Illegal immigrant rescues and deaths in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector are down nearly 80 percent compared to the same time last year, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials announced on April 25.
Yuma Sector Chief Patrol Agent Justin De La Torre told reporters at a press briefing in Yuma, Arizona, that for fiscal year 2025, his agents have so far conducted 19 rescues and recorded one death.
That’s about a 79 percent drop from the 89 rescues and six deaths agents recorded over the same period last year.
“The people who previously were coming here for economic reasons, we believe the message is out that this is not the way to cross, because we’ve seen such a drastic reduction in the number of people crossing for those reasons,” De La Torre said.
He attributed that change to one major policy reversal: the end of the so-called “catch-and-release” policy.
“We are no longer releasing people after arresting them into the United States before the adjudication of their immigration hearing,” De La Torre said.
As for the decrease in deaths, De La Torre attributed that to CBP’s Missing Migrant Program, launched in 2017, which he described as a “technology-based intervention program that improves the chance of survival for those lost in the desert.”
He noted that the Yuma Sector has 24 rescue beacons and 124 rescue signs scattered throughout the desert that display the viewer’s coordinates and instructions for calling 911 for help.
While the number of illegal crossings has significantly decreased, De La Torre said his agents were still seeing people—mostly single adults with criminal records—attempting to enter unlawfully “through remote and dangerous terrain.”
To those individuals, he issued a warning: “It’s still not worth your life to be smuggled in by the criminal organizations. It’s not worth losing your life or being subjected to exploitation to come to the United States.”
The press briefing included officials from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.
Juan Pablo Valdivieso, ambassador and consul general of Ecuador, stressed the importance of transnational cooperation to thwart the criminal organizations that are trafficking people and drugs throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Valdivieso noted that just 15 days prior, the Ecuadorian government incinerated 340 tons of cocaine that had been seized over the previous few months.
Drug trafficking, he said, brings these criminal organizations “a lot of money, more than we can imagine.”
He added that the same can be said for human trafficking, which also brings “a lot of suffer[ing] to those people who risk their lives and to their family that do not know what’s going on, what happened to them.”
Concluding his remarks in Spanish, Valdivieso praised CBP’s Missing Migrant Program for the lives it has saved—“lives that are invaluable to their families.”
