Drownings and Deterrence in the Rio Grande

More women and children are drowning trying to reach the US as Texas and Mexico militarize the border. Record requests reveal the soaring death toll in the Rio Grande amid official undercounts.

The river separating the US and Mexico, called the Rio Grande or Río Bravo, has become a graveyard for migrants, many of whose deaths are never recorded by authorities on either side of the border.

The number of people crossing the river in order to enter the US has soared in recent years. In 2021, the state of Texas launched a multi-billion dollar initiative to stop asylum seekers from stepping foot in the US, called Operation Lone Star, erecting hundreds of miles of razor wire, floating buoys and other barriers. Meanwhile in Mexico, the number of troops on its northern border doubled by 2022. Yet the number of deaths continued to climb.

Lighthouse Reports, in partnership with The Washington Post in the US and El Universal in Mexico, spent a year collecting and analysing data from every Texas county and Mexican state along the Rio Grande. We found at least 1,107 people drowned crossing the Rio Grande between Texas and Mexico from 2017 to 2023, a figure significantly higher than has been previously reported.

In Texas, we documented 858 migrant drownings, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is legally mandated to record migrant deaths, recorded 587 along the entire southwest border. In Mexico, where no single agency is comprehensively documenting migration-related deaths, we found records of 249 people who drowned in the river.

The deadliest stretch of the river during this time was the Texan city of Eagle Pass, which has been described as “ground zero” for Operation Lone Star. While most bodies were found near the city’s international bridges prior to 2021, as more border barriers were erected under Operation Lone Star, more drowning victims were found further downstream.

While the data alone was insufficient to establish whether Operation Lone Star caused more deaths, experts said militarization on both sides of the border had pushed some people to cross in more remote and dangerous parts of the river.

Our data on drownings reveals the changing demographic of those dying in the Rio Grande as more families with children attempted to cross. In 2023 about one in five drowning victims was a woman and one in ten a child. More people from nationalities other than Mexican were increasingly dying in the river. After peaking in 2022, drowning deaths dropped in 2023 but analysis of available data for 2024 indicates they are rising again.

METHODS

We requested records of drowning deaths in the Rio Grande from 165 local, state, and federal agencies in the United States and Mexico. Eventually, 52 sources provided data after hundreds of emails, phone calls, and 25 in-person visits to local offices across Texas. Many of the agencies approached responded that they do not keep these records, some charged prohibitive fees to access the information or simply refused to answer. Data availability and completeness were particularly problematic in Mexico.

Incomplete official data in both the US and Mexico leave many deaths uncounted. We benchmarked our data against CBP’s publicly-available figures and underlying data obtained by journalists and researchers through Freedom of Information Act requests. Our data on child drownings was benchmarked against the International Organization for Migration’s missing migrants which is compiled using both official records and media monitoring.

To investigate the impact of Texas’ border barriers on the frequency and location of drowning deaths, we mapped nearly 250 miles of state and federal security infrastructure on the border, including fences, federal border walls, containers and a floating buoy barrier, by analysing satellite imagery and official reports. We also plotted the locations of drowning victims using geographic coordinates and by reviewing location descriptions in incident reports. This enabled us to compare drowning trends with changes in security infrastructure, although we were not able to establish a causal relationship using statistical analysis due to data limitations.

This methodology describes our data collection and analysis in more detail.

STORYLINES

Four-year old Angelica was found clinging to her father’s lifeless body in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. Her family, originally from Venezuela, had fled the brutal economic and political situation in their home country, and were seeking a better life in the United States. The entire family, Angelica’s father, mother, uncle, and 11-year-old brother, Santiago, drowned while trying to wade across the Rio Grande in November 2023. Angelica was the only survivor.

Carolina, 27, and her children Kylian, 3, and baby Noel, just two months old, fled the dictatorship in Nicaragua to join her husband in the United States. Both of the children drowned in August 2022, in the same section of river, where police and soldiers have been deployed to stop asylum seekers from touching US soil.

Militarizing the river is a binational effort. In 2022, as the number of drowning deaths peaked, so did Mexico’s deployment of soldiers to turn back asylum seekers: more than 11,500 soldiers from the Army and the National Guard were sent that year, double the number in 2019, when Mexico first deployed its military as immigration enforcers.

In Texas, under Operation Lone Star, more than 10,000 National Guard soldiers and police have been deployed to the river, since it began in March 2021.

The militarization of immigration has made migration more lethal, especially for vulnerable women and children, experts said. Jerónimo del Río García, a researcher at the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law, said the militarization of migration policy in Mexico has triggered an increase in human rights violations: persecution, abuse of power, and cruel treatment. They use a “military logic of fighting the enemy,” he said. “This has translated into more severe and cruel treatment against the migrant population, which has made them opt for alternative routes with a series of risks. Let’s say that it’s not that the armed forces directly causes the drownings, but it is a factor that indirectly influences them,” he said.