Texas
Related: About this forumTo Save Lives, Close the Falfurrias Border Patrol Checkpoint
As early spring in Texas brings the return of bluebonnets, as August marks the beginning of high school football, early summer ushers in the dying season in Brooks County. In the last decade, hundreds of migrants have perished in the unforgiving ranchland of Brooks County, cut down by heat and exhaustion while trying to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. 281, 70 miles north of the border. By the thousands they slogold, young, Mexican, Central Americanacross the sizzling sand, often equipped with little more than a bottle of water and a snack, lied to by their coyotes, pursued by vigilantes with dogs and ATVs. Dehydration can do crazy things to a person: Some strip naked and then roast in the sun. Others lose all sense of thirst and die with a water jug next to them.
Often, the bodies arent found for weeks, or months, or years. Some are presumably never found. Unidentified bodies recovered by the perpetually broke Brooks County Sheriffs Office are sent to a cold-storage facility at Texas State University. In 2012, the most fatal year on record, the sheriffs department recovered 129 bodies. In 2013, the death toll was 87. Last year, the figure was 61, but by mid-April of this year, authorities had already recovered 23 bodies, putting 2015 on pace to exceed 2013.
The causes of this humanitarian crisisand thats precisely what it isare fairly well studied and understood: Ever-increasing border militarization has funneled migrants into narrower, more remote and more dangerous routes into the U.S. interior. Drug cartels have consolidated control of human smuggling and turned it into a ruthless business. Finally, in the case of Brooks County, the location of the Border Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias forces migrants into el monte, the wilderness. Deaths began increasing in the mid-90s, when the checkpoint expanded and border policies became stricter. The checkpointor more precisely its locationis the proximate cause of the crisis. Without the checkpoint, many more migrants would survive.
Solving the border security puzzleif it can be solvedis a momentous task. But moving or abandoning the checkpoint is within the realm of possibility. It is strange that such a proposal is rarely contemplated. Everyone laments the senseless loss of life and yet there is a solution, albeit an imperfect one, within reach. Scrap the checkpoint; save lives.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/end-the-falfurrias-border-patrol-checkpoint/
Gman
(24,780 posts)And that checkpoint has a sign with the amount of drugs seized year to date.
The article doesn't mention the hundreds that are saved by BP stationed there.
Gothmog
(144,005 posts)The Border Patrol will not change this