Q: Professor Martínez, based on your research, could you describe how different types of expulsion authorities at the border create a more dangerous and disorderly environment for migrants and border communities?

A: Attempts to impede access to the U.S. asylum system through metering and expulsion policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols (known colloquially as “Remain in Mexico,” a policy that had asylum seekers wait in Mexico for their actual court case) and Title 42 (enacted initially as a health measure by the Centers for Disease Control during the COVID-19 pandemic) are recent examples of the federal government’s expanded effort to limit asylum, which some scholars argue initially began in the 1980s. These recent efforts are producing the same negative consequences and failed results as strategies aimed at reducing undocumented immigration. Social science research, including my work, clearly demonstrates that efforts to deter undocumented immigration through increased border enforcement beginning in the mid-1990s directly contributed to thousands of deaths across the border by funneling migrants into more remote regions such as southern Arizona, and more recently, southern New Mexico and South Texas.

Limiting access to asylum places migrants at significant physical and social risks. For example, thousands of migrants through the Remain in Mexico policy were forced to wait throughout northern Mexico, instead of being allowed to enter the U.S. to seek relief and wait for their claim of asylum to be heard in the U.S. Being stuck far from home in an unfamiliar area with few social and financial resources, often for months at a time, asylum seekers are at a greater risk of violent victimization and exploitation. These programs also put tremendous pressure on border communities that generally do not have the infrastructure and services to reasonably accommodate influxes of asylum seekers.

We must also consider the unintended consequences of expulsion authorities like Title 42, a public health law that permitted the suspension of asylum screenings, which effectively returned migrants to Mexico, and in some cases to other countries, without the opportunity to initiate an asylum claim. Many migrants processed through Title 42 could not return to their communities of origin because they had initially fled, fearing for their lives. Unable to return home, asylum seekers and other migrants had few options other than to make subsequent attempts to enter the U.S. In fact, the U.S. Border Patrol’s one-year recidivism rate—that is, the proportion of migrants the agency encounters more than once in a fiscal year—more than tripled after the implementation of Title 42, increasing from 7% in 2019 to 27% by 2021.

Q: You’ve extensively studied the unfortunate deaths of migrants along our southern border. Could you quantify the potential increase of deaths we would expect to see along the border resulting from asylum restrictions?

A: I must mention some caveats. First, the true number of migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border is unknown. Second, there is no centralized system or protocol used to enumerate and track recovered migrant remains across the entire border.

Nonetheless, records from several medical examiner and medical investigator offices indicate increases in migrant deaths along the border. We are still in the early stages of our research on the mortality impact of Title 42, but preliminary evidence suggests migrant deaths in southern Arizona increased notably during the Title 42 era. For example, according to data from Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Tucson, Arizona, an average of 133 sets of migrant remains were recovered each year during the “localized funnel effect” era (October 2013 to February 2020). By contrast, this figure increased to an average of 198 a year during the Title 42 period (March 2020 to May 2023). Consequently, we have not seen any evidence to suggest that expulsions lead to a decrease of migrants’ suffering and risk of death. Rather, based on nearly two decades of research, I believe that expulsion authorities, such as Title 42, could increase migrant deaths in a region like southern Arizona by as much as 50%.

My colleagues and I have also argued that each unsuccessful subsequent crossing attempt ultimately contributed to migrants’ vulnerability and physical exhaustion, especially if undertaken in a short period, thereby increasing the risk of death. We have found that clusters of recovered migrant remains have shifted spatially, with remains being clustered closer to the U.S.-Mexico border and having shifted from west to east during the Title 42 era. This suggests that migrants crossing during Title 42 were not traversing as far into the United States before perishing, possibly because they were already physically depleted from prior crossing attempts.