An investigation by The Washington Post and other news organizations found more deaths than Mexico or the U.S. have reported. Many were in Eagle Pass, where the Texas governor’s border crackdown is concentrated.
EAGLE PASS, Texas — Angelica had journeyed with her parents, older brother, aunt and uncle by foot from South America through a muddy jungle, ridden atop sooty train cars and slept in noisy city plazas hoping to reach the United States.
Now it was dawn and the 4-year-old girl’s family could see their destination from across the Rio Grande. The adults sent messages to relatives back in Venezuela before stepping into the river with the two children.
“Ya no aguantamos más,” wrote Robiet Farías, Angelica’s uncle, saying he could not bear waiting anymore to enter the United States.
The family held one another’s hands and formed a chain with other migrants crossing the Rio Grandein Eagle Pass that November day in 2023. But as they got deeper into the river, something went wrong. Panic set in. The Farías family disappeared into the water.
This stretch of the Rio Grande has become a graveyard as the number of people dying while trying to cross rises. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported. And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.
The news organizations collected death records from every Texas county and Mexican state that borders the Rio Grande since 2017, when President-elect Donald Trump first took office pledging to crack down on illegal migration, to examine the effects of enforcement and migration policies on asylum seekers, and whether these factors have increased drownings.
The data shows that at least 1,107 people drowned trying to cross the river in the seven years from 2017 to 2023. The deaths peaked in 2022 as the number of people trying to enter the United States soared. A rising number of women were among the dead. In 2023, more than 1 in 10 drownings involved a child.
The spike in deaths coincided with a record surge in people attempting to cross into the United States illegally. Many of those migrants chose to cross the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, a city of 28,000 that has emerged as a flash point in the nation’s debate over migration. Abbott and the Biden administration have clashed over how to respond to the surge, with the Texas governor installing dozens of miles of razor wire, shipping containers and buoys, and the White House accusing the state of blocking its access to the river.
Migrants often choose Eagle Pass because it is across the river from a part of Mexico that is considered safer thanother regions controlled by criminal gangs. But the river there has a significant current in certain areas, and gets deeper as people reach the midpoint. Weeds and rocks can make it difficult to get one’s footing.
The records obtained by the news organizations show drownings in Eagle Pass have risen significantly in recent years. The Post and its partners mapped the fatalities there using location data provided on death records. The analysis shows that as the number of deaths rose, bodies increasingly began washing up in new locations.
From 2017 to 2020, more than half the victims in Eagle Pass were found near the downtown area. After 2021, the year that Operation Lone Star began, drowning victims were largely discovered away from the city’s center.
While it is unclear whether Texas’s border security initiative caused that shift, interviews with dozens of asylum seekers, state and federal law enforcement officials, migration experts and elected officials indicate that the barriers pushed migrants to cross in new and, sometimes, more dangerous areas.
“The intention is to make it more difficult for people,” said Margarita Núñez Chaim, the coordinator for Iberoamericana University’s migration issues program in Mexico. “And that, as a result, makes it more deadly.”
Abbott’s office disputed the idea that Operation Lone Star might have contributed to any deaths, saying that the initiative is deterring migrants from crossing the Rio Grande. In a statement, officials said the Biden administration is to blame for increased drownings by encouraging people to “make the unsafe and illegal trek across the border, ultimately taking the lives of migrants.”
White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández said the Biden administration has reduced border crossings by more than 55 percent since introducing new restrictions on applying for asylum in June. He called the president’s approach “effective and balanced,” and said that Republican officials are more interested in “dangerous and inhumane political stunts than securing our border.”
Deaths dipped by nearly 40 percent in the state in 2023, but data from Customs and Border Protection show they rose this year.
For the Farías family, crossing the Rio Grande felt like their best choice. They had fled Venezuela for Peru, but quickly realized there would be few opportunities to advance their lives there. Thousands of Venezuelans were wading across the river into Texas and claiming asylum. Angelica’s parents planned to do the same. The Post is identifying the girl by only her middle name because she is a child.
It wasn’t long after they entered the water that another migrant found Angelica clinging to her father’s back as his corpse floated near a pecan orchard called Heavenly Farms. She was alive.
Other people who had been traveling with the family took her to authorities. They told officers her first name. But they knew almost nothing else about her. Her entire family was dead.
For decades, it was mostly men — usually from Mexico or Central America — who braved the river to find work in the United States.
But as gang violence, chronic poverty and political instability grew, many more women and children began making the journey in the mid-2010s. Smugglers spread the word that minors were released quickly and allowed to stay in the United States. By 2014, so many children were crossing the border alone that President Barack Obama declared it an “urgent humanitarian situation.”
Then in 2020 came the pandemic. Migration to the United States plummeted, but a year later, people began making their way to the Rio Grande. Entire families from countries such as Venezuela were arriving. Unlike those who had crossed years earlier, they wanted to surrender to U.S. authorities in hopes of qualifying for asylum.
Death records reviewed by The Post and its news partners reflect that changing dynamic. More and more people from South American countries began washing up dead in Texas and Mexico. In 2022, women made up nearly 22 percent of all deaths, higher than any of the other years examined. At least 75 children drowned in the river from 2017 to 2023.
The Rev. Paulo Alfonso Sánchez, who operates a shelter in Monclova, a city many migrants stop at on their way to Eagle Pass, said that in the fall of 2023 rumors began spreading about various dates by which an asylum-seeker had to reach the United States before Biden would bar them from entering. The information was false, and immigration advocates think it probably came from organized crime groups seeking to stoke urgency.
“It was a desperate situation,” Sánchez said. “Big groups tried to cross, stepping over each other at the riverbank and both sides, U.S. and Mexico, had to rescue people.”
The Post and its partners documented 858 migrant drownings in Texas from 2017 to 2023, while U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 587 along the entire southwest border during that time. The agency is required under federal law to record how many people die trying to enter the country each year, though federal investigators have acknowledged the data is incomplete.
Asked about the discrepancy, a CBP official noted the challenges in collecting data on migrant deaths, and said the unit tasked with tracking those fatalities has a limited budget, though Congress has offered more funds in recent years.
Sister Isabel Turcios runs Frontera Digna, a migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, and estimates that in 2023, about 4,000 showed up in the city each day. She said most people went straight to the river without resting. Many were afraid of being robbed, beaten or deported by Mexican officials and wanted to leave quickly.
Across the river, migrants now found towering shipping containers, giant buoys in the water and armed troops. They were all part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which the Texas governor launched after accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to curb illegal immigration.
“Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans,” Abbott said in announcing the initiative.
On the Mexican side of the border, migrants encountered more soldiers patrolling the border. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had deployed thousands of troops to crack down on illegal immigration in response to pressure from then-President Trump. By 2022, there were 11,500 troops stationed along Mexico’s northern border — nearly twice as many as there were three years before.
A spokesperson for Abbott’s office said the state has put up hundreds of miles of barriers such as fences and shipping containers, as well as more than 51 miles of border wall. Reporters from The Post and partner news organizations mapped approximately 250 miles of state and federal security infrastructure using available satellite imagery through 2023.
The mapping of the state’s barriers showed that at least 40 percent of the fences, buoys and other deterrence devices erected as part of Operation Lone Star were concentrated in and around Eagle Pass.
That included a fence near Heavenly Farms. The sprawling property where Angelica’s father was found is about four miles from downtown Eagle Pass and filled with rows of pecan trees. In 2023, more and more bodies were turning up there.
Border agents had long patrolled the Rio Grande near the pecan orchard by boat. But migrants still frequently passed through Heavenly Farms after crossing into the United States.
In 2022, Operation Lone Star law officers built a fence along the river near the farm. Soon after, they deployed spools of sharp concertina wire by the banks. And in the summer of 2023, troops placed a thousand feet of large orange buoys on the water close to the property.
Border Patrol agents began cutting Abbott’s concertina wire to reach migrants. They claimed Texas state troopers had blocked their agents from a boat ramp at a municipal park. The standoff shifted from the border to the courts as Texas and the Biden administration took turns suing each other in legal disputes over buoys, wire and river access.
Meanwhile, the number of people found dead in the Rio Grande near Heavenly Farms was rising.
The deaths mapped by The Post and its partners and available satellite imagery show that two drowning victims were found near the farm in the five years before a fence was constructed along the property. Thirty-three victims were discovered in that same area in the two years after the fence was built.
There was the Venezuelan folk musician trying to join his niece in the United States. The man from the Ivory Coast whose family did not find out he was dead for two years. The 6-year-old boy from Colombia who’d lost his mother’s grip as they entered the water.
The data on drowning deaths alone is not sufficient to show whether any of the new barriers played a role in the deaths. Where people are found does not necessarily indicate where they crossed. But interviews with migrants and shelter operators indicate that more and more migrants were choosing to cross away from Shelby Park, a green space near the city’s downtown where troops were concentrated, to more isolated parts of the river.
Abbott and others admonished migrants for not choosing legal options, such as surrendering at a port of entry. In the fall of 2023, when Angelica’s family crossed, the Biden administration was asking migrants to request an appointment at an official U.S. port of entry through its CBP One app.
Angelica’s parents had registered through CBP One. But that was just the first step in the process. Getting an appointment could take months. And many migrants felt they could not wait. Some had run out of money. Others thought it was too dangerous to stay in Mexico.
Immigrant advocates in Mexico also said Mexican officials and organized crime groups were blocking migrants from accessing border bridges, unless they had an appointment.
For many people, the river felt like the best way to quickly get into the United States.
Angelica’s parents had met working at Venezuela’s Department of Health.
They were both analysts, and they dreamed of building a life together while advancing their careers in the medical field. Zelnays came from a family of three close-knit siblings who had lost their mother when they were all still teens. An aunt, Norkys Farías, had taken them in and continued to raise them as her own.
Miguel Perez Carles fit right into Zelnays’s family. He had a knack for making her laugh with jokes and funny stories. The two gathered frequently with her family in the coastal city of La Guaira to celebrate milestones.
Their daughter arrived in 2019. Zelnays had a son, Santiago, 11, from a previous relationship. Family members said he was a talented soccer player who wanted to attend a specialized academy for the sport.
But their life in Venezuela grew more difficult as hyperinflation skyrocketed and the nation’s economy tumbled. So when her sister left for Peru, they followed.
“They had a vision, as young people do, for the life they wanted to live,” said Lizmar Farías, Zelnays’s cousin. “They wanted to help the family and build a house.”
After some time in Peru, they decided as a group they would have better luck realizing their goals in the United States.
The journey from Lima to the U.S. border with Mexico was difficult. In a group chat with relatives back home, they recounted sleeping on streets as they moved from one country to the next. When they reached Panama, they crossed the perilous Darien Gap, a jungle that is home to jaguars, anacondas and venomous insects. They told their family members that they sat in their tents terrified at night listening to the sounds of animals lurking nearby.
They’d managed to endure all of it by staying united, relatives said.
“They were always together,” Lizmar said. “In photo after photo, at the beach, in the city, at birthdays, they were inseparable.”
They reached the Mexican border with Texas early on Nov. 18, according to interviews with relatives and information from other migrants.
Francisco Contreras, director of the state civil protection services in Piedras Negras, remembers the soaring number of people trying to cross around that time. He said there were groups of 400 or 500 people gathering at different points along the riverbank. The width of the river near Eagle Pass is between 250 and 300 feet.
His team and Mexico’s migrant rescue squad, Grupos Beta, were repeatedly called to help pull screaming children and splashing adults from the water. He said they performed CPR on too many people for him to count.
“You know we always ask them why — why risk their children?” Contreras said. “And they always tell us, they’d rather die here, in this river, than back in their countries.”
Texas Department of Public Safety agents patrolling the river the day Angelica’s family crossed told Maverick County Sheriff’s deputies that about 200 migrants were attempting to cross together from Mexico, according to incident reports.
The family linked arms as a human chain and waded into the Rio Grande with other migrants. As they got deeper into the water, chaos ensued. The relatives got separated.
A Maverick County Sheriff’s Office incident report of the Farías family drowning states that 14 to 16 people “were visualized to have been taken by the river’s strong current.”
A woman who was traveling with the family later told Angelica’s relatives in Venezuela that she saw a man she didn’t recognize holding the child’s hand and leading her to Border Patrol agents. The child had been rescued after someone noticed her clinging to her father’s back. He was dead, and his body floated down the river toward the pecan farm.
Border agents patrolling the river on boats recovered Zelnays’s body from the water. She had a printout of the family’s CBP One registration email in her pocket. The bodies of her siblings, Thailyz and Robiet Farías, were found together near a cement plant’s boat ramp. Angelica’s brother, Santiago, is thought to be in a morgue in neighboringWebb County, but officials are awaiting DNA confirmation.
Word did not reach their relatives in Venezuela for 10 days. A migrant who had been traveling with the family sent them a message on Facebook.
In an instant, Norkys had lost five family members. She had reason to believe Angelica was still alive. But she had no idea how to find her.
Angelica’s family in Venezuela scoured the internet for any information about the girl with dark eyes that they knew as “Caraota,” or bean.
Diplomatic relations between the United States and Venezuela are strained, so Norkys and her relatives had to rely on the International Red Cross and consular officials in Mexico to make inquiries. They called every Texas and Mexico number that might have information. For weeks, they could not figure out where she was.
But a worker at a funeral home in Eagle Pass had given them reason to hope. He told them that Angelica’s relatives were dead, but that officials had confirmed to him that she had indeed survived.
A month after her family drowned, Angelica surfaced in the U.S. immigration system. U.S. officials had taken her to a shelter for young unaccompanied migrants. With no relatives in the United States, child welfare advocates began arranging her return to Venezuela. It would take an additional eight months to bring her home.
During that time, the number of people crossing the Rio Grande dropped. Mexican authorities continued to stop migrants from reaching the river, and the Biden administration imposed new restrictions on applying for asylum over the summer.
But many migrants are still wading into the Rio Grande. Migrants interviewed at shelters in the Mexican state of Coahuila, across from Eagle Pass, said Texas troops have begun using rubber bullets and pepper balls to deter them. One pregnant woman showed a Post reporter marks on her belly where she said she had been hit. A spokesperson for the Texas Military Department said Operation Lone Star troops do not use rubber bullets or tear gas.
Angelica flew home to Venezuela in August dressed in a pink top and jeans. Her curly black hair was tied up with a matching bow. Norkys and her mother’s cousins waited for her at the airport in Caracas.
When they saw her tiny figure walking through the terminal, they called out: “Caraota!” She turned in their direction and giggled nervously. When she got close, Norkys bent down so that Angelica could see her face up close.
Angelica studied her gray hair and brown eyes. Then she opened her arms. She nestled her face in Norkys’s neck and didn’t let go.
Reprinted from the Washington Post
