The number of deceased immigrants recovered at the U.S.-Mexico border spiked during President Joe Biden’s first full year in office last year to the highest number on record, according to data acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Washington Examiner.
Data tracked by federal law enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border indicate that a record-high 880 immigrants who illegally entered the United States were found deceased in fiscal 2022, which ended in September. The Washington Examiner obtained the Border Patrol data Monday through a FOIA request filed in July 2022.
The 880 deaths are far higher than the 247 to 329 deceased found each year between 2014 and 2020. Landowners, as well as police from the local, state, tribal, and federal levels, made the discoveries and reported the numbers to the federal government.
The new revelation underscores the human toll of the Biden administration's border crisis — with more people apprehended crossing into the U.S. illegally since March 2021 than any other time in the Border Patrol's centurylong existence.
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The number of immigrant deaths had climbed to 568 in 2021 as illegal entry incursions simultaneously increased that year.
Immigrant advocacy groups have said in the past that the addition of border wall during the Trump administration has forced illegal immigrants to cross in more remote areas. More recently, the American Immigration Council told the Washington Examiner that the Biden administration's choice to continue imposing Title 42, a pandemic-related policy that allowed the government to turn away some immigrants at the border, was a factor in the uptick in deaths because the policy forced people to cross in remote areas to avoid arrest.
“It is a staggering death toll, and it's a sign of how desperate people are that they are willing to take these risks,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the council’s policy director, said last fall. “Title 42 has sort of encouraged people to keep trying to cross the border until they make it through. That has driven people into more dangerous crossing locations."
More bodies were recovered in the south-central region of Texas, which encompasses the border town of Del Rio, than any other of the nine regions that the Border Patrol divides the 2,000-mile southern border by.
The Del Rio region reported 255 deceased immigrants, followed by 210 in the southeastern Texas region of the Rio Grande Valley and then 134 in Tucson, Arizona.
In an incident that garnered international attention last summer, 53 immigrants died as a result of being trapped inside a tractor-trailer that a human smuggler had abandoned on the side of the road in San Antonio on its way from the border city of Laredo, Texas.
Immigrants have drowned trying to swim across the Rio Grande, while others died after falling from the top of the 30-foot-tall border wall erected during Trump’s tenure.
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While the number of deaths has risen over the past couple of years, so too has the number of immigrants rescued by Border Patrol. The dataset for 2022 is not available, but publicly accessible information shows that rescues were up threefold from 2019 to 2021.
Between October 2021 and June, agents have rescued 16,897 immigrants, compared to 4,920 in all of 2019, 5,071 in 2020, and 12,833 in 2021.