GENEVA (Reuters) – The US-Mexico border is the world’s most harmful land migration route, based on figures from the United Nations migration company revealed on Tuesday, with a whole lot dropping their lives attempting to cross the perilous desert.
The Worldwide Group for Migration documented 686 deaths and disappearances amongst migrants on the border final 12 months, however the precise quantity is probably going increased resulting from lacking knowledge, together with from Texas border county coroner’s workplaces and the Mexican Search and Rescue Company.
In an unlimited desert surroundings and cactus-studded valleys and hills, migrants fall prey to heatstroke in the summertime and hypothermia within the winter, U.S. border officers stated. Some our bodies had been by no means discovered.
Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the Worldwide Group for Migration, stated the recorded figures “signify the bottom estimates accessible.”
“The alarming figures are a stark reminder of the necessity to take decisive motion to create common authorized pathways for migration,” he instructed reporters in Geneva.
The Worldwide Group for Migration stated almost half of the deaths recorded final 12 months had been linked to crossing the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts.
The variety of deaths and disappearances documented by IOM alongside the border represents almost half of the 1,457 instances recorded throughout the Americas final 12 months.
“Some of the alarming developments noticed by IOM within the Americas is the rise in deaths on migration routes within the Caribbean,” Dillon stated.
He stated that 350 deaths had been documented in 2022, in comparison with 245 in 2021 and fewer than 170 instances recorded in earlier years. Many of the victims on Caribbean migration routes had been folks from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba.
The Darien Hole, a jungle border crossing between Panama and Colombia, noticed 141 documented migrant deaths final 12 months, based on the Worldwide Group for Migration.
“The distant and harmful nature of this space and the presence of felony gangs alongside the route means this determine probably doesn’t signify the precise variety of lives misplaced,” Dillon stated.
Final week, Panama introduced new measures to curb the rise in migrant crossings via the Darien Hole area, which reached an all-time excessive this 12 months.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Modifying by William MacLean)