Imagine: You are an immigrant family, waiting to hear that family members have crossed the border safely to join you in America. You receive a call, with bad reception, that your loved one is lost or injured, lacking food and water on a trek that can last two grueling weeks. Then their phone loses power.  That’s where I come in. As a volunteer at Missing Migrant Hotline project of Derechos Humanos in Tucson, Arizona, my colleagues and I offer assistance and advice to families of migrants seeking their lost loved ones. In the summer, our phones ring incessantly.  When the family gives permission, we attempt to activate the emergency response system. A call to 9-1-1 gets us immediately forwarded to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), leaving us speaking to the very agency this person got lost trying to avoid, requesting rescue and medical assistance.  They answer our calls with deep sighs, obligatory paper shuffling, grumbles about difficulties re-allocating resources, maybe some comments about being distracted from ‘primary objectives.’ The information is recorded. Sometimes we call the same number in two hours for an update and encounter someone who has no idea what we are talking about. Sometimes we do this several times. In areas where community search and rescue responses are absent or prohibited by private land, we have no other option.  Migrants in distress, buffered previously by political rhetoric and the southwest desert, grew more visible last summer, when more than 40,000 children found crossing the Texas border were brought to incarceration facilities for processing. The pictures of children and families trudging through the wilderness shone a new light on the horrifying ordeal that is modern migration.  CBP responded with an image overhaul, using its search and rescue unit, Borstar, to stage rescues on well-maintained forest service roads for members of the press to witness. CBP has also begun to promote the numbers of recovered remains in the borderlands as a symptom of their humanitarian enforcement. The numbers, they say, are falling – thanks to their efforts securing the border, fewer people are dying trying to cross it.  But the truth is that bodies adrift in the southwest often sink into obscurity. When we are asked to investigate a disappearance, and we can’t find the person after a search in detention facilities, we pass case information to medical examiner offices. The number of times that information matches to a set of unidentified remains is low. We find ourselves on the phone with families, describing the vastness of these desert lands, the jagged mountains, the expanses of sand and cactus without a road in sight. We explain the rate of deterioration of a body under the blazing desert sun, the scavenging animals who scatter remains within days. The real truth behind “humanitarian enforcement” is that these deaths, recovered or undiscovered, are the result of CBP’s own policies.  The deterrence policy, in place since 1993, causes border crossers to avoid places with checkpoints, forcing them to pick routes in more remote – and, therefore, more dangerous – terrain. And if they get into trouble, they are unwilling to seek rescue from the same agency that actively hunts, deports and detains them. These checkpoints are placed throughout the borderlands, and nearly every death from dehydration, heatstroke, or exposure occurs because their placement has lengthened the wilderness trek to its current deadly proportions.  To save lives along the southern US border will take more than a PR campaign; only a policy of demilitarization will stop this crisis. The removal of these checkpoints would need to be the first significant step.  Another would be an emergency response system that separates itself from border enforcement. The response system must have a front line of doctors, nurses and rescue teams who will scan the landscape with an empathetic eye, rather than one that searches for criminals.  But truly, to stop this crisis would mean addressing the root causes and impetus of migration in the first place. This would require a restructuring of global inequalities and acknowledgment that current border enforcement is the present-day ripple of past genocidal colonization.  It’s not surprising that an immigration policy that dehumanizes undocumented people would lead to an emergency response system so affected by inhumane indifference. It’s not surprising, but it’s reprehensible. Until that changes, we’ll keep picking up the phone.
Undocumented immigrants in danger must call the very people tasked with trying to keep them out of the country