Drownings and Deterrence in the Rio Grande

Published December 8, 2024

More women and children are drowning trying to reach the US as Texas and Mexico militarize the border. Record requests reveal the soaring death toll in the Rio Grande amid official undercounts.
The river separating the US and Mexico, called the Rio Grande or Río Bravo, has become a graveyard for migrants, many of whose deaths are never recorded by authorities on either side of the border.

The number of people crossing the river in order to enter the US has soared in recent years. In 2021, the state of Texas launched a multi-billion dollar initiative to stop asylum seekers from stepping foot in the US, called Operation Lone Star, erecting hundreds of miles of razor wire, floating buoys and other barriers. Meanwhile in Mexico, the number of troops on its northern border doubled by 2022. Yet the number of deaths continued to climb.

Lighthouse Reports, in partnership with The Washington Post in the US and El Universal in Mexico, spent a year collecting and analysing data from every Texas county and Mexican state along the Rio Grande. We found at least 1,107 people drowned crossing the Rio Grande between Texas and Mexico from 2017 to 2023, a figure significantly higher than has been previously reported.

In Texas, we documented 858 migrant drownings, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is legally mandated to record migrant deaths, recorded 587 along the entire southwest border. In Mexico, where no single agency is comprehensively documenting migration-related deaths, we found records of 249 people who drowned in the river.

More:
https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/drownings-and-deterrence-in-the-rio-grande/