More women and children are drowning trying to reach the US as Texas and Mexico militarize the border. Record requests reveal the soaring death toll in the Rio Grande amid official undercounts.

In Texas, we documented 858 migrant drownings, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is legally mandated to record migrant deaths, recorded 587 along the entire southwest border. In Mexico, where no single agency is comprehensively documenting migration-related deaths, we found records of 249 people who drowned in the river.

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Our data on drownings reveals the changing demographic of those dying in the Rio Grande as more families with children attempted to cross. In 2023 about one in five drowning victims was a woman and one in ten a child. More people from nationalities other than Mexican were increasingly dying in the river. After peaking in 2022, drowning deaths dropped in 2023 but analysis of available data for 2024 indicates they are rising again.

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Four-year old Angelica was found clinging to her father’s lifeless body in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. Her family, originally from Venezuela, had fled the brutal economic and political situation in their home country, and were seeking a better life in the United States. The entire family, Angelica’s father, mother, uncle, and 11-year-old brother, Santiago, drowned while trying to wade across the Rio Grande in November 2023. Angelica was the only survivor.

Carolina, 27, and her children Kylian, 3, and baby Noel, just two months old, fled the dictatorship in Nicaragua to join her husband in the United States. Both of the children drowned in August 2022, in the same section of river, where police and soldiers have been deployed to stop asylum seekers from touching US soil.

Militarizing the river is a binational effort. In 2022, as the number of drowning deaths peaked, so did Mexico’s deployment of soldiers to turn back asylum seekers: more than 11,500 soldiers from the Army and the National Guard were sent that year, double the number in 2019, when Mexico first deployed its military as immigration enforcers.

In Texas, under Operation Lone Star, more than 10,000 National Guard soldiers and police have been deployed to the river, since it began in March 2021.

Incidentally, the Washington Post investigated alongside with Lighthouse on this story and also wrote an article (arc'd)