ALABAMA - Since President Joe Biden signed executive orders in June imposing stricter asylum-seeking rules, migrant encounters along the United States' Southern border have fallen drastically. August saw a slight increase in border crossings compared to July, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials still recorded some of the lowest figures throughout the entire Biden administration, with about 58,000 encounters.
Despite the considerable decrease compared to the 200,000 peak in December of 2023, there is a place along the U.S.-Mexico border that is seeing an increase in encounters: New Mexico.
The portion of the El Paso Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol that runs from Mount Cristo Rey in Sunland Park, New Mexico, to the Arizona state line accounted for almost 9,000 encounters in the region in August.
According to CBP data published on Sept. 16, migrant encounters went up 22% in New Mexico, going from 9,087 in July to 11,016 in August. Most of the migrant apprehended in August were Mexican nationals, followed by Guatemalan and Venezuelan migrants.
Border Patrol's encounters within ports of entry were 68% lower than in the same month of the previous year. According to CBP, the fiscal year that ends on September 30 is expected to conclude with the lowest number of migrant encounters since 2020.
Despite the recent increase in border crossings, New Mexico is still seeing far less migrant encounters in Fiscal Year 2024 compared to previous years under the Biden administration. During FY 2023, the state of New Mexico reported more than 170,000 illegal crossings, according to CBP data.
More treacherous than its Texas and California counterparts, the New Mexico border, according to federal officials, typically does not involve asylum-seekers but rather migrants who are actively trying to avoid apprehension.
"The traffic shifting to New Mexico makes sense since the groups are attempting to evade detection and apprehension and you simply do that where you have less agents," said Victor M. Manjarrez Jr., a former U.S. Border Patrol chief agent in El Paso and Tucson, Arizona.
This shift has caused an increase in deaths along the deserted region. In April, No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid organization, issued a report that revealed that at least 140 deaths occurred in the area in 2023, 31 more than in 2022. Of those, 51% of the deaths reported were women, marking the first time that data captured anywhere along the border has indicated a higher number of deaths for women than men.
As migrants and smugglers opt for more secluded areas in order to avoid detection, the chances of not making it out of the Southwest desert alive increase. Such has been the case for the Sunland Park and Santa Teresa region, where CBP deployed a surveillance aerostat capable of spotting migrants in the desert from several miles away.
A volunteer research and rescue group revealed to Border Report on Sept. 23 of the location of 20 sites with human remains near Santa Teresa.
According to data, that would bring up 2024's death toll in the El Paso Sector to nearly 200 migrants. Last year, that figure clocked in at 149 deaths.
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