These numbers also fail to take into account all those who have died or gone missing crossing the border into the United States, people often fleeing the violence-ridden towns and cities of their birth. In 2017, Manny Fernandez reported in The New York Times that the Border Patrol had recorded over six thousand deaths in the sixteen years between 2000 and 2016. In Arizona’s Pima County alone, the remains of more than two thousand migrants were found. The sheriff of another rural county in Texas told Fernandez that “for every one we find, we’re probably missing five.”
