DOÑA ANA COUNTY, N.M. — Last month, the Texas Tribune published a landmark data-driven piece about a spike in migrant deaths in the desert outside of El Paso following the Star City’s entry into Operation Lone Star. The piece was a team effort that crossed state lines, reported by Uriel García and Yuriko Schumacher at the Tribune and Patrick Lohmann of independent newsroom Source New Mexico.
The team piggybacked on the tireless efforts of nonprofit rescue groups along the border who help migrants in distress and recover human remains. Last year, the organization No Más Muertes (No More Deaths) put out a report alleging that CBP had been significantly underreporting migrant fatalities. (The Big Bend Sentinel reported on this study — and the agency’s response to accusations — in April of last year.)
Border policy is officially the domain of the federal government and “prevention through deterrence” has been the strategy since the mid-90s. “Setting up a visible line of Border Patrol agents at the border sent a message that was ultimately, ‘Don’t come into the country illegally,’” García — one of the Tribune reporters on this piece — explained. “That didn’t stop migrants. In fact, what they ended up doing was taking more dangerous routes around urban areas.”
In March 2021, the state of Texas implemented its own “prevention through deterrence” in the form of Operation Lone Star, which funneled billions of dollars into visible law enforcement presence along the border. Eligible counties and municipalities could tap into the funding by issuing local emergency declarations — Presidio County did so in July 2022, when former County Judge Cinderela Guevara proclaimed that the county was under “invasion” by migrants.
The city of El Paso joined Operation Lone Star at the tail end of 2022, and groups like No Más Muertes started seeing a jump in activity in the most remote reaches of southern New Mexico and Far West Texas almost immediately.
The Sentinel caught up with García to talk about the process of reporting the piece — and what might be next for the Texas borderlands.
I’m curious what sparked this piece — had y’all been tracking migrant deaths already or did a rescue group tip you off?
It was kind of about creating a story that was hiding in plain sight. Other people had written about this topic in the past — [migrant rescue group No Más Muertes] had done a whole report just last year, so we knew the numbers were going up. But one of the things that I think makes our story a little different is trying to answer and explore the question of why this was happening.
What stood out to me is that El Paso specifically had not been experiencing this amount of deaths. Sure, there are deaths all along the border and other places have higher numbers, but El Paso had not seen this before.
Can you tell me a little bit about the data-gathering process?
UG: I’d like to give credit where credit’s due, because I think that anyone who reports along the border wishes that they had this much detailed information — but what happened in this case was that No More Deaths had their own set of data, which they compared to the CBP data.
The federal government takes really long to process some of these records requests, particularly when it comes to immigration. So I talked to my co-reporter, [Yuriko], the data reporter on this piece, and I told her to analyze it and see what she found on her own. She came back with a whole bunch of findings that went beyond my gut check.
Did you feel like anything obvious got left out?
One of the things I wish we could have done was that we were trying to get in touch with some of the families who lost someone in this part of the desert. That didn’t work out — it wasn’t for lack of trying. We were in touch with a couple families who seemed to want to talk, but ultimately decided not to, for different reasons. It came down to the fact that they didn’t want to put themselves in a very vulnerable position.
El Paso was a relatively late holdout on Operation Lone Star money. Can you remind me of what that looked like — what the political backdrop was and why they decided to join?
There’s a little bit of context here that didn’t get put in the story because it’s kind of getting lost in the weeds. But back in the fall of 2021 Abbott had issued an order to criminalize the transportation of migrants from the border to the interior, and the pretext that was used at the time was because they could potentially be spreading the Coronavirus. There was a lawsuit in federal court in El Paso.
Moving forward, when Governor Abbott needed some of the border counties to help out in Operation Lone Star — to be able to put up soldiers and state police — El Paso didn’t necessarily want to cooperate because of the conflict [over the transportation of migrants.] That translated into El Paso being among the last to join in December 2022, and the reason they ended up joining Operation Lone Star was because there were thousands of migrants being released and many of them were sleeping in the streets. It was a public safety concern.
Ultimately Abbott reversed his policy of not wanting migrants to be transported. The mayor needed buses to get the migrants transported out of El Paso, so he issued an emergency declaration and the state sent transportation resources — that’s how the city ended up joining.
What was going on with the border at the federal level at the time and how did that play into state and local policy?
There was a lot going on. Biden came into office, and even though he’s been accused of being pro-open borders and pro-illegal immigration, ultimately he wasn’t any of those things. That’s not a political statement. He continued some of Trump’s crackdown on the border [from his first term] and didn’t immediately reverse others. Even when he was proposing different policies that would have provided a pathway to legally enter the U.S., it was coupled with other restrictions on asylum law. This all coincided with a lot of people — particularly from Venezuela and other places in South America — coming to El Paso. I don’t think that El Paso was prepared for the number of people that were coming, and Biden had been changing and reversing and implementing his own immigration policies that caused a lot of confusion.
We’re pretty isolated out here, so we see a version of what’s happening in the bigger border cities, but it’s easy to feel disconnected. Is there anything happening on the border in El Paso that our readers should be paying attention to?
It’s hard to predict the future, but as of right now, the number of crossings at the border are historically low — a trend that started even before Biden was leaving office. I think your readers need to remember that immigration is just more complex than what the U.S. sometimes makes it out to seem. There are climate change effects that are causing natural disasters, affecting hundreds of thousands of people who depend on certain resources that were wiped out. There’s political instability. At the end of the day, people are seeking safety and jobs. Wherever can provide safety and jobs, that’s where migrants are going to go.
One of the Trump administration’s priorities is clamping down on immigration. I think it’s safe to say we don’t know what’s going to happen next, because it seems like the president is using immigration enforcement to keep pushing the boundaries of what a presidential administration can get away with.