Haunted by migrant deaths, Border Patrol agents face mental health toll

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SANTA TERESA, New Mexico – Hours before it happened, Border Patrol Agent José Gil knew someone was going to die.

A sensor on the border was tripped and Gil, responding to a potential illegal crossing, had come face to face with a smuggler through the steel border fence, as migrants scattered into the Mexican dunes to hide.

"Look, don’t bring them across," Gil warned the smuggler, known as a coyote. "You are going to kill them. We’ve been finding people here, dying."

Migrant deaths have surged for a second year along this stretch of U.S.-Mexico border in West Texas and southern New Mexico. The personal and economic toll on migrant families of losing their loved one – often the breadwinner – is immense.

But there is a hidden toll, too, on the border agents who find the bodies of migrants, or who fail trying to save the ones they find barely alive.

Through Friday, 175 migrants have died in Border Patrol's El Paso Sector this fiscal year, which ended Monday. That broke last year's record of 149 deaths here, a number many times higher than even five years ago when 10 migrants died in a year. And it shocked agents like Gil, who patrol this stretch of desert populated by homes and crisscrossed by highways where migrants are dying within reach of help.

It's one of the contributing factors to a mental health crisis that has led U.S. Customs and Border Protection to drastically expand support for agents over the last 18 months after 15 agents committed suicide in 2022.

Border Patrol's mission is law enforcement, but the job is in many ways unique. The policies agents are meant to enforce are constantly changing. Border terrain is rugged, and the work – often requiring hours of solitude in extreme conditions – can be lonely and dangerous.

Gil grew up in the desert landscape of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. Like many border agents, he traces his roots to Mexico and started his career in the U.S. Army before entering the Border Patrol.

He speaks English and Spanish with equal ease and knows the terrain of this borderland where he was raised: the ruddy dunes crowned with mesquite, the rocky peak of Mt. Cristo Rey, the sprawl of the metropolis where homes in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have panoramic views of the border fence that divides them.

After warning the smuggler not to risk the crossing, Gil buckled down in the dunes to wait for him to try again.

New resources for agent mental health

Fifteen Border Patrol agents died by suicide in 2022. It was a brutal wake-up call for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, on the personal and professional pressures border agents face and the true cost of the agency's historically male-dominated, tough-it-out work culture.

The mental health crisis among Border Patrol agents stems from many contributors, agency leaders say: The whiplash of shifting border policies; the strident tone of national immigration politics; conviction of murder by one of their own; the stress of apprehending families and children, often in terrible condition; and – in this desert in particular – the dramatic spike in migrant deaths.

The mounting risks to migrants in the desert near El Paso are also evident in the number of rescues this year: more than 900 rescues up from nearly 600 rescues a year ago.

Gil said this year, more than any other, "has been really, really bad because we’ve been seeing a lot of dead people. A lot of recoveries. A lot of people in medical distress, lost. It takes a toll on us, all the agents, because we’re not used to it."

Still, like many agents, Gil ‒ one of the few to clear the bar into the agency's two elite forces, the BORTAC tactical force and BORSTAR rescue team ‒ hasn't sought mental health support.

"Changing the culture is one of these things that doesn’t happen overnight," said Peter Jaquez, who served in leadership in El Paso Sector and took a job last year as CBP's first executive director of workforce care. "But we’ve taken tremendous strides. We’re removing that stigma of asking for help."

CBP's response since 2022 has been to swarm mental health and other resources to agents and to care for them at work and at home in a way it never had before.

As a first line of mental health defense, Border Patrol has always had access to the chaplaincy program and volunteer "peer support" agents ‒ men and women in uniform who raise their hands to support others in field. Peer support agents are now receiving additional training on recognizing the signs of mental health crisis.

CBP has also hired six operational psychologists who office inside Border Patrol stations, and the agency plans to hire more. Uniformed agents are now assigned as "resilience specialists" to create ties between the psychologists and field agents. Last year, CBP launched a K-9 program specifically designed to support agent mental health.

The agency has created ancillary programs to help agents better manage stress, including back-up childcare and pet care programs, financial education programs, and "family days" where agency leadership can ensure spouses are aware of the resources available to agents and their families.

But in the most serious cases, the agency has also made a crucial change to a policy that prevented agents from asking for help, Jaquez said, removing the punitive risk they faced in permanently losing their badge and gun.

If an agent is expressing suicidal ideation, Jaquez said, "We’re going to remove the weapon. But we’re not going to put them on a rubber gun squad and have them in limbo forever. Mental health is treated like a physical injury. They're given time to recover and rehabilitate."

At Border Patrol's El Paso Sector headquarters, Chief Patrol Agent Scott Good has made mental health and what the agency calls "resiliency" a priority.

"We don't need to be that tough guy or gal," Good said. "We don't have to have our problems and take them home with us and not talk about it."

Migrant advocates say the higher border fence and tougher U.S. policies tend to drive migrants into the hands of smugglers, who force them to take deadly risks.

"Our agents are going through a lot," Good said. "The agents see the results of this evil that the smugglers have and it really does weigh a big toll on their mental health and well-being."

This year, through Sept. 11, seven Border Patrol agents have committed suicide, including one in El Paso, according to CBP.

"Even one is too many," Good said.

When rescue attempts fail

Dozens of Border Patrol agents in El Paso Sector witnessed a death or found a body this summer. In interviews with five of them, agents told USA TODAY the failed rescues were the hardest on them. Most said they were military veterans; that they didn't ask for help but CBP made mental health support available.

Two months ago, Agent Steven Figueroa responded to a group of migrants struggling in the Rio Grande and arrived to the rescue.

"One subject, female, she drowned," he said. "She was face down. We weren’t in time to save her. It’s just rough. You try so hard to be where you can, to do everything you are taught, everything you would do if it was someone you knew, and it slipped through your fingers."

His supervisor immediately alerted him to the resources available, and fellow agents checked in.

"They were all asking to see if I was good," he said. "It was nice to see."

Benjamin Guillen Griego, who was born and raised in El Paso, said agents are law enforcement officers but "we are human ourselves." He is a vet, too, and – like Gil and Figueroa – he hasn't used CBP mental health resources, he said. But it gets to him sometimes.

"These people, despite whatever their intentions were, it all started with a dream of having that better life and to think their dreams ended up in that spot … they could be out there for months at a time or a year," he said of the bodies, "and their family not knowing."

'I told you somebody was going to die'

Three hours after Gil warned the smuggler not to cross, roughly 100 migrants began scaling the border fence – five here, seven there. He and other agents jumped into motion.

As he raced after a group of 10 on foot, Gil found an older man on his hands and knees in the sand. "He was probably tired because he was running away from me," he said. "I tried to pick him up because I could look up and I could see people running away."

Gil told the man to get up. "He couldn’t, so I helped him up and I sat him down. I said, 'Hey stay right here,' so I could go get more help."

Gil borrowed an ATV from another agent nearby who had just found the body of a dead woman and was following protocol: He would stay and wait for a sheriff's deputy and the forensic investigator. Gil steered the ATV into the dunes.

The next person he caught was the same smuggler he had warned earlier, along with two other migrants. He marched them over to the elderly man, who was now prone, his face in the sand. Gil rolled him over. There was foam around his mouth.

He turned to the smuggler. "I told him, ‘Te dije que somebody was going to die,'" Gil said. "You guys are going to have to help me."

Gil had already called in emergency assistance. It was less than three miles over desert terrain to New Mexico's Highway 9.

He put two migrants in front of his ATV and told the smuggler to hold the elderly man in the back.

He drove as fast as the overloaded ATV would let him, toward the highway. The man reminded him of his own parents, he said, both Mexican. How they would fare in the desert on a day like that one. How they would never make it.

"I look back," he said. "I keep on shaking him. 'Okay, he is breathing.' We were like 30 yards from the highway, and he just... No pulse. No pulse. We did CPR. Everyone showed up. It was too late."

Gil told the story standing in the shadow of the border fence. He wore a camouflage uniform, a heavy vest and sunglasses. He didn't want to talk about it, he said. But he didn't stop.

"That got me really really bad," he said. "Mentally, I even had a nightmare that night. And I’ve been through a lot. I’ve seen a lot. People, aliens, decapitated because they’ve done an FTY, a failure to yield, and they’ve run into a semi (truck) – stuff like that doesn’t get me. But actually having somebody dying on me like that? And like I said, there was nothing I could do because it’s too late. It’s too late.

"The coyote," he said of the smuggler who is now awaiting prosecution, "he was crying, too."

Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.