U.S. flights to Mexico fail to cut migrant deaths

A U.S. government program that returns illegal immigrants to Mexico by flying them deep into the country is ineffective at reducing the number of deaths in the Arizona desert, analysts said on Wednesday.

The Interior Repatriation Program of daily charter flights from Tucson to Mexico City and Guadalajara was implemented in 2004 to cut deaths in the summer months.

Instead of dropping the migrants near the border as is usually done, the program flies them hundreds of miles inside Mexico. The idea was to deter migrants from immediately reattempting to cross the border via the desert corridor from Mexico.

But a report by the Government Accountability Office noted last week that fatalities along the southwest border had jumped to 472 in 2005 from 334 two years earlier, prompting analysts to say program has failed in its primary aim.

“The authorities had been selling the program in part on the grounds that it reduced deaths, but so far there is little evidence that it has had any impact on fatalities,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute think tank.

The program is implemented in conjunction with the Mexican government and operates from July to the end of September, when temperatures in the desert corridor south of Tucson soar to highs of above 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Flown deep into Mexico
Instead of driving migrants south to the dusty border in a bus and dropping them off in Mexico, the one-way flights take migrants hundreds of miles into the interior of Mexico, from where authorities bus them to their homes.

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The U.S. Border Patrol had hailed the program’s success at cutting deaths on the border in its first year of operation, when fatalities dropped by six, although the GAO report stated that there was “insufficient evidence” to support the claim over the two-year period.

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Papademetriou said the problem lay in the limited scope of the program, which succeeded in sending back 20,000 undocumented migrants to Mexico last year -- a tiny fraction of the almost 1.2 million people arrested crossing the border.

“How can any reasonable person argue that repatriating fewer than 2 percent of the total number of immigrants would have any meaningful effect on deaths?,” he said in a telephone interview.

The U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agency, which oversees the flights, was not immediately available to comment on the program on Wednesday.

The charter flights cost U.S. taxpayers around $15 million a year.