Migrant deaths in Arizona desert reach two-year high despite declining border crossings

The remains of 19 dead migrants, including children, were found in the Arizona desert near the U.S.-Mexico border last month, a two-year record, according to data from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner and the advocacy group Humane Borders.

Among the deceased, five appeared to have been dead for less than a day and two had been dead for less than a week when they were found.

“This is a persistent and perennial problem, it's not just a July 2026 problem,” Brad Jones, a political science professor at the UC Davis Global Migration Center and a Humane Borders board member, told the Arizona Daily Star.

“It does ebb and flow, but it never goes away,” he said. “We’ve never had a period of zero recovered remains” since Humane Borders was founded in 2000, acording to Jones.

The record number of deaths, likely an undercount, is all the more striking because border crossings have plunged overall since Donald Trump took office and tightened a variety of immigration policies, including effectively cutting off all asylum claims and restricting entries at the southern border.

There were nearly 10 times fewer encounters between Border Patrol agents and migrants in July 2026 than during the same month in 2024, the final full year of Joe Biden’s administration.

As The Independent has reported, the U.S. has long pursued a strategy of “prevention through deference,” using military-style security infrastructure such as walls and barbed wire at popular points of entry to push migrants into remote rural areas spanning the lengthy U.S.-Mexico border, in the hopes that the danger of the crossing will prevent future migration.

Critics argue that undocumented immigration into the U.S. is often driven by life-or-death factors and migrants will make the journey regardless of what kind of barriers are in their way, exposing already-vulnerable people to injury and death along the mountains, rivers and deserts of the borderlands.

The Trump administration has continued to fortify the border, thanks in part to a $46 billion infusion of funds from Congress to continue building its signature border wall, which was largely paused during the Biden administration.

Border construction efforts have continued across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, despite opposition from indigenous tribes, environmental advocates and park boosters, who have been particularly incensed by a plan to add new border security infrastructure within Big Bend National Park, an area that’s not a high-traffic illegal immigration zone.

In addition to adding new physical barriers at the border, the Trump administration has sought massive changes to the legal regime along the frontier.

The White House has argued migration into the U.S. constitutes an invasion and gives the administration the power to remove undocumented border crossers without giving them a chance to seek asylum, a right which is protected under U.S. and human rights law. Lower courts have blocked the policy, though the Trump administration is seeking a Supreme Court appeal.

The administration has also revoked temporary protected status rights for people from a variety of nations, policies which had given tens of thousands of immigrants from unstable regions reprieve from deportation.

Last year, 32 people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, the most deaths in more than two decades.