By Manny Fernandez, Caitlin Dickerson and Simon Romero
A 10-month-old boy died after a raft carrying migrants overturned on a stretch of the Rio Grande along the Texas border, federal authorities said. Three other migrants, including two children, were also feared dead in the latest tragedy involving the influx of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
The episode came to light around 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday, when Border Patrol agents near Del Rio, Tex., apprehended a man who told them he had been crossing the Rio Grande with his family in an attempt to enter the United States when their raft overturned in the water, spilling its nine passengers into the river. The man said that he saw his 10-month-old son and 7-year-old nephew, as well as another man and that man’s daughter, swept away by the water.
The agents then heard screaming from the river and saw two people struggling in the water close to a raft, officials said. The man they had apprehended identified them as his wife and 6-year-old daughter. Agents entered the water and pulled the mother and child ashore, and began searching for the others who had been aboard the raft.
Two other passengers, another man and his 13-year-old son, were later found on the American side of the river. Border Patrol agents found the body of the 10-month-old baby on Thursday and pronounced the boy dead, according to a Customs and Border Protection official. Agents were still searching for the three migrants who had not been recovered.
The chaotic episode highlights the rising death toll as migrants from Central America try to cross the border with Mexico to request asylum in the United States. Two detained migrant children from Guatemala died in December while in Border Patrol custody, and a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala died earlier this week in Texas after arriving at a shelter for unaccompanied children.
Raft crossings into Texas are a common form of transit into the United States, with the Rio Grande Valley sector being consistently the Border Patrol’s busiest. With springtime water levels relatively high, the water is fast-moving in the area near Del Rio, said an official with Customs and Border Protection, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the raft accident. Rescues are common because many of those attempting to cross have little, if any, experience with swimming, the official said, and crossing the river at night, as this group had, is particular dangerous.
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The river is patrolled regularly by Border Patrol agents, but migrants attempting to cross are often advised by smugglers to do so in areas that are difficult for the agents to see because they are obscured by trees or other natural barriers — making an accident such as an overturned raft in those areas even more dangerous as it can go unobserved by the authorities.
The five people who survived Wednesday’s accident were from Central America, leading agents to believe that the missing migrants were also Central American.
The leading theory among Border Patrol agents was that all four missing migrants were dead, according to an official from the Department of Homeland Security, who was not authorized to speak because of the preliminary nature of the investigation.
The five other migrants on the raft were given medical attention and brought to a nearby hospital, the official said.
Most migrant deaths on America’s southwest border occur on land. From October 1997 to September 2018, the Border Patrol recorded 7,505 migrant deaths in its nine sectors, and the vast majority were the bodies and remains of migrants who died from dehydration and exposure to the elements while hiking through the desert or the brush.
But a large number of those deaths were men, women and children who drowned while crossing the Rio Grande. In Hidalgo County, part of the Rio Grande Valley sector, sheriff’s officials reported 27 migrant waterway deaths last year, an increase from 13 in 2017.
“We pull out one to two bodies a month from the river,” said the sheriff of Hidalgo County, J.E. Guerra. “It’s a fast-moving river in certain areas, and it might not look swift from the surface, but you jump in and that current will take you under. We’ll see rafts and we’ll see inner tubes tied together. Most of the time they paddle with their hands, with no paddles.”
Sheriff Guerra said the majority of migrants who cross the river do not know how to swim, and the smugglers known as coyotes who are paid to get them across illegally have no concern for the migrants’ safety.
“They overload these rafts,” he said of the smugglers. “They’re just concerned about getting the body across the river. They’ll put 10 people on a raft that was meant to hold only four.”
Along other parts of the border, drownings and near-drownings in irrigation canals are common.
In February, Border Patrol agents near Yuma, Ariz., heard calls for help coming from the Salinity Canal and rushed to rescue six Hondurans struggling to stay afloat. Four of the six people rescued were children and teenagers. Migrants struggling to swim are also frequently pulled from the All-American Canal in California.
Five weeks ago, in a section of the Rio Grande not far from where the raft overturned Wednesday, Border Patrol agents rescued a Guatemalan woman and her three children after they attempted to swim across the river but were swept downstream by the strong currents. Agents assigned to the Eagle Pass Station were patrolling the river on a boat and came upon the family on March 28. The three children were ages 2, 4 and 15.
“Had our Border Patrol agents not been in the area to respond quickly, the woman and her children would have more than likely drowned,” Louie W. Collins, the Border Patrol’s acting chief patrol agent for the Del Rio sector, said in a statement.
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