Border Desert Proves Deadly For Mexicans

By Timothy Egan, New York Times, May 23, 2004

At the bottleneck of human smuggling here in the Sonoran Desert, illegal immigrants [illegal aliens] are dying in record numbers as they try to cross from Mexico into the United States in the wake of a new Bush administration amnesty proposal...

After a four year drop, apprehensions which the Border Patrol uses to measure human smuggling are up 30 per cent over last year along the entire southern border, with 660,000 people detained from Oct. 1, 2003 through the end of April, 2004, Federal officials said...