Using
quantitative and qualitative data, the report's analysis finds
unprecedented violence against migrants in six northern Mexican border
states and four southwestern U.S. border states during the period
January 1, 2021–June 30, 2022.
Gaspar
Rivera-Salgado (left), director, Center for Mexican Studies (Sakshi
Jogekar/ Daily Bruin; cropped), with graphic from “Out of Sight and Out
of Mind” report cover.
UCLA International Institute, April 25, 2023 — A new report published by the
Indigenous Alliance Without Borders (Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras), the
UCLA Center for Mexican Studies and the
UCLA Latin American Institute
documents widespread unprecedented violence against migrants in six
northern Mexican border states and four southwestern U.S. border states
during the period January 1, 2021–June 30, 2022. Co-authors Blake Gentry
(Cherokee), Raymond Daukei (O´odham), Lupe Sotelo Valenzuela and
researcher Samuel Chambers contributed to the report.
“
Out of Sight and Out of Mind: An Interpretative Human Rights Report on U.S.-Mexico Border Violence Under MPP and Title 42” relies on mixed methods of data collection, quantitative analysis of a
Human Rights First
database of acts of violence against migrants and qualitative data
gathered in Arizona and Sonora, México from migrants, migrant shelter
staff, attorneys and volunteers.
The report details violence against mostly Méxican, Guatemalan, Honduran
and El Salvadoran migrants by forces of the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP), local and state Mexican police and cartels involved in
human trafficking at the U.S.-México border, based on 7,294
unduplicated incidents of violence identified in the Human Rights First
database.
“Out of Sight and Out of Mind” consolidates these incidents into 17
categories of violence: kidnapping, extortion, sexual assault, rape,
robbery, assault /beatings, threats, armed threats, murder, torture,
labor exploitation/trafficking, unlawful deportation (“expulsion”),
shooting, police assault and police extortion. The
Indigenous Language Office,
a program of the Indigenous Alliance Without Borders, found that the
most frequent top ten acts of violence represented 99% of all such acts.
“This report represents the work of indigenous and human rights
nongovernmental organizations on both sides of the U.S.-México border.
It not only documents the violence deliberately committed against
migrants during the time period, it places that violence within the
framework of neoliberal policies that have promoted free trade in the
Americas since the 1970s,” said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the
Center for Mexican Studies and project director at the UCLA Labor
Center.
“For example, it analyzes the economic incentives for human smuggling
created both by restrictive U.S. immigration policies at the border and
the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) of 2005.”
Adopted by the Trump administration in December 2018 and ended by the
Biden administration on June 1, 2021, the Migrant Protection Protocols
(MPP) enabled U.S. ports of entry to keep asylum seekers on the Mexican
side of the border while they awaited official interviews, which are
typically not scheduled for extended periods of time. Title 42 is a U.S.
public health code first employed by the Trump administration in 2020
that continues to be used by the Biden administration to prevent migrant
asylum seekers from entering the U.S. as a precaution against the
spread of COVID-19.
“We explain how those official policies led to unprecedented violence
carried out from Jan. 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022 through migrant
expulsions by CBP and by multinational criminal organizations, known in
the borderlands as [the] ‘Cartel,’” write the report’s authors.
Of note, migrant deaths under MPP and Title 42 on the main reservation
of the Tohono O´odham Nation (TON) in Arizona and in TON communities
along the border during the time period examined by the report
significantly exceeded migrant deaths in those areas during a four-year
period prior to the implementation of MPP and Title 42.
Comprised of five sections, “Out of Sight and Out of Mind” categorizes
violence against migrants, identifies vulnerable social groups at
particular risk and ultimately seeks to understand how and why violence
at the border is routinely employed against migrants by both state and
non-state actors alike. The report’s conclusion links today’s mass
border violence to the historical antecedents of Indian boarding schools
in Arizona, U.S Indian termination policy (i.e., forced assimilation),
Japanese internment camps and settler colonial practices of displacing
and mis-identifying indigenous peoples.