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SANTA TERESA, New Mexico – Hours before it happened, Border Patrol Agent José Gil knew someone was going to die.
A sensor on the border was tripped and Gil, responding to a potential illegal crossing, had come face to face with a smuggler through the steel border fence, as migrants scattered into the Mexican dunes to hide.
“Look, don’t bring them across,” Gil warned the smuggler, known as a coyote. “You are going to kill them. We’ve been finding people here, dying.”
Migrant deaths have surged for a second year along this stretch of U.S.-Mexico border in West Texas and southern New Mexico. The personal and economic toll on migrant families of losing their loved one – often the breadwinner – is immense.
But there is a hidden toll, too, on the border agents who find the bodies of migrants, or who fail trying to save the ones they find barely alive.