Republicans and Democrats agree: They want to kill migrants at the US-Mexico border

Leaders from both parties have tried to make crossing the border more deadly, killing people while hardly making a dent on migration trends

Guardsmen watch as migrants try to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into the U.S. near in Eagle Pass, Texas, Tuesday, July 11, 2023 (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Mexican officials informed the state of Texas that two bodies were found in the Rio Grande: one ensnared in Governor Greg Abbott’s controversial floating border wall, and another in a nearby area. Their official cause of death hasn’t been determined yet, but sooner or later, the razor-wire-tipped buoys are going to get people killed. And that, all but explicitly, is the point.

The buoys are part of a three-decade push from state and national leaders of both parties to make crossing the border as deadly as possible, under the theory, proven wrong by data, that this will reduce migration overall. Until we change course, the bodies will keep piling up.

Mr Abbott insisted last month in a letter to the White House that no one “wants to see another death in the Rio Grande River,” and spun his efforts at the border as a way to save lives and drive people towards legal immigration at US ports of entry.

The reality on the ground would suggest otherwise.

In July, a Texas state border medic named Nicholas Wingate went public with allegations that the border barriers were already causing severe injuries, and that he and his fellow troopers were ordered, as part of the governor’s Operation Lone Star, to push exhausted migrants back into the river and refuse to offer them water. (The state denies this order existed.)

“I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane,” he told his superiors, in messages shared with media outlets.

Last year, at least 250 people died crossing the Rio Grande, and that was before Texas installed what amounts to a giant, razor-tipped net in the middle of the river. Mr Abbott, a longtime leader in America’s biggest border state, surely knows the stakes of making this crossing even more lethal.

Republican state governors don’t have a monopoly over abuse on the border, though.

Under the Biden administration, which made much of how different it was from the naked cruelty of the Trump years, the Border Patrol has been accused of routinely destroying caches of water left for migrants wandering through desert areas between highly militarised ports of entry.

Despite formally jettisoning the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy, the Biden White House asks asylum-seekers to use a buggy cellphone app to process their claims, stranding them in Mexico for long periods of time, where they are vulnerable to kidnapping, extortion, and violence, according to Human Rights Watch.

2022, under a Democratic president, was the deadliest year ever for border-crossers, with more than 800 people lost.

While many were shocked by the extremes of the Trump border regime – family separation, border walls, mass refusals of entry under Title 42 – the Republican administration was only underlining the kind of approach that’s been standard-issue from Washington for decades.

Trump administration officials first proposed separating children from their families at the border, what eventually became the infamous “zero tolerance” policy, as a means to deter people from trying to immigrate.

And how different is that really than in the 1990s, when President Clinton, another leader who took office amid a season of high immigration, first proposed “prevention through deterrence.”

In 1994, his Border Patrol unveiled a strategic plan to fortify major border-crossings, leaving unauthorised migrants little choice but to brave the “mortal danger” of crossing remote rivers, mountains, or deserts to enter the US.

“It was our sense that the number of people crossing through Arizona would go down to a trickle once people realized,” Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time, has said.

The thinking here, whether by a Republican governor, or presidents of both parties, is that there’s some magical amount of violence that can be inflicted on migrants that will put a stop to undocumented immigration.

This is morally wrong, and apart from that, easily disproven.

In December of 2022, officials had 251,487 migrant encounters at the Southwest border, a record in US history. In March of 2000, a previous peak, there were 220,063 encounters. In other words, after decades of policy and billions spent, after all the extra Border Patrol officers added under Clinton, or the expanded border surveillance under Bush and Obama, or the draconian excesses of the Trump years, little has changed overall.

As Jaime Puente of the state advocacy group Every Texan, which monitors the state budget, recently told me of Texas’s efforts, “We’ve spent $12bn over the last decade, and we have nothing to show for it. People are not being deterred from coming to the US to seek a better life and opportunities…no matter how deadly we make that journey.”

All of the deaths at the border, and all of the backlog in the legal immigration system that fuels them, could be addressed at the policy level. They are not a fact of life, but a consequence of our actions, and inactions.

Legislation could cut down on the nine million people waiting for green cards, or the often decade-long wait for family reunification visas, or the millions more people who apply each year than are accepted into the US diversity visa “lottery.” Our leaders simply don’t have the vision or the desire to change this status quo.

The next time a body washes up in Greg Abbott’s border buoys, or a skeleton is found in the desert of Arizona, there will be little doubt who is to blame. As one border activist recently told me, these tragedies are “death by policy.”