Fwd: US Mexico border migrant death database
Molly Molloy
From: Bryce` Taro <brycetp...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Subject: US Mexico border migrant death database
For Immediate Release: US-Mexico Border Death Map and Database
No More Deaths releases database of migrant mortalities along US-Mexico Border
04 August, 2025
Today, No More Deaths released a comprehensive database and map of recovered migrant remains for the entire southern land border. This data will not bring anyone back or undo the decades of suffering and death caused by US border policy and perpetrated by the United States Border Patrol (USBP), and it does not account for the tens of thousands lost or missing in the borderlands—but it does provide the most comprehensive statistical record to date of people who died on their journey into the United States. Through this data we find the following:
Depending on the sector, we document anywhere from 20% to 40% more migrant deaths than CBP’s official count. We also found that USBP makes regular errors when recording basic information such as name, age, nationality, and date of death.
We show that CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has failed to record the vast majority of BP-related deaths (including deaths in custody, by pursuit, falls from the border barrier, use of force, and medical distress). Wall fall deaths are especially underreported and have increased drastically since the first Trump administration.
Our database confirms cases of people seeking asylum when they died, and hints towards many more. Since the erosion of asylum protections under the first Trump administration, and increasing under Biden, there has been a massive increase in the deaths of migrants of nationalities more likely to be seeking asylum.
Many cases were individuals who resided in the United States. These ranged from people who had travelled to Mexico to visit family and had to make a difficult crossing to return home, to people who were returning after a very recent deportation to a place where they likely had few or no connections. With the new administration’s push for mass deportation, we will likely see more of our neighbors killed by violent US border policy.
Map: https://nomoredeaths.org/migrant-death-mapping/
Database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRVeemioXDJKhz6II5RBxPwWwSEr7tWp4gtAO0M7CL2vS45O1LU6sEiE0bEWTdDlFRj-6CHLutuDwkk/pub?output=xlsx
Findings: https://nomoredeaths.org/us-mexico-border-death-map/
Methodology: https://nomoredeaths.org/methodology/
Recommendations
The death toll from thirty years of Prevention Through Deterrence border policy is staggering. The death of each person listed in the database here, as well as the thousands more who died in Mexico or in a place where data was unavailable or difficult to access, and the likely tens of thousands more whose remains were never found, who disappeared in remote areas of the border, is a tragedy directly caused by increasingly violent US border enforcement and immigration policies, and by the actions of Border Patrol, an agency that has proved time and again that it cannot be reformed.
We call for the end of Prevention Through Deterrence and the abolition of the United States Border Patrol, an agency directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
We also call for the abolition of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been empowered and emboldened to create and invisibilize more and more of the harms described here.
To ensure that human rights and international law are respected, we echo our open letter of December 2023 in calling for ports of entry to be reopened to asylum seekers. We must also reopen legal asylum pathways which are our responsibility under international law and decades of precedent.
We urge medical examiners, justices of the peace, and coroner’s offices to follow the lead of the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, and the El Paso Office of the Medical Examiner in recording migrant deaths. This would go a long way towards creating an alternative to the highly flawed CBP database, and toward ensuring accountability and promoting better understanding of individual causes of death, and of the crisis of mass border death more broadly.
We’ve pointed at just a few preliminary findings from the large amount of data collected in this database. We hope others can use the database as a resource for continued research, advocacy, and direct aid.