Beacon Broadside

The following post is from Margaret Regan, the author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands. Regan's book chronicles firsthand accounts of the militarized borders and the ultimate human struggle and sacrifice to experience the freedom and independence in the United States.

A hot wind swept through the Arizona desert on the first day
of July, pushing gray clouds across the sky and carrying the welcoming smell of
rain.

The
dampness in the air gave some small hope to this parched land. During all of
June, it rained not a single drop in southern Arizona. The temperatures spiked above
100 degrees on twenty-two days, including sixteen days in a row during the last
two weeks of the month. On one day, June 23, the mercury shot up to 109.  

The
region’s powerful summer thunderstorms—the monsoons—haven’t started yet but everyone’s
praying for rain. Last week in Tucson, in a traditional celebration on the
feast day of San Juan Bautista—St. John the Baptist—on June 24, neighbors
carried his statue around on the banks of the dried-up Santa Cruz River, in
hopes that the saint would baptize the borderlands. So far, the saint hasn’t
answered their prayers.

 Often
he waits for the Fourth of July. If the holiday merrymakers get lucky, black
clouds roll across the Catalina Mountains and sheets of water fall in torrents,
bending mesquite trees sideways and turning roads into rivers. Everyone turns
giddy. Southern Arizonans sweltering by their barbecues have been known to
welcome the downpours by dancing in the streets, their arms lifted up toward
the heavens.

As for the migrants haltingly making
their way through the scorched desert outside the city, they thank the rains
for helping keep them alive.  

This
is the dying season in the desert.

June
yielded up twenty-four migrant bodies. An unidentified man was found dead on
Tuesday, June 27, at the northern end of the remote Tohono O’odham Reservation,
the deadliest migrant corridor in the state. Suspected cause of death:
hyperthermia, death by heat. The temperature was 104 the day he died. On
Monday, June 28, a 30-year-old man named Hindemas Majia-Peres perished near
Sells, the small town capital of the Rez. He too was felled by the heat, on a
day that the temperature hit 108. Four days before that, on June 24, on another
108-degree day, another man died of exposure, in the open land near Benson, a ranching
community east of Tucson.

The
deaths of migrants are up, way up, in this year of vitriol against these poorest
of the poor, against these economic refugees who risk dying to cross into
America to work. By the end of June, in the months since the fiscal year that started
last October 1, 152 bodies had been found in the Arizona desert. That’s twenty-seven
bodies ahead of the count this time last year, when the number was 125. The
harsh winter, cold and wet, gets part of the blame for the uptick in
casualties. But the true culprit is the increased border enforcement. The more
walls we build, the more Border Patrol agents we add, the farther into the
wilderness these migrants go, and the more that die.

But
hardly anyone is discussing the death toll, not in Washington, not in Arizona.
The state’s governor, Jan Brewer, who signed the infamous anti-immigrant bill SP
1070 in April, hasn’t mentioned the tragic fates of would-be workers like
Hindemas Majia-Peres. Instead, she’s libeled the migrants, living and dead, by accusing
the “majority” of working as mules for the drug cartels. She provided no
evidence, and even the Border Patrol disputes her assertion. Their figures show
that 90 percent of the migrants they apprehend are ordinary people coming to
the United States to work or join their families. Ten percent have had criminal
convictions.

Undeterred
by these facts, Brewer went on to make a new claim that “our
law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just
lying out there that have been beheaded.” The specter of headless bodies was
meant to invoke the horror of the drug cartel murders in Mexico. But that was a
falsehood too. The medical examiners who autopsy the bodies of the crossers
have never found a death by decapitation among the migrant corpses in their
morgues.

Kat
Rodriguez, a human rights activist in Tucson, has cataloged the deaths of the
migrants for ten years, by name, when possible, and by cause of death.

“I’ve
never seen a beheading,” she says. “It’s irresponsible of Brewer to be
spreading fear. In addition to lying, she’s creating fear and feeding into
stereotypes.”

The truth is, the migrants are drawn to
the United States by the very things that Americans celebrate on the Fourth of
July: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

And
so they make their way across the desert, and pray that the rains come soon.