Immigrant Drownings Along Mexico's Rio Grande Spike After US Enforcement Surge Seth Robbins - The Associated Press
go to original March 30, 2015

Many Central American and Mexican migrants get to the U.S. by swimming across the Rio Grande River. Many don't survive the river's strong undercurrent. To get a feel for the treacherous conditions thousands of migrants face, Fusion's Jorge Ramos decided to swim the river. (Fusion)

Soon another body turns up, then another. A Mexican investigator arrives and holds up his hand confirming the grim tally: four men and a woman.

The grisly discovery last month is part of a spike in drownings since October. Immigrants, desperate to avoid detection at a time of increased patrols, are choosing more dangerous and remote crossings into South Texas. The Border Patrol has responded by expanding its search-and-rescue teams to monitor the area, particularly weed-choked irrigation canals where many of the bodies are being found.

"The canals and areas of the river they are trying to traverse, they typically weren't trying to go across before," said Raul L. Ortiz, deputy chief of Rio Grande Valley sector.

Encompassing some 320 miles of river, his sector has already seen at least 16 drownings in nearly six months, nearly a third of them in the canals. The tally is only five short of the number of deaths reported from October 2013 to September, when a historic surge of immigrant women and children were crossing into South Texas. Though illegal crossings have decreased dramatically from last summer, more law enforcement officials are patrolling the border to deter another wave of immigrants.

Many of the bodies are being discovered just southwest of Mission, where the fire department's dive-and-rescue team has had a busy winter. In January and February alone, it recovered at least six bodies in the murky canals.

"It used to be one a month," Mission Fire Chief Rene Lopez Jr. said. "Now it's one a week."

Read the rest at The Associated Press

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