It Could Happen Here - Mapping Border Deaths

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

James is joined by Bryce from No More Deaths to discuss the release of a map of border deaths that shows systemic undercounting of the lethal consequences of the USA’s deterrence policy. https://nomoredeaths.org/migrant-death-mapping/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hear it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Bryce from No More Deaths. And what we're going to talk about today is this really excellent piece of data visualization and research. that depicts a very sad topic, which is the deaths of migrants entering the United States. And Bryce, I know has done a lot of work on this.

So welcome to the show, Bryce. All right, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I guess maybe we can start off. I'm looking at this data visualization on a map right now, and we'll have links in the show notes for other people who want to look at it. Can you explain, like, what this dataset is? Yeah, so we collected through a,

bunch of different sources, medical examiners, justices of the peace, sheriff's apartment, CBP's own data, just a bunch of data on individual migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border. And so this is different data through each source, but generally we tried to get a lot of demographic data, location data, cause of death, and at least some form of the incident narrative to kind of get a little bit of the context of how each of these people guide. Yeah. If people are looking at the map, they can see very color dots, right? And they can click on that dot and that will give them the fiscal year, the Border Patrol sector. In some cases, you'll see the type of death, maybe a gender and age, things like that. I don't know. Looking at it, like, it's one of those things that maybe is more

emotionally difficult to view if you're more familiar. Like, I can look at these dots and I can think of places I've been. I can even think of the day I was there. And it's quite, I don't know, It's impactful to see that all these people have died in places I know so well. Perhaps we can explain, like, the scale of this is huge, right? Do you know how many, exactly how many data points there are on here? I think there's something like 12,000 or 13,000. Yeah, it's vast. Which overall is like not a great sort of like indicator of how many people have actually died

or even though how many people could be reported to have died just because the Texas data is so wonky. yeah let's get into that then let's talk about maybe the sources for this data and then maybe perhaps how your estimates are much high even with some of the emissions like the the data that you have tends to show underreporting so like can you explain first like where does this data come from and how did how did you get it you were saying the texas numbers are lower but can you explain how like there are these multiple jurisdictions and how you can't just, like, ask someone for this information. Yeah, there's a few people we're able to just

ask for it. Well, generally, it all comes from formal public records requests from medical examiners when we're lucky because medical examiners usually have really good, easily shapeable data. So that's what we did for San Diego County. Yeah, they're very good. Pima County, the state of New Mexico, El Paso. Other places have a coroner that are associated with for sheriff department. And that's usually a little dice here. There, a little more reluctant to give up records. They'll be like Imperial County or Yuma County. And then Texas, it's just like a medical legal nightmare.

So there's, if smaller counties don't have our medical examiners, they just have justices of the peace, which are part of like the courts. And they'll go out and investigate deaths. And if an autopsy is needed, they'll send it off to another county to get an autopsy. There's a huge amount of counties in Texas like this. So that data all came from this research.

Stephanie Loiter from the University of Texas, Austin, who is working on a different project, but was gracious enough to share everything that she had collected. But that was just a huge amount of legwork of physically going to each of these counties, looking at paper records from Justices of the Peace, writing down all that data. There's some that comes from, like, sheriff's department, some that comes from various other sources. So the Texas data, In some of it, for example, Wed County, medical examiner, they don't give up their data to anybody. And there's a lot of issues with them potentially, like, not having actually performed autopsy on a lot of autopsies on a lot of migrants. And there's some potential workplaces about that going on.

But, yes, so Texas is really messing. And a lot of it, you'll notice, like, Texas has a lot of the purple dots. Yeah. The purple dots under location data from Border Patrol's database. Yeah. And so that ends in 2018. So we have data past 2018 in Border Patrol and out-location data.

Yeah. And so a lot of Texas onset being this just the Border Patrol data unless we had low-specific access to that place is justice to the abuse data. So the Texas data is pretty limited for that reason. Yeah, you can see this sort of very few red dots, which are your other data sources,

like in Texas. aside from it, it looks like maybe Brooks County you're able to get justice to the piece data there because the density is profound. Yeah, it's just the Brooks County Sheriff's Department that actually puts together that data. They're really

keen on the whole thing. Okay. And partially it's because the data exists, but partially it really was just for each cluster the depth in that area because of a checkpoint south of there. People will get dropped off south of the checkpoint, hike around, and it's just like

massive open graveyard in Brooks County. Jeez. Yeah, I don't think I've spent much time in that part of Texas, but certainly like some of these other ones I'm much more familiar with. Let's talk about the CBP data, right? You mentioned it there. One of the things that you found was that CBP has a systemic issue with undercounting deaths, right?

Yeah. So where does that come from? So I've heard from, I guess, for years, Humane Borders and Pima County Medical Examiner has been documenting this since at least 2014, the major undercount on Border Patrol's data. But something I've hear a lot is just that it's cases where Border Patrol wasn't personally involved in search and that they had, like, changed their counting system to only be counting cases where they were involved. And I think that may account for some of it.

But in order to compare these deaths, Border Patrol's data is. just really gnarly and messy and that. There's typos, there's misspelling, states are wrong, ages are wrong, genders are wrong. So you really, in order to compare them, you really have to go person by person, go down the list, find the death in the border patrol database, look into medical examiner data on the arm to matches person by person.

So because we have so much of the incident narratives from the medical examiners, we can actually tell when Border Patrol was involved. And so we marked when Border Patrol's involved, when they're not involved, and then when that case doesn't actually get counted by Border Patrol. Okay. And it doesn't actually really line up. There's not a huge correlation there. I mean, there is some correlation, like older skeletal remains, things like that, often won't get counted. But generally, there are a lot of cases where they directly involved, or even they were the first responders on the scene to a distress call or any number of things where that person won't end up in Border Patrol's database.

And then other cases where it seems like they had no involvement, that person ends up in Border Patrol's database. So, I mean, they've been in trouble with the GAO multiple times for undercounting or improperly counting or reporting these deaths. And so they have access to medical examiner data, medical examiner send them the data. They just don't use it. We often also noticed that the causes of death really don't match up

in a lot of really specific cases. Like for wall holes, for instance, It was the most notable one. There will be a huge amount of cases that medical examiner will say one force trauma. And then Border Patrol's data will say medical examiner on the chairman or exposure or any number of other things, which like for the most part causes a death scene to line up. So the fact that for these wallfall deaths, it happens to not line up is like, you know, I don't want to assume they have bad intent, although obviously Border Patrol is bad intent. But it seems like it happens regularly enough that it's hard to feel like it's not, that is somewhat intentional that the cases that they're kind of choosing to change the causes of death for.

Right. So like it obfuscates the lethality of the border war, right? It's the amount of people who it kills. Yeah, I mean, to a huge degree too. I mean, the fact that border controls data is kind of our only source of data for migrant deaths and then specifically for deaths caused by Border Patrol or like wallfall deaths means that the amount of deaths that the public has access to, like waffle deaths, for instance, is just a drop in the bucket compared to what's actually happening.

So all of the research and reporting and all the stuff that happens around these key-related deaths is drawing off of just, like, truly false numbers. Yeah, yeah. And that leads to people drawing bad conclusions, right? Yeah. you should know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must listen podcasts on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great

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like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. When I'm watching everything. Sheesh.

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So can you explain how you were able to ascertain that difference between the in-custody death recorded by the Office of Professional Responsibility versus the ones that you found, right? Right. So the opposite of professional responsibility is part of C. And they're supposed to be recording all of these all CBP related deaths, including according to the deaths in custody reporting act like 2013 or whatever it was. I mean, death in custody, there's a really specific definition of what in custody means. And so we tried to follow pretty strictly what that definition was to kind of make our own assessments using the incident narratives.

Yeah. I'm curious, what does it mean? Like, I'm thinking about door detention, right? Does that count as in custody? Yeah, so any other time, if a person is in the process of being apprehended, if the person has been apprehended, if the person has been detained, is a person who is physically in custody border patrol, in a border patrol vehicle, in a CUT facility,

all those things would count as in custody. Okay. It's just important because in at least one of the cases, the Border Patrol agent involved said the person wasn't in custody, he was just detained, which for the purposes of reporting, there's actually no difference. Right, yeah. But he said that clearly to not have it be labeled as in-custody death.

Right. And what it seems like that ended up not being labeled as a in-custody death. So it's definitely, I think they're aware of the fact that these are being reported and kind of trying not to have that data case. That don't have too many of them like appear. Another interesting data, interesting is your wrong word, but another data point here was the amount of deaths caused by pursuit, right, or in pursuit. I guess maybe you should just explain.

like what pursuit is to people if they're not aware? Yeah, so there's two kinds of pursuit. We list them at the same year on the database. You can see the difference of there's chases in a motor vehicle and there's chases on foot. So for example, a person's getting chased through the desert and collapses and dies. They'll be considered a death year pursuit or if a person is like in El Paso or San Diego or Imperial County more is chase. and ends up falling in a canal or jumping into a canal to escape and drowns, the idea would chase on foot. And then motor vehicle pursuits are, yes, with a person who's being chased by Border Patrol and the grovely crashes and people are killed.

Use of force cases also include some of these chases through OPR standards and CVP standards. If spike strips are deployed or if a vehicle is ran by a Border Patrol vehicle, that's considered use of force. So that's where a person died due to that. We would call that a use of forced death. Yeah, so I guess those are the two to three different times. And so, like, yeah, those are, as you say, they're broken down in the database, right? But in the spreadsheet, they are combined. What does this data show us about, like, I guess if we look at the last half decade or so,

let's go back to like 2016, right, border policy, like, What does it show us about, like, Title 8, Title 42? We're like a little too close to the Biden asylum ban to have, I guess, like, good data on that yet. But do you see a clear pattern in, like, the border rhetoric and border, quote, unquote, enforcement and the amount of death or the type of deaths? Oh, definitely. Yeah, it's immediately clear. I mean, even Biden's asylum ban, I think there's an immediate effect. I mean, even just with, as a No More Death Volunteer, we started seeing people crossing the border, crossing the desert.

That just never would have made the attempt previously, you know, and then started to see those people reported in the death data too. So I think all of that is pretty clear. So with Trump's restrictions on asylum, I think that the biggest thing, honestly, was all the metering policies, rather than just Title 42 or Nike protection protocols or any of that, it was just the fact that people weren't allowed to access the border country. Yeah. I ended up kind of like going around to enter like other places in the desert, like the border would sort of pick them up, that all this started happening.

Yeah. And so it's kind of like a trickle in 2019, 2020, a little bit more in 2021. And then 2022, you suddenly see just huge and lots of people from countries other than Mexico, Central America, starting to show up in the data, and then also, like, people who clearly were trying to seek asylum showing up in this data, all the way up until it slowed down after, you know, at the end of 2033, and then, but definitely continue through Fronten for it. Yeah, definitely, like speaking from my own experience on the border here, we saw the same thing, right, like people crossing who you wouldn't have seen making that correct.

crossing in places and times that they wouldn't have crossed, you know, before the Biden asylum ban. And, like, that definitely resulted in, I mean, there was a weekend in September where I think five people died, September 2024. We had a heat wave and, like, yeah, it immediately resulted in multiple fatalities that, like, wouldn't have been the case previously. I wonder, like, what is this data set in terms of, like, recommend? recommendations, right, in terms of, like, how we can use this data set. Obviously, we're at a time when I, well, I guess the Trump administration, like, had its complete asylum ban stayed. But we're back at, like, people can't, in good faith, like, turn up to a port of entry anymore and just be like, hey, I'd like to claim asylum and really, really hope for the best. Like, what does this data set tell us in terms of, like, what policies kill more people and, like, I guess, like, what recommendations arise from the data in terms, obviously, I guess, the recommendation is to have law.

that allow people to fucking enter this country and claim asylum without walking across the desert. But that seems like it's too much to ask. So like what do we learn in terms of like specific policies that are particularly fatal and the ways that that could be mitigated

and if it's not already by like water drops and such? Yeah. That's a hard question just because talking to, you know, the older people and then more deaths who've been around since like kind of the early years. is a prevention to deterrence.

Yeah. They thought about sort of feeling like, you know, when they were first out there, being like, man, this is really unsustainable. We can't be out here all the time like this. Maybe like a few more years we could probably handle. And then hopefully this prevention through deterrence thing will have like kind of stopped. They'll see like this is unsustainable.

And then here we are all these years later and it's worse than it's ever done. Yeah. And the original prevention to deterrence policy is like this strategy of essentially killing people in the hopes of people will stop trying to cross the border or something and um it just is the original thing that it's really hard to get away from and yeah the fact that we're now applying the same the same strategy of death and suffering to asylum seekers is really horrifying so i think um yeah number one open up ports of entry to allow asylum secret to seek asylum bring back like even the sort of minimum asylum projections that we

had back then other things like how people are dying really matters yeah so for example in The El Paso sector, there was very, very few deaths in 2014. The last couple of years, it's been the deadliest single, small area in the entire border. And a lot of that was just because the border has just become so militarized that even this, like, urban area where, you know, people are dying a mile from town. People are dying in town. We, I was part of the recovery where we, this person was on a road, had been there for about three days dead. It was about 40 feet from the busiest road in the entire town. Jesus, yeah.

And that's just not something that really fits in with the ordinary narrative of, like, Venture through deterrence, people are getting pushed out to these more remote areas. And I think just the level of militarization is just up to the level that it really is just deadly kind of, I mean, even, yeah, all these deaths in San Diego, as you know. Yeah. Also, so like all these wall tall deaths are pretty much all since, like, 27th. team or even more recently. So the construction of all this new border wall,

you can point very directly to a huge amount of deaths just caused by wall falls. There's the canals in Imperial County and El Paso that show a huge amount of people. There's El Paso right now in the process of redamping their whole canal system. It would be a great opportunity to add some sort of like safety systems in place so that people don't die.

Yeah. There is all the pursuit deaths, which now are not just being caused at border patrol. but also like the Texas Department of Public Safety, now that Operation Lone Star has popped up. There's all these things where the kinds of deaths and the kinds of people dying and all that stuff has changed

and increased really drastically in the last few years. And you can kind of point to a lot of them, but also it's like, yeah, I don't know, it's hard to really have any smart thoughts on it besides just like border patrols unperformable and just needs to be disbanded and die if. Yeah, and like this whole border regime, right, the whole idea of like an iron border that we enforce in a physical space, the point of it is to kill people. The point of it is to deter people by having perfectly innocent people who you'd be happy to have this your neighbor die in the desert.

Like that's, that is that is the policy goal. Like I'm just looking at like I'm looking at Pinto Canyon, which San Diego people will know is like, it's pretty like don't, if you're listening to this, don't go to Pinto Canaan. you might die. It's not a place to just go looking around if you're not experienced traveling out in the desert. But like even Pinto Canyon is gnarly. But looking along the wall, the wall kills way more people than this rugged and difficult piece of terrain in the middle of nowhere. Like it's things that we have paid a lot of money for that kill the most people. And that's pretty brutal to confront. The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must listen podcasts on movies.

It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know Summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great movie playing right in front of you. Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stunt men and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more. Listen to the Stuff You Should Know Summer Movie playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? Well, that's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II.

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Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast, and I explain, playing those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions.

Now you know with Noah de Barrasso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. When I'm watching everything. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more. than Democrats differ on the economy. You kidding.

Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to tame it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to Now You Know with Noah DeBarossa on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

One of the other things that, that you guys were able to determine was that like a number of United States residents had died, right, in this data set. Yeah. Can you explain that for people? Totally. So, yeah, like you said, there's people you'd love to have as your neighbor dying in all these places. And not just that, but your actual neighbor. The amount of people whose main residents listed was just in San Diego County, in Oceanside, in Bakersfield and Indianapolis, places.

that we've all been to. They were able to record for San Diego County and a few other counties. A lot of where people actually live and some of the circumstances for why they were crossing through the desert in the first place, a lot of it is people who are very recently deported or who just traveled to Mexico because they had to get some paperwork done or wanted to visit family or things like this, just had entire lives in the United States and then passed away on the way back into the country.

Yeah. Yeah, including, I mean, it's really heartbreaking to even see. There's a lot of cases where the person who actually finds the body or recovers the body is that person's family members or their spouse or their children even,

which only happens because, you know, bored of trolls generally not that interested in recovering bodies or in looking for people who are lost. So often, yeah, half and it'll be, yeah, somebody's spouse who comes and is actually the first person on the sea. Yeah, it's very common, right, for volunteers to be alerted via, like, you know, I know some of the search and rescue groups are alerted by like Instagram, for instance, that like

someone is missing, right? It's not like there is, like, despite this being massively overfunded, you can't just call and they won't just send out an ambulance, like a lot of, a lot of times. it is either the family members or like a bunch of volunteers just driving out there in the trucks the last night like i can remember in running into some migrants in like 2023 and then being like hey there are some other people down there and i was like where how'd you know and they'd found them on a snapchat map oh wow and like that that was you know the only thing that that maybe said those people's lives and yeah it's pretty brutal to think that like that there's still really there's no one where there are people you can call come help you but it's not the people who are getting billions of

dollars. Let's talk very briefly, before we finish you up, about deaths outside of the United States. I see you have some data. Like, obviously, my familiarity is with the Daddy and Gap, which I don't think that data exists. But, like, I see you have a number of data points within Mexico. Can you explain, like, how you came across those and, like, to what extent that data is, if at all, like, representative or complete? Yeah, so it's not at all representative or complete. It all comes from the National Institute of Immigration, the INM in Mexico.

Yeah. To, I guess you do border work in the group of theta are they're like the sort of like quote-unquote humanitarian aid for migrants instituted by the government in Mexico in Mexico.

And so we through the Mexican movement of the FOIA you're able to get data from the group of Spada. which throughout the years, there's been kind of like changing locations of offices. So the data we have was just from where their offices are. So it's usually just sort of like a number of deaths for that particular office for that particular year. It's very, very limited.

And there's many, many, many deaths that we then have other data to show that doesn't exist here. So it's really just kind of like, yeah, shouldn't be. taken as any kind of like representative sample or it's purely just the one piece of Mexican data that we were able to quickly foot on a map. Yeah. We did get other data from like specific states in Mexico, but we used to because of time and capacity and just the data itself, we're unable to turn that into a map just yet. Well, some club would be to do something with that. Yeah. And I think it still remains true that like the single deadliest mile of this journey is the United States border like at least from this data that you're seeing

would you say this data still supports that probably I don't know yeah um yeah probably I just don't want to say because the data is just so bad in so many places especially in Mexico but yeah I'm thinking of like the Dallian right like it's it's very deadly I have seen people die there like uh it's obviously a very very different or rugged place, but I think comparatively probably more people die at the US border just because, A, there were more of them and because people come, like, people are,

not everyone has to cross the area and like people can fly to Mexico or somewhere further south, right? And then come up that way. Where, if people want to find this data, or perhaps as someone who's like a ninja with data and data visualization, and they want to offer to help, like, where can people find this and how can they reach out to no more desk

if they'd like to help in some way. Yeah, so just on the NoWare desk website, you can see the report and the map and all that stuff. And in there, there's a link to the media outreach email, which in the next couple months is my email. And just feel free to send an email there. And yeah, happy to give greater access. Right now, the data is pretty anonymized for privacy and safety.

Yeah. and there's a lot of the fields that we've kind of talked about that don't appear in the public database. So I'm happy to share that with researchers, activists, advocacy people, journalists, things like that. And also, we desperately would have a lot to help. So you're interested in looking at some spreadsheets. Yeah, just taking it.

Cool. Great. Thank you so much your time and for all the work on this. I know this was a lot of work getting those records. And I think it, I don't know, it gives us something to point to to show how many people this border shit is killing. Okay. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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