‘A backlog of bodies’: why this is the deadliest year for the US-Mexico border

Along the US-Mexico border, overwhelmed mortuaries in Eagle Pass, Texas have been forced to stockpile a "backlog of bodies" in a city-owned refrigerated truck.

The local government bought but never used the makeshift morgue amid the Covid-19 pandemic, when such desperate sights were not unheard of in various parts of the US, including Texas.

Yet in recent weeks, the truck has come to embody a renewed abundance of death in the border town with a population of roughly 29,000, deployed as a stark stopgap measure to keep bodies preserved before they can go to an overworked medical examiner, Eagle Pass fire chief Manuel Mello III told the Guardian.

Mello recently counted nine overflow corpses languishing inside the refrigerated truck, a tally that was on the rise.

"They're all migrants," he said solemnly.

Along the 2,000-mile (3,219km) boundary between the US and Mexico, the 2022 fiscal year proved the deadliest on record for people trying to make unauthorized crossings of this heavily-patrolled international line.

In just 12 months, more than 800 migrants lost their lives in search of a better one as they disappeared beneath the tumultuous waters of the Rio Grande, succumbed to blistering summer heat, crashed in a smuggler's vehicle, tumbled from a border barrier, or otherwise had their travels violently cut short.

In Eagle Pass's regional enforcement sector alone, Border Patrol agents discovered more than 200 dead migrants between October 2021 and the end of July, compared to an already heartbreaking 34 bodies during the entire 2020 fiscal year.

Ahead of this week's crucial midterm elections, Republicans have manipulated these harrowing statistics as yet another opportunity to make much ado about what various rightwing players call US president Joe Biden's "open border policies", accusing the administration of incompetence that is causing "body bags [to] keep piling up".

But while those deceptively simple talking points have proven persuasive among American voters - a plurality of whom say Republicans are better suited than Democrats to address immigration - they mask a far starker reality.

For large swathes of forcibly displaced people fleeing unlivable poverty, persecution, hunger, climate change and bloodshed in places ranging from Haiti to Venezuela to Honduras, the US-Mexico border is not open at all.

It's close to sealed by a hostile combination of pandemic-era public health measures cynically retooled as federal immigration control and mass policing by state troops who arrest, jail and criminalize migrants.

Cruelly, these hardline deterrence mechanisms advanced by both Democrats and Republicans have likely only made the US's south-west border bloodier.

Current US policy is predicated on a false assumption that if only the consequences for crossing the southwest border are severe enough, people will stop trying.

For decades, presidential administrations with disparate political views have unified under the paradigm of prevention through deterrence, erecting physical and legal obstacles to discourage people from crossing.

Deterrence as a strategy has informed some of the US's most controversial immigration policies, from separating families, to detaining children, to stranding asylum seekers in dangerous Mexican border towns.

But desperate people still find ways to make it onto US soil: last fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection documented nearly 2.38m enforcement encounters at the southern border, a record high causing headaches for Joe Biden as conservatives accuse the president of being "lax" on border crime.

The truth is more complex, and not at all lax. More than a million of last fiscal year's border enforcement encounters were processed under Title 42, now invoked as a federal immigration enforcement tool but originally disguised as a public health measure amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The policy allowed the Trump and now the Biden administrations to expel huge numbers of people from the US without even letting them ask for asylum, seemingly in violation of domestic and international law.

Far from ending unauthorized migration, the invocation of Title 42 has in fact dramatically inflated the number of encounters at the US-Mexico border, as people who are expelled feel compelled to cross again - and again, and again. Sometimes, relentless migrants have been so determined to complete their journeys that they've risked life and limb dozens of times, fueling a political and humanitarian disaster.

Yet even though these expulsions have proved ill-advised both optically and ethically, Biden has now expanded the use of Title 42 by adding Venezuelans to the list of nationalities targeted for return to Mexico, an apparent betrayal of his campaign promises to uphold the legal right to seek asylum and a paradox as his administration ostensibly fights to sunset the practice in court.

Beyond these mixed messages, the Biden administration has repeatedly acknowledged that the US immigration system is broken. Luckily, actual solutions abound, including innovative federal legislation creating genuine pathways for people to migrate legally. For one, the agricultural sector is begging Congress to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act and shore up much-needed immigrant labor, as food insecurity and national security concerns raise alarms amid a dwindling domestic food supply and surging food costs.

For another, the House has already advanced the American Dream and Promise Act, which would create a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers, who were brought to the US unlawfully as children, and forcibly displaced people with temporary protected status (TPS), two demographics who have been stuck in a precarious legal limbo, sometimes for decades, despite significant contributions to the nation.

Even effective humanitarian policies are not that difficult to devise and implement; the Biden White House already did so when it admitted over 100,000 Ukrainians in just about five months amid the ongoing war to resist Russia's invasion.

But when the administration announced a similar parole program for Venezuelans last month, modeled after Uniting for Ukraine, it initially allotted a meager 24,000 spots. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 7.1 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide, many in our own backyard.

So despite having solutions so close at hand, a lack of will jams up legislative reform via Congress.

Republicans who publicly tout bipartisanship don't engage on immigration reform, claiming "it's not possible to do it while the border crisis is raging".

"What the Biden administration ought to do is focus on regaining control of the border, fixing our broken asylum system," US senator for Texas John Cornyn told Roll Call. "And then I think we can have that conversation."

So goes the vicious cycle: Republicans avoid solutions, which exacerbates the situation, then they shout about inaction and it buys them votes and headlines in the New York Times like "Democrats twist and turn on immigration as Republicans attack in waves".

Some Democrats appease their loudest detractors amid election vulnerability.

And both parties continue to police people seeking security and opportunity over violence, persecution and poverty as if they're national security threats.

In the shadow of it all, the corpses amass.

Back in Eagle Pass, locals like Rosalinda Medrano who have lived for decades along a porous border understand that migrants have and will always come or, increasingly, die trying.

"Even though there's one fence, and another fence, and so many troopers, and the National Guard, and you name it - Border Patrol, here and there and everywhere - it's not gonna stop these families," she said, adding simply: "They want a better life."