By alonso calatrava
Jul 23, 2023, 14:33 PM EDT
This weekend, the immigration activist group Compassionate Borders decided to install six new additional water stations in the US Organ Pipe National Park, on the border of the state of Arizona and Mexico, after the death of two immigrants due to the intense heat in the region.
According to Dora Rodríguez, director of the organization, one of the deaths occurred near the border wall in Sasabe, and another was in Arivaca, where another man collapsed due to the heat; to later die. “The situation we are experiencing at the border at the moment is terrible, unfortunately we witnessed the death of at least two migrants recently,” he said.
This same week, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office reported that although there are still no official figures for deaths at the border during fiscal year 2022, the agency did confirm that between fiscal years 2017 and 2021, the agency recorded a total of 1,701 migrant deaths along the border.
“We are seeing that people continue to arrive, we have seen groups of one hundred to four hundred people waiting near the wall to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol,” Rodríguez said.
Mistreatment at the border
These two deaths associated with temperatures on the border occur at the same time that the White House, politicians and civil groups repudiated the border policy of the Government of Texas, led by Republican Greg Abbott, after various media outlets in the United States denounced that several police officers in that state received orders to deny migrants water and to return even children and babies to the waters of the Rio Grande on the border with Mexico.
According to reports, soldiers and police officers deployed on the Texas-Mexico border, which is a program supported by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, after the end of Title 42, would have received orders from the state Department of Public Safety to push immigrants towards the Rio Grande, to prevent them from entering US territory.
Democratic congressman Joaquín Castro said that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told him that the Joe Biden government is reviewing the situation on the Texas border.
With information from EFE
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