Is Biden's border policy a death sentence via desert for migrants?

An interview with Salvavisión's Dora Rodriguez!

Welcome to Work Climate! While I’ve been attempting to learn The Law, I keep getting distracted by heat- and immigration-related news. I admit I’m biased towards these topics, but I think it’s undeniable that they both—for good reason—have been getting a lot of attention recently. Early and drastic heat waves have hit much of the United States,¹ prompting new rounds of commentary and petitions regarding the federal government’s slow (but progressing!) efforts to protect workers from deadly heat. The situation is even more grim internationally: Pakistan is regularly topping 120 degrees Fahrenheit, while more than 1,000 people died during the hajj to Mecca, where temperatures hit 125 at Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mosque. This latest heat-driven mass tragedy should have been bigger news here, I feel, though, to be fair, we have plenty of other unfolding catastrophes to keep track of.

On the immigration side, of course most of the chatter has been about what a liability the border is for Biden, and his administration’s consequent—and craven—crackdown on asylum seekers. I have no idea how the political calculus will work out here (as a professor said to me recently, the only thing worse than this would be a second Trump term, which I believe based on terrifying reports of what Stephen Miller et al. are planning for 2025). But it seems clear that the Democrats’ capitulation on migrants’ rights guarantees a lot of suffering for the sake of some deterrence and uncertain electoral gains.

For all this swirling news about movement and heat, though, I haven’t seen much reporting connecting the issues. Enter a timely law review article (how often can that be said?) by Julia Neusner — Deadly Journeys: Climate Change, U.S. Border Enforcement, and Human Rights. Her work explores the myriad ways climate change is making mobility in the Americas more difficult. To wit:

In summer 2023, parts of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands region became engulfed in a record-breaking heat dome, a consequence of climate change that produced record high temperatures in the triple digits for more than a week. . . . Heat-related deaths and injuries in the borderlands soared in the wake of Title 42, [Biden’s] Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule, and other policies obstructing asylum and border access.

Julia (who I’m also lucky to call a friend and mentor) draws attention to the experiences of migrants and advocates in her writing, including the powerful testimony of Dora Rodriguez, founder and director of the nonprofit Salvavisión in Tucson, Arizona, who I also had the privilege of hearing speak at a conference last month. Per an interview in the piece, Dora’s organization

has been struggling to provide food, water, and other aid to migrants and asylum seekers in the Arizona borderlands as sweltering conditions with triple-digit temperatures have made the work even more challenging and exhausting. “The heat has made everything so much harder,” she said. Rodriguez explained that the group depends on private donations, and that the federal government provides no support. Sometimes DHS agents reach out to Rodriguez and her organization to provide humanitarian support to migrants and asylum seekers impacted by extreme heat.

I wanted to learn more about this, and Dora was kind enough to speak with me about her personal story, Salvavisión, and the weirdness of Arizona.

This image was the least uncanny of those generated by Substack’s AI plug-in; I can’t decide if those cacti are electronic mirages.

Stories from Sonora

Mexico is in the midst of a crippling heat wave which has already killed over 100 people. This event was made much more likely due to climate change, but naturally the region has long been visited by harsh summers. Dora began by recounting her own harrowing journey from El Salvador to Arizona 44 years ago. I have lightly edited and condensed her answers, here and below.

I decided to leave El Salvador when I was 19, when a civil war started in my country. A young person like me was a target for arrest because I was part of a youth group at my church, associated with American nuns who later were murdered by the government. I was going to university to become a social worker, because I love to connect people, but my mother and I decided I needed to leave the country. [After two failed attempts to enter the United States, in mid-June 1980 a smuggler brought] 26 of us to Arizona, women and men as well as four unaccompanied minors, my cousin and three young sisters. I had no idea what the climate was like in Arizona, and, during the last week of June 1980 a heat wave came. The temperature in the desert was something we had never experienced before because El Salvador is a tropical country. The smugglers left us and we were lost without water in temperatures above 115. We were in such a terrible situation we knew we were not going to make it. Thank God, two Salvadorans were arrested and told Border Patrol where we were, but, by the time they found us, 13 people died, including the three sisters—my friends. After the rescue, we were in the hospital for seven days recuperating. I ended up in Tucson, and I’ve been here since I was 19. My life changed with that tragedy, and it’s why I’ve been doing the work I’ve been doing for many years.

I then asked Dora about founding Salvavisión and the work that her and others’ organizations do to combat climate hazards in the Sonoran Desert.

In the 80s, the sanctuary movement started because of the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, so I got involved by hosting people in my house. I had a family, went to school, became a social worker, and then, in 2015, I decided to go public with my story after not speaking about it for nearly 30 years. It was very hard and traumatizing, as I didn’t want to pass that on to my own kids, but the political rhetoric at the time inspired me to come forward and try and change people’s minds about who we are. Salvavisión has not stopped providing aid since then to Borderlands deportees and people in the community, and educating as much as we can through stories. There are so many humanitarian orgs doing life-saving work here, though, like Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans and Humane Borders. Every single day they’re out there, especially right now, but the winter can be brutal, too. The snow, the cold in the mountains can be freezing. These issues got worse after Clinton’s prevention through deterrence. They militarized the Borderlands, so the people started crossing in the most remote areas, which started increasing deaths. Since then, we have lost at least 5,000 people in that desert due to extreme heat and cold and injuries. They are in such remote areas that no one finds them. Our work is independent from the government and can be as simple as buying hundreds of bottles of water and taking off into the desert to find people presenting for asylum. Just on Saturday, I found a group of about 50 people in 105 degrees who had been walking for 3 hours with no water. Some women had begun vomiting and passing out. It’s so sad to say, but finding these types of groups in distress is common for us. The smugglers leave them far away from where they can get help, where there is nowhere there to help them. So, on a daily basis, we’re loading up the car with life-saving resources and taking off for the wall.

Finally, I asked Dora about what she’s seen change under Trump and Biden.

Our teams always go in groups because of the vigilantes. These extreme right groups are tough, they think we’re providing aid to cartels, so that is very dangerous. They’re much bolder [since Trump], they come in ATVs right into your face, almost running you off the road, they look like they’re going into a war zone with rifles and M16s and body armor; we try and get away from them without violence. [As for Biden’s border policy,] it’s pure cruelty. It’s so cruel. [On June 19], I witnessed whole family units being deported without being given the chance to ask for asylum. I saw a woman with a daughter in a wheelchair, and I would hope they would be an exception, but Border Patrol didn’t let them speak. Biden’s executive order affected these people right away. We are seeing hundreds turned away from our ports of entry. It’s not okay. I understand they have a job to do, but why would they treat these women with such disrespect? Deporting them without their IDs for no reason? That makes them vulnerable in border towns. That shouldn’t be the protocol. So, all we can do is talk to anyone we can, but we can’t resolve this. It’s a political circus, but it’s dehumanizing. It is hard as an advocate, seeing the people suffering everyday, to understand how we in this country have become so heartless, such that everything that matters is the vote, the power. What I see is cruelty and suffering. It’s important to bring forward the truth that these policies are criminalizing people who are only seeking safety; they have no fentanyl in their backpacks.

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My profound gratitude to Dora Rodriguez for her time and to everyone at Salvavisión and throughout the southwest saving lives in very difficult circumstances. If you’ve read this far, thank you, and please join me in helping keep their critical work going this summer: https://salvavision.org/donate

1. In somewhat cooler news, California is set to follow Spain’s lead and name its heat waves starting next year, which should help elevate these events in the public’s imagination as the climate disasters they are. California also finalized its indoor heat regulations, meaning it will soon be just the third state to have such rules.