Death in the Borderland

By: Erin Olson Michael Marizco, a border reporter for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, tells the story of an illegal immigrant from Michoacan, Mexico, who was separated from his wife on their way to the United States. The man visited Arizona's port of entry, where immigrants cross into America, every night for a week, hoping his wife would be there. He didn't know if she was alive or if she had perished in the journey across the Arizona desert ? and Marizco doesn't know if the man ever found out. He eventually left the United States and returned to Michoacan alone.

"I will run into people who are looking for a wife, looking for a husband, looking for a brother," says Marizco, who has been a border reporter for the Daily Star since April 2003. "It starts to weigh on you, frankly."

Marizco started keeping track of the deaths of illegal immigrants who try to cross into the United States through southern Arizona because he didn't want to rely on numbers provided by the Border Patrol. But the information he collected gave him an idea: creating the first online database to catalogue the deaths of illegals (more than 200 just this year). Now available at the Daily Star's Web site, azstarnet.com, under "Border News," the database is searchable by a missing person's name, age, or hometown.

The program, launched July 15, is still a work in progress. Marizco and Andrew Satter, online producer for the Daily Star, compiled the available data going back to October 2003, and Sean Kasun, a StarNet programmer, created the database. Marizco says it took about a month to set up the original program, and he tries to update the information once a month as new immigrant deaths are reported.

"We had a difficult time keeping counts of the illegal entrants who died," Marizco explains. "The Border Patrol gets the majority, but they don't get all. That evolved into starting up a database where families can go, because so many people lose family members and friends trying to get through the desert."

This year alone, the Daily Star counted a record number of 221 deaths using data from documents provided by Mexico's Secretary of Foreign Relations, local law enforcement, and Arizona county medical examiners. According to Marizco, the immigrant death toll has been on the rise since 2000 ? which is why he has already requested information from Mexico "going back a couple of years" to include in the database.

Though he admits that staying on top of the information was overwhelming, the work appears to be worth it. According to Satter, upon its initial introduction, the page was getting about 150 views a day, though he didn't know if anyone had actually found relatives through its use. The Daily Star provides the information, but it tells searchers to contact the authorities if they find a loved one on the site.

"The summer, unfortunately, is the most deadly time of year, so that was kind of the peak time when there were multiple deaths coming through each week," Satter says. "It's one of those things ? the less people have to use it, the better." Marizco and Satter are working on improving the database with a new search method Satter refers to as a "things they carried" feature: details like the clothes or jewelry immigrants were wearing, tattoos, and other distinctive markings or articles. Eventually they hope to make the database searchable by such items.

For the time being, in addition to providing a service to the families that may have lost loved ones in the dry Arizona desert, the site is doing double duty as a public service announcement. As Satter puts it, "Hopefully it will give people perspective on how deadly it is out in the desert, and that more needs to be done to help save people."