaths, their data is ready-made to map. The problem with using only Border Patrol data, however, is that they don’t represent all the illegal border crosser bodies handled by the county medical examiner’s offices in the last decade.
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Star’s Border Death Database up-to-date.
During my reporting for the Decade of Death special report, my colleague Kori Rumore helped me update our Border Death Database by going back comparing all of our files from 2004-2010 with the current information from the medical examiner's offices, and by retrofitting the database with deaths from 2001-2003.
As a result, we now have a searchable database with up-to-date information on each of the nearly 2,000 people who have died crossing Arizona’s desert since 2001. The database is based on information from the Pima, Cochise and Yuma county medical examiner’s offices. Pima handles all illegal border crosser bodies from Santa Cruz and Pinal counties as well.
Our laborious update of the database is important because it allows us, and you, to get a more accurate account of who died, how they died and a little bit about who they were: age, name, sex and in some cases, where they were from.
Because we get monthly reports from the medical examiner’s offices shortly after the month ends, we put up "hot off the press" information on the database. If we don't update it from time to time, we leave outdated information for cases where investigators have since gathered much more information, such as a person's identity or age, the cause of death, and their home country. As we detailed in our special report, figuring out this information is often an arduous task that can take weeks, months and in some cases, years. So, by going back through and updating the cases, we’ve created a much more useful database.
For example, I was able to quickly figure out this afternoon the exact breakdown by sex of the 1,955 illegal border crossers who have died since 2001:
• 1,427 were men, 73 percent
• 403 were women, 21 percent
• 125 are people’s who sex has never been determined, 6 percent.
I was also able to quickly get the yearly count, by calendar year:
2001 - 77
2002 - 147
2003 - 196
2004 - 218
2005 - 245
2006 - 224
2007 - 249
2008 - 190
2009 - 223
2010 - 186*
Total - 1,955
* 2010 through Aug. 18
One note, the Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos also tracks the deaths and keeps counts that match up with the federal fiscal year used by the Border Patrol, which is Oct. 1-Sept. 30.
