SUNLAND PARK, New Mexico (Border Report) – The rocks are jagged, and the sand is hot. The 12- to 24-inch wide paths often trail off 100 feet down. A fall from Mount Cristo Rey means broken bones and possibly death.
But it is the sun, that burns the skin and leaves lips dry, that has claimed the most lives of people coming over the mountain from Mexico and proceeding to the New Mexico desert. Nonprofits tracking border medical examiners’ offices and Customs and Border Protection data say the Sunland Park-Santa Teresa migrant corridor is one of the deadliest in America.
That’s why a group of volunteers on Saturday accompanied El Paso Catholic Diocese Bishop Mark J. Seitz up the mountain, with a statue of Christ the Redeemer on top, and placed water bottles in spots they believe migrants stop to rest.
“I am extremely concerned about people dying in the desert. The number are unimaginable. Since October, it was sitting at 119 last week. Very often women, men in their late teens, 20s are collapsing and dying,” Seitz said. “Whatever our position on immigration, I don’t think anybody can agree that the death of people is a fitting response, a solution. What we simply are trying to do is to make it possible for people who may find themselves without water in the middle of the desert to have a drink.”
Providing water to unauthorized migrants in the past has landed do-gooders in trouble with the law. In Arizona, a volunteer with the nonprofit No More Deaths was charged with felony harboring of migrants after the U.S. Border Patrol saw him give water and food to two migrants in the desert near Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago.
On Saturday, Border Patrol agents on horseback passed near Seitz’s group twice without incident. One agent approached the group to ask how they were doing. “You guys, be safe,” the agent said.
A volunteer who knows someone in the Border Patrol struck a casual conversation with the agent as two other border agents apprehended an unauthorized migrant hiding on the mountain no more than 50 yards away.
Marco Raposo, director of the Diocese’s Peace and Justice Ministry, said the volunteers’ “water drop” had no political connotations.
“For me, it is an act of faith. It is also an act of humanity in the sense that (the migrants) are people like me. We bleed the same,” Raposo said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Of course, we live in a country that has borders, that has policies – I’m not denying that. That may be why we have to do this, but our motivation comes from the fact this person is a person like me, that has the same rights, same dreams and deserves a chance to live.”
Others said pilgrims walk to the summit of the holy mountain all the time. This was the same, but in addition to prayer it included the gift of water, and perhaps life.
The devil across the border
Federal officials, immigration advocates and border experts have told Border Report the Mexican drug cartels that have taken over migrant smuggling are largely to blame for the deaths.
Cartels gather people on the move in crowded houses with little food or water for days. Then they send them across – starved and thirsty – downplaying the risks they face in canals, hills and deserts. They tell them not to approach emergency beacons in the desert where people lost in the desert can press a button and summon help. They send them across the border during the hottest hours of the day, telling them the Border Patrol doesn’t like working in the sun.
The El Paso Sector of the Border Patrol that includes the state of New Mexico has come across 119 dead or dying migrants since Oct. 1. In El Paso, many of the deaths are from drownings. In New Mexico, migrants die from falls and, more often, from the heat.
The Sunland Park Fire Department deals with life-threatening emergencies involving migrants crossing the border illegally almost every day.
Lucy del Valle, one of the volunteers taking part in Saturday’s water drop, said she’s seen smugglers erect makeshift camps on the Mexican approaches to Mount Cristo Rey.
“They put up tents with clothes and the smugglers are (monitoring) Border Patrol. If they see it is safe for them to cross, they tell them to get across,” she said.
Del Valle said the smugglers have followed her movements from the other side of the border, which makes her afraid. She tries not to go alone to Cristo Rey.
The volunteers on Saturday went up and around the mountain. They placed water bottles under mesquites and large rocks. Del Valle found a spot surrounded by rocks where migrants had left behind a Red Cross blanket and spent electrolyte bottles.
Discarded toiletries and clothing tell the tale of exhausted migrants trying to lighten their load the steeper the climb gets and the hotter the weather turns.
“We hope that providing some water might just get them a little more time. Sometimes they die right next to neighborhoods, just on the edge they could find someone to help them,” Seitz said.