EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Immigration activists fear new Biden administration restrictions on asylum-seekers are contributing to the deaths of migrants at the border.
Three people drowned and several others were rescued from the waters of the Rio Grande late Tuesday near the Texas-New Mexico line in far west El Paso. The deaths brought to 102 the number of migrant fatalities since Oct. 1 in the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector. That compares to only 67 deaths by this time last year.
The agency also said it has performed 712 rescues in that period, compared to 278 by the same time last year. Border agents recorded 149 migrant fatalities in the sector that includes Far West Texas and all of New Mexico in all of Fiscal Year 2023.
The latest tragedy prompted migrant advocates in El Paso to call on the Biden administration to rethink enforcement-only policies and on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
“Since we saw the (Biden) executive order and since we saw the application of asylum getting much harder, we’ve been talking about this. We’ve been saying that migrants were going to take alternate dangerous routes to reach safety in the U.S.,” said Alan Lizarraga, spokesman for El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights.
On June 4, the White House announced it would bar from receiving asylum most migrants who cross the border unlawfully between ports of entry. He also announced the border would be shut down between ports of entry when average daily crossings exceed 2,500 a day for a week.
Migrant encounters have plummeted 40 percent since the announcement. But most migrants who do come in between ports of entry are now trying to evade capture. That means sorting the Rio Grande, the fast-moving water of irrigation canals parallel to the border wall and venturing into deserts.
“It’s a failed policy that continues to put the lives of innocent people at risk. It’s very sad that we continue to wake up here in El Paso to more and more deaths every day,” Lizarraga said. “It’s because of these restrictions that limit asylum so much that push them (the migrants) to seek other venues, to go to smugglers, take deserts, canals and it puts them in dangerous conditions.”
In a protest outside a state building in El Paso on Wednesday, BNHR members also blamed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star for endangering migrants. State officials have placed razor wire on the banks of the Rio Grande from the New Mexico state line to the Ysleta-Zaragoza area of El Paso’s Lower Valley. Abbott continues to call OLS a success that has prompted the Mexican cartels to take their migrant-smuggling operations elsewhere on the border.
Other BNHR members at the protest called on the Biden administration to increase work visas, particularly for Mexicans and Central Americans who aren’t seeking asylum but come across the border by the hundreds of thousands in search of seasonal work to pull their families out of poverty back home.
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