SAN DIEGO — As Title 42 is set to expire in May, the number of migrants apprehended illegally crossing the Southern Border has increased by 25 percent.
That was just in the month of March, compared to February.
More than 160,000 migrants were apprehended last month, and US border officials don't anticipate that number slowing down anytime soon.
Officials expect 13,000 migrants to cross each day when Title 42 expires in early May. Title 42 is a pandemic-era policy used to expel migrants seeking asylum over COVID concerns.
And as more migrants are expected to cross the US-Mexico border, historically that could mean more injuries and even deaths.
The University of San Diego is raising awareness about this issue in a powerful exhibit inside the Copley Library.
“Here I see a 10-year-old that was hit by a car,” said Marni LaFleur, Ph.D., USD.
The professor of anthropology at USD pointed to one of the 1,500 toe tags that line the wall outlined with a map of San Diego and Imperial Counties. The tags represent migrants who died crossing the border or waterway in San Diego and Imperial Counties. USD says the tags represent deaths from 1994 to 2021.
Toe tags are what medical examiners use when a person dies. The orange toe tags are people who have not been identified and the manila ones have been identified but the names have been withheld for privacy.
“I see one that is an eight-year-old male that drowned in La Jolla. So that's always hard for me to see,” said LaFleur.
Toe tags with the cause of death, blunt force trauma, line the San Ysidro border.
“We see that from when the wall went from [17] feet to 30 feet, there's an increase in the severity of the injuries and an increase in the number of deaths,” said LaFleur.
Last year a UC San Diego Health study found injuries in falls from the border wall were five times higher than in 2019.
“I hope that, that deaths like this stop, I hope that there's a policy change in immigration so that people can actually apply for and be granted asylum in a reasonable amount of time. And they don't become so desperate that they have to cross or enter the United States without documentation,” said LaFleur.
She, Dr. Meghan Donnelly and USD students used data from the medical examiner’s office to track migrant deaths. San Diego County tracks locations but Imperial County does not.
They adopted the exhibit from the collaborative Hostile Terrain 94 Project which tracks migrant deaths in Arizona from 1994 to 2022. LaFleur wanted to document the deaths in San Diego and Imperial counties.
“It’s just really shocking to see the number of people and to realize that it's here like this isn't happening somewhere else. It's not, you know, far away. This is right here happening in our city,” said LaFleur.
The impact flutters across the wall with messages on monarch butterflies that are handwritten and colored by people who visited the exhibit.
“Where were you going? What was your life going to bring? But now you're on this wall,” said LaFleur.
The professor says this has a bigger impact by seeing the 1,500 toe tags on a map than a piece of paper in a list.
“If there were 1,500 bodies of people that got shot, we'd see that it's violent with that imagery. We don't see these bodies, it's easy to forget that they were individuals,” said LaFluer.
She hopes with her exhibit you will see these are people who are more than just a toe tag with their age and how they died.
“This kind of brings them back in a small way that they existed that they were here,” said LaFleur.
The exhibit will be on display in the Copley Library until May.