The New York Times MagazineWhen he came to the Sunúns’ store, Caty and
Roberto realized they had seen him around town.
It turned out Roberto’s father was friendly with
him, though he had no idea the man was a coyote.
He was a familiar face. He wasn’t going to mistreat
a fellow Cubulero, Roberto reasoned.
The coyote told Roberto that his journey
across the desert would take three days and
that the entire trek would cost him 75,000 quet-
zals — about $10,000. This was many times what
Tomás and Magdalena had paid, and Roberto
couldn’t aff ord it — not even close. But it was a
common rate, and migrants fi gured out how to
pay. Families got mortgages on their homes or
land to send members north, sold off livestock
or took out private loans. Roberto could have
asked his father to pay, but Lucas was opposed
to his going. Caty’s father lent him the money.
He didn’t realize he was sending his son-in-
law to a very diff erent border than the one he
crossed 19 years earlier.
On his last visit to church, Roberto donated
two conga drums to the band and sang a hymn.
Caty was struck by one lyric: When I fi nish my
journey in this world, Roberto sang, my soul will
be lifted. On the morning of May 25, 2019, a
pickup truck pulled up in front of the store.
Roberto climbed in.
Geologists estimate that the Sonoran Desert
has been accumulating for about two billion
years. Today it occupies approximately 100,000
square miles — an area larger than Britain —
that stretch from the Colorado Plateau in the
north down through Sonora, Mexico, in the
south, and from Southern California in the west
to just east of Tucson. In the desert’s Pinacates
Volcanic Field, as little as an inch of rain falls
in a year. NASA used to train Apollo astronauts
there — it was the closest thing to a moonscape
they could fi nd.
The eastern desert, which includes the Toho-
no O’odham’s tribal lands, is more hospitable,
but even here the earth’s indiff erence to human
need can seem vindictive. A route through the
desert that missionaries, miners and migrants
traditionally followed was called El Camino del
Diablo, the Devil’s Highway. It followed an older
trail that the Tohono O’odham used to send their
young men down. Toward the desert was ‘‘the
direction of suff ering.’’ One early- 20th- century
account called the desert a ‘‘vast graveyard of
unknown dead.’’ It can still feel that way. Hiking
on the Arizona border today, even taking a walk
outside Tucson, you can fi nd human bones. Some
are years old, some months.
Last December, I accompanied a pair of Bor-
der Patrol agents as they left the gates of the
agency’s sprawling sector headquarters in Tuc-
son and headed toward the border. Jesus A. Vasa-
vilbaso and Daniel Hernandez had for about a
decade been ‘‘sign trackers,’’ following migrants
through the desert.
‘‘I can’t tell you how many times we’ve come
upon groups in the desert, and they have no
food, no water,’’ Vasa vilbaso said as he drove
south on State Route 286. ‘‘And the journey they
had — they had no idea what was coming. The
terrain was so harsh, and they’re in the middle
of nowhere. And we tell them: ‘You should be
grateful and glad that we caught you when we
caught you. What was coming, you were not
going to make it out.’ ’’As migrants have sought out increasingly
remote routes through the desert, more of them
have died. This is a fact not seriously disputed
by anyone familiar with the problem, includ-
ing the Border Patrol. But if we are to look at
these deaths as the Pima County pathologists
do, as a kind of slow- motion epidemic, we must
label the desert a proximate, not an ultimate,
cause. There are various ultimate causes, but
perhaps the plainest, certainly the most trace-
able, is federal policy. Confronted with imag-
es of holding pens and parentless children, it
would be easy to assume the policy began with
President Trump, the latest face of a revived —
though hardly new — American hostility toward
migrants. In fact, it has been in place through
four presidential administrations.
In 1993, the Border Patrol apprehended over
1.2 million people trying to migrate without doc-
umentation. Bill Clinton entered offi ce that year
pledging to ‘‘get serious’’ about the problem,
and in a strategic plan the following year, the
Border Patrol introduced ‘‘prevention through
deterrence’’ (the quotation marks are original).
It called for an increase in security around bor-
der cities like Tijuana, El Paso and Nogales. As
more agents assembled in these places, the
thinking went, undocumented migrants would
try to cross in increasingly remote areas, where
the land and the elements would take over.
‘‘Mountains, deserts, lakes, rivers and valleysform natural barriers to passage,’’ the plan read.
‘‘Temperatures ranging from sub zero along the
northern border to the searing heat of the south-
ern border aff ect illegal entry traffi c as well as
enforcement eff orts. Illegal entrants crossing
through remote, uninhabited expanses of land
and sea along the border can fi nd themselves in
mortal danger.’’ Doris Meissner, commissioner
of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
at the time, said later that ‘‘it was our sense that
the number of people crossing through Arizona
would go down to a trickle once people real-
ized’’ how dangerous it was.
‘‘Prevention through deterrence’’ worked.
Apprehensions increased, reaching a peak of
nearly 1.7 million in 2000. So did deaths. Migrant
deaths weren’t new. People had always died try-
ing to cross. It was where they were dying now,
and how. Previously, the most common forms
of death involved traffi c accidents or drowning;
migrants were hit by vehicles as they tried to run
across Interstate 10 into El Paso, for instance, or
went under when the Tijuana River fl ooded. Now
they were dying on ranch lands and in mountain
ranges and in the desert, of exposure, dehydra-
tion, heat stroke. Certain victims the desert took
quickly. Others suff ered more. ‘‘It is not unusual
to fi nd bodies of migrants who in a confused state
have removed their clothing in freezing weath-
er or attempted to drink desert sand to satisfy
thirst in extreme heat,’’ according to one report
from the American Civil Liberties Union and
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission.
‘‘Disoriented, migrants sometimes fall on cacti
or rocks, suff ering blunt trauma and lacerations
in diff erent parts of the body.’’
At the medical examiner’s offi ce in Tucson,
the pathologists began compiling reports of
missing migrants. This was not a standard prac-
tice, but they saw a trend. ‘‘We knew it was a
rise,’’ Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist
with the offi ce, told me. In 1994, Pima Coun-
ty handled 11 dead migrants. In 2000, it had 74
cases. By 2010, 222.Under George W. Bush, the Department of
Homeland Security began cooperating with local
law enforcement agencies to increase detentions
and deportations of undocumented people. The
cooperation continued under Barack Obama,
whose tenure saw more deportations than those
of any of his predecessors (or of Trump). Though
unlawful migration decreased drastically, the
American debate around immigration grew only
shriller. Trump used the charged atmosphere
to stoke fears of Mexican rapists and Central
American caravan invasions. He sent thousands
of Border Patrol agents and National Guard
troops to the border.
The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector — with over
3,600 agents — is one of the most heavily staff ed.
While that seems like a lot, Vasa vilbaso and Her-
nandez told me that I had to consider the size of33‘I CAN’T TELL
YOU HOW MANY
TIMES WE’VE
COME UPON GROUPS
IN THE DESERT,
AND THEY
HAVE NO FOOD,
NO WATER.
AND THE JOURNEY
THEY HAD —
THEY HAD NO IDEA
WHAT WAS COMING.’Photograph by Daniele Volpe for The New York Times