Deaths of illegal immigrants crossing the Southwest border have surged since the mid-1990s, with the majority of the increase between 1998 and 2005 concentrated in Arizona, according to a report to Congress.
Meanwhile, the report found the number of deaths among women illegal immigrant crossers has more than doubled in those same seven years — and more than half died in Arizona.
The report took the Border Patrol to task for not having a uniform standard nationwide for collecting data on migrant deaths.
While most deaths have involved men, deaths among women rose from 9 percent to 21 percent of the total between 1998 and 2005, according to the Border Patrol data. “Deaths among women in the Tucson sector accounted for the majority of the overall increase in deaths among women in all sectors,” the study said.
The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector encompasses about the easternmost three-fourths of the Arizona-Mexico border and has been the nation’s busiest point for illegal immigration for years.
The Government Accountability Office performed the study at the request of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., using data from sources that included the Border Patrol, the National Center for Health Statistics and state vital statistics registries.
Illegal immigrant deaths more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, the GAO said, although there was no corresponding doubling of illegal entries.
The GAO, the investigative arm for Congress, noted that the Border Patrol was inconsistent in dealings with local authorities, including medical examiners or county coroners, leaving questions about data reliability. Some “reported that the nature and methods for communicating with local authorities had changed from one year to the next,” the study said.
The Tucson sector only began contacting medical officials in one county with a relatively high number of deaths in 2005 for related information and data “may represent an undercount of the total number of border-crossing deaths in that sector,” according to the GAO.
Calls to the Border Patrol for comment on the study were not immediately returned.
“It doesn’t take a GAO study for those of us on the ground to know that deaths have dramatically increased,” said Isabel Garcia, a spokesman for the human rights group Derechos Humanos. “The most objectionable part is that … the Border Patrol has never been interested in telling the truth about it.”
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