Drownings surge in illegal Rio Grande crossings

MISSION, Texas -- A U.S. surveillance helicopter hovering over the Rio Grande spots a body floating near a muddy bank on the Mexican side of the river.

Soon another body turns up, then another. A Mexican investigator arrives to confirm the tally: four men and a woman.

The discovery last month is part of a spike in drownings since October. Desperate to avoid detection at a time of increased patrols, people 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 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 Ortiz, deputy chief of the 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 surge of 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 illegal aliens.

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 canals.

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

Some canals are 50 feet wide with steep, brush-covered embankments that make it hard to climb out. The waters look calm but currents run through them, and swimmers often get caught in hydrilla, an invasive water plant, or debris such as shopping carts and tires.

"They get tied down, and it's hard to get away from that in black water," said Capt. Joel Dominguez, part of the rescue team. "And they are often panicking, running from agents."

To provide help, the Border Patrol has transferred eight members of an elite rescue unit from El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley, bringing the total number of agents to 30. They're trained in swift-water rescues, emergency medicine, tracking and diving.

But experts say the extra resources can only do so much to prevent deaths in the Rio Grande, which has long claimed the lives of migrants trying to cross it.

Border Patrol trucks and Texas state trooper vehicles stand watch daily on the levees that separate the Rio Grande from the canals. Smugglers are now quicker to abandon their groups in the river or scrubland, according to Felix Cantu, the Border Patrol agent in charge of McAllen station.

Until recently, the smugglers "usually would take the group all the way to where they are going," he said. "Now they are trying to get more separation, remove themselves form the group, obviously not to get caught."

The dead will often float to the surface within a few days. Fish and turtles often have fed on the bodies, making identification difficult if the person didn't carry a form of ID. Three of the five bodies discovered last month by the helicopter crew were identified within days: two Mexicans and one from El Salvador.

"You just feel for them," Lopez Jr. said. "They are young, in their 20s and 30s, even teenagers."

Guatemalan Consul Allan Perez has had the task of notifying families back home that their loved ones died. Just last month, the decomposed body of a 27-year-old Guatemalan man was found in one of the canals.

He said he impresses upon people who survive but get deported that they are the lucky ones.

"I tell them you are returning without money, injured, with broken dreams and your head down," he said. "But you are going back alive."

Information for this article was contributed by Eric Gay of The Associated Press.

A Section on 03/30/2015

Upcoming Events