Over the last quarter century, more than 4,500 migrant remains have been discovered in the Southern Arizona borderlands. On Humane Borders’ “migrant-death map,” thousands of red icons mark locations where remains were discovered and list the known information on each migrant death the county medical examiner has recorded since 2000.
The migrant-death total is certainly an undercount, Jones said. Human remains disintegrate quickly and are easily dispersed by weather and wildlife in the desert environment.
Though July’s figure was a two-year monthly high, it was by no means an unusual figure for the time of year. In July 2005, the total was 69 sets of migrant remains discovered, and three summers ago, 42 migrants’ remains were found in July alone, according to a data analysis by Jones.
“This is a persistent and perennial problem, it’s not just a July 2026 problem,” he said. “It does ebb and flow, but it never goes away. We’ve never had a period of zero recovered remains” since Humane Borders was founded in 2000.
Under Customs and Border Protection’s “prevention through deterrence” policy, implemented in 1994 under President Bill Clinton, border militarization around populated areas forced more migrants into the Arizona desert. That’s led to a migrant-death crisis that has continued to this day, Jones said.
“The whole paradigm behind the prevention through deterrence is to make crossing so unrealistically difficult that no one will come,” Jones said. “The fact is, people come. So it doesn’t fully prevent entry, but it significantly increases the probability of death.”
As early as 1998, the Border Patrol was aware of the deadly results of the deterrence policy, according to a 2010 report from the Congressional Research Service. In 1998, the Border Patrol launched a safety initiative aimed at addressing the rising deaths in Southern Arizona, the report said.