The U.S.-Mexico border is a dangerous area. Now, under the Biden Border Rush, it‘s even more dangerous than before. 

Reuters recently published a special investigative report entitled The Border‘s Toll [July 25, 2022]. It reports “The migrant death toll at the U.S.-Mexico border rose dramatically in 2021.“  

Reuters summarizes the situation thusly:

From the highways of San Antonio, Texas, where 53 migrants died last month after being packed into a sweltering tractor-trailer, to the currents of the Rio Grande, the unrelenting heat of the desert in Arizona and the wall that former President Donald Trump touted as “just about unclimbable,“ there have been more than 1,000  fatalities on the U.S.-Mexico border since U.S. President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.

Some of the fatalities, of course, are being blamed on Donald Trump. 

Some of the deaths, medical experts and advocates told Reuters, are a legacy of Trump-era policies. The towering wall - built as high as a three-storey building in some sections - has multiplied serious injuries for those who try to scale it.

 Don‘t try to climb it.

A record number of crossings, more than 1.7 million so far this fiscal year through June, have been fueled in part by an expulsion policy put in place by Trump, a Republican, that Biden, a Democrat, has been unable to end. It cuts off options for requesting asylum, pushing migrants to seek entry multiple times along ever-more-risky clandestine routes.

 Once again, it‘s Trump‘s fault. 

Republicans say Biden’s promise of a more “humane” approach to the border has encouraged migrants to embark on the dangerous journey to the United States in ever greater numbers.

 I‘d say that‘s more accurate.

Last year was the deadliest for migrants crossing the border, with 728 fatalities recorded by the United Nations, which started counting in 2014. The U.N. has counted 340 more this year, apace with 2021’s grim record.

There are many dangers on the border. People die in vehicles, from thirst or exposure, by drowning, by sickness and by violence. 

And falling off the border wall.

A UCSD [University of California at San Diego] study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 29 found the higher border wall was associated with more deaths and severe injuries as well as increased costs for the hospital. From 2019 to 2021, after the higher wall sections were completed, there were 375 UCSD admissions due to falls, a more than five-fold increase compared to the previous three-year period.

 So that‘s our fault?

Francisco Garduno, head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, said Mexican migrants now try to cross on average four times and some more than a dozen times.  “Sometimes they are returned and try to cross again the next day,” Garduno told reporters in June.

 Here‘s a grim statistic just from Arizona‘s border:

In 2021, 225 deceased migrants were found along Arizona‘s some 400-mile long border with Mexico, data from Humane Borders shows, the most since the earliest record kept in 1981.

Yes, the U.S.-Mexico border is a humanitarian disaster.  The solution is not an open border. The solution is to get control of the border.  That, of course, is not the policy of the Biden Administration.