10/10/2024 FOIA of CBP BSITS Data
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On 10/10/24, via a Freedom of Information Act request, No More Deaths obtained data on migrant deaths collected by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). https://www.elpasomigrantdeathdatabase.org/index.php/foia/
In the short time we’ve had to look at this data and compare to the El Paso Migrant Death Database we’ve found a number of things that deserve further study:
This year, for the first time since CBP began recording mortality data, the El Paso Sector is the deadliest on the US-Mexico border, with 40% more remains found in that sector than the next deadliest areas of the border (the Rio Grande Valley and Tucson sectors, respectively). While CBP’s figure for the El Paso Sector is 176, comparing with data from local medical examiners yields a number no lower than 196 mortalities during the 2024 calendar year, an increase of 20% from last year’s historic deaths, and nearly double the number from just two years ago.
There appears to be a systematic misrepresentation of deaths by falls from border barriers. Less than 25% of deaths due to falls from the border wall were recorded as such by CBP. Many cases directly contradict the cause of death designated by medical examiners, and over a third of deaths due to wall falls were completely absent from CBP’s data.
Demographics: Over 500 women have died on the border since 2021. Female deaths were over a quarter of all deaths in 2024, an all-time high and up from less than 10% in 2018. From 1998-2016, deaths of individuals from countries outside of Mexico andCentral America averaged around 1.8% of cases where nationality data was available. This figure jumped to 7.3% for the years between 2017 and 2024. These stark demographic changes come only after radical restrictions of asylum initiated under a Trump presidency and expanded under Biden.
CBP is required to record all deaths of people presumed to be migrants, but there are numerous cases in which Border Patrol was directly involved in a death that never appears in the official CBP data. This includes cases in which a migrant died in CBP custody or was killed in the process of being apprehended.
CBP data has been shown time and again to be inaccurate and flawed. The above are just a few of the more disturbing inconsistencies revealed through comparison with the El Paso Migrant Death database. We expect similar findings to emerge from further research and comparison to other databases, such as humaneborders.info. Researchers can reach out to us for access to data that can more easily be compared to other datasets.