Texas Heat-Related Deaths Reached A Two-Decade High In 2022 Amid Extreme Temperatures

As the number of migrants apprehended at the border continues to set records, the number of migrant deaths also has reached new highs: The U.S. Border Patrol reported locating 853 bodies along the entire U.S.-Mexico border in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30 — a number that includes deaths from heat, drowning and other causes. That’s more than three times the number reported in the 2020 fiscal year, and the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency, has called the southwest border the “deadliest land crossing in the world.”

Texas also often sees the highest number of recorded migrant deaths among the four states bordering the U.S.-Mexico border, which also include New Mexico, Arizona and California.

“I’m seeing an extreme increase in the number of border-crossing deaths compared to other years,” Webb County Medical Examiner Corrine Stern, who serves 11 South Texas counties, told KENS 5 in August. At the time, Stern said her office was holding the bodies of 260 migrants and had stopped accepting additional bodies for the first time in her 20-year career.

Stern declined the Tribune’s recent interview requests, citing the high number of cases she was handling.

The heat-related deaths recorded by the state in these border counties are likely an undercount, experts said, because some migrants who die after crossing the border are never recovered or their bodies are found too late to determine the cause of death. And not all deaths caused by heat are attributed to hyperthermia — excessive exposure to natural heat — as the primary cause.

For example, 53 migrants from Mexico and Central America were found dead on a hot June day inside a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio after their smuggler abandoned them. But DSHS logged fewer than 10 heat-related deaths in Bexar County in the first nine months of 2022, meaning few, if any, of those migrants were captured in the agency’s data for hyperthermia deaths.

DSHS declined to provide the exact cause of deaths for the migrants, but survivors from the tractor-trailer were later treated at hospitals for heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

Sylvia Dee, a climate scientist at Rice University, said climate change is “shifting the entire distribution of temperatures higher.” As a result, Texas is exceeding heat indexes dangerous to human health more frequently than it did in the past.

“People shouldn’t be outside in those temperatures at all,” Dee said.

Some experts also pointed out that extreme weather events fueled by climate change are one reason people decide to migrate in the first place.

“We hear constantly from migrants engaging in agriculture that the land is not what it used to be, that they cannot plan and cannot harvest [in their home country] anymore,” said Luz Maria Garcini, a Rice University assistant professor who researches trauma and the health of immigrant communities.

And as global temperature continues to warm, climate migration will likely become even more common, scientists have warned. According to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2022, extreme weather events could uproot 143 million people around the world over the next 30 years.

About 70 miles north of the border, Brooks County hosts one of the busiest Border Patrol checkpoints in Texas on U.S. 281. To avoid it, migrants walk through miles of ranch land, but many are ill-equipped to trek through the thorny brush. And the journey only gets more perilous with rising temperature and humidity.

“In the ranches, that’s where you see the majority of the deaths,” said Brooks County Judge Eric Ramos. “Because of the distance from the border, by the time [migrants] get to us, they’re really exhausted. So with the heat, the thickness of the brush just becomes overwhelming.”

Brooks County, which has around 7,000 residents, has recorded at least 202 heat-related deaths between 1999 and Sept. 30, 2022, according to DSHS data — the second-highest number among Texas’ 254 counties. The agency did not provide updated county-level data for all of 2022.

But this is likely to still be a substantial undercount. A 2020 report co-authored by Stephanie Leutert, a migration policy expert from the University of Texas at Austin, found at least 535 recorded migrant deaths in total between 2012 and 2019 in Brooks County. Leutert said a large number of these deaths were likely related to heat, but may have not been counted as heat-related deaths because their cause of death could not have been determined. Some, she said, may have also been assigned a separate cause of death like dehydration, which is often enhanced by heat but can also happen during cold weather.

Ramos said the number of bodies has forced Brooks County to build a second morgue that will hold 40 bodies. He added that the county may soon hire more staff to help rescue migrants or, when necessary, recover and identify the bodies of those who died crossing.

“It’s only going to get worse,” Ramos said.

Eddie Canales, founder of the Brooks County-based South Texas Human Rights Center, said his organization is also trying to increase its capacity to respond to the crisis.

Since 2013, his organization has installed about 150 water stations throughout Brooks County and surrounding areas, leaving water in big blue buckets that hold several gallons each. He and his volunteers make weekly trips to refill the water stations.

“Water is water,” Canales said on the phone as he refilled his organization’s water stations in January. “People sweat, and they are walking for miles.”

The center also runs a hotline for people searching for loved ones who have gone missing during border crossings and assists in local governments’ rescue operations and identification of deceased migrants, which Ramos said can require a substantial chunk of the budget of Brooks County — one of Texas’ poorest counties.

“Everybody deserves some dignity in death,” Canales said.

Ultimately, experts, advocates and local officials said the country needs to go beyond deterrence-based border enforcement policies to stem the tide of migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border. For example, Ramos believes the federal government should reform the immigration system to create more legal pathways for migrants to work and ultimately receive U.S. citizenship.

“Climate change is definitely a killer for these folks,” he said. “But the inability for our lawmakers in Washington to do their job is also a killer.”

Support for this reporting was provided by Columbia University’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

This article was written by ALEX NGUYEN AND ERIN DOUGLAS of The Texas Tribune.  The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.  This article originally appeared at: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/26/texas-heat-deaths-migrants-climate-change/