Border Patrol Unit 2: Humanitarian Realities: Rescue and Migrants in Distress

School: Minister Destiny Testimony Schools Track: Law Enforcement — Professional Training Wing: Border Patrol Unit: 2 of 4 (self-paced) Tier: Public — open to all students Founded and presented by: Muslim Ordained Minister Destiny Marie Morgan

A note on what this school is: this is community-designed training — Minister Destiny's program. It is not agency policy, does not replace CBP training, statute, or the courts, and where it proposes approaches they are labeled as proposals. Nothing here is legal advice. Rank in this school is a school achievement only — not a job rank, title, or credential. This unit is compiled from public sources; it is not classified material and this school holds no security-clearance content.

Before you start

• This school never collects your name. Progress and quiz answers stay on your device; pass the unit quiz (80% or higher, retakes allowed, answers are not shown) and your certificate downloads with a blank name line to fill in after saving.
• Unit 1 taught the mission and its authority. This unit teaches the other fact of the same ground: the border environment itself injures and kills people, and the same agency charged with enforcement is also, by its own published account, a rescuer of the people it finds in distress. This is a heavy unit. Read it at a pace you can carry, and know that every helpline listed at the end is there for students as well as for the field.

The lesson

1. The environment is the first danger

Public reporting and agency publications describe the same unforgiving geography. Large stretches of the southern border cross desert where summer ground temperatures far exceed air temperatures, where water sources are scarce and unreliable, where a wrong turn multiplies distance faster than a tired walker can correct it, and where night brings its own cold even after a scorching day. Rivers on the border, including the Rio Grande, add current, depth changes, and drowning risk, especially for children and for anyone crossing at night or in flood conditions. Mountains and canyons add falls, exposure, and rescue access measured in hours rather than minutes.

The human physiology is not a matter of opinion. Heat illness progresses from cramps and exhaustion to heat stroke, which damages organs and can kill quickly without cooling and medical care. Dehydration degrades judgment before it stops the body, which means a person in trouble may walk away from help, hide from rescuers, or make decisions that deepen the emergency. Hypothermia, snakebite, traumatic injury from falls, and pre-existing conditions — diabetes, heart disease, pregnancy, childhood itself — all appear in the public rescue record. Smuggling organizations, in CBP's repeated public characterization, frequently abandon people who can no longer keep up, including people with disabilities, and collect fees without regard to whether the person survives the route. Students should understand abandonment as a documented pattern in agency releases, not as a figure of speech.

Estimates of how many people die in the borderlands vary by source, by year, and by how remains are counted and identified — county medical examiners, consulates, humanitarian organizations, and federal agencies do not all count the same cases the same way. This school therefore teaches no single death figure as fact. What is not in dispute in any public source is the direction of the reality: people die in this terrain every year, remains are still being recovered and identified years later, and families on both sides of the border wait for news that sometimes never becomes certain. Hold the uncertainty about numbers with precision, and hold the certainty about the human cost without flinching. Both are part of an honest education.

2. BORSTAR — the rescue unit CBP publishes

CBP's published answer to this environment is a specialized unit whose name students should know in full: Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue — BORSTAR. Public sources describe BORSTAR as created in 1998, in response to the rising toll of injuries and deaths in the borderlands, with its headquarters in El Paso, Texas, and teams stationed across the Southwest border sectors. Its agents are Border Patrol agents with additional specialized training in search and rescue and in emergency medicine in remote and hazardous environments — the kind of medicine that begins where roads end.

At a public level, the published picture of BORSTAR's work includes searching for people reported missing or in distress, reaching injured or stranded people in terrain vehicles cannot cross, stabilizing patients in the field — including advanced life-support skills among its medically trained members — and coordinating evacuation, often with air support, to hospitals. BORSTAR agents also respond beyond migrant rescue: CBP's own public releases describe them rescuing hikers, hunters, motorists, and fellow agents, and assisting in disaster and water-rescue responses. That breadth matters for understanding the unit. It is a rescue capability stationed where rescue is predictably needed, and the majority of its calls, by the nature of the place, involve people who crossed or attempted to cross the border.

This school teaches BORSTAR at the level CBP publishes it: its existence, its purpose, its general capabilities, and its rescues as released to the public. It teaches no rescue tactics, no deployment detail, and no operational methods. A student who finishes this unit should be able to explain what BORSTAR is and why it exists — and should also be able to say, accurately, that how its teams plan and execute a particular rescue is professional training held by the agency, not classroom material here.

3. How a rescue begins — beacons, 911, and coordination in public view

Published accounts describe several public-facing doors into the rescue system. People in distress who can reach a phone are urged, in government and humanitarian messaging alike, to call 911 — the universal emergency number in the United States — which routes to local dispatch and, in border counties, into coordination with Border Patrol and county rescue resources. CBP has also publicly described rescue beacons placed in remote areas: towers a distressed person can activate to signal for help and be located, some equipped to provide water or shade while help travels. And many rescues begin the oldest way: a call from a family member who received a last message — a dropped pin, a landmark, a name of a ranch or a highway mile — relayed through a consulate, a sheriff's office, a humanitarian hotline, or the Patrol itself.

Coordination is the unglamorous core of the published system. A single desert rescue can involve a county sheriff's dispatch, Border Patrol agents and BORSTAR teams on the ground, CBP air assets overhead, local emergency medical services, and a receiving hospital. Missing-person work extends the coordination further and longer: when a family reports someone missing after a crossing attempt, the search for an answer can run through Border Patrol records, county medical examiners who hold recovered remains and personal effects, forensic specialists who work to identify the dead, and consulates that connect identifications back to families in the person's home country. CBP's public Border Patrol page also names a Missing Alien Program, described as seeking to prevent the loss of life among people crossing the border, in accordance with the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act. Students need not memorize the machinery. They should grasp the principle: in this terrain, rescue is a system of handoffs, and every handoff — family to consulate, consulate to agency, agency to medical examiner, examiner back to family — is a place where care and accuracy either happen or fail.

One caution belongs in every student's notebook. Public messaging is consistent that the safest rescue is the one never needed: no one should attempt a desert crossing relying on beacons, phones, or rescue teams, because signal, battery, injury, and weather can each close the door before help is requested, and because some searches begin days after a family's last contact, across enormous ground. Rescue capacity is real, and it is also finite, slow, and weather-bound in ways enforcement capacity is not. Prevention — honest public information about the danger — is part of the humanitarian mission, not a rival to it.

4. The agent as rescuer — what CBP's own releases show

Read CBP's public newsroom over any span of months and a pattern emerges that surprises students who know the Patrol only through enforcement headlines: rescue releases are routine. Agents carry people out of canyons on litters. Teams reach a lost hiker in the Guadalupe Mountains in snow, treat hypothermia with dry clothing, water, and fire, and wait out weather for a helicopter. BORSTAR agents swim a flooding river channel to reach stranded people. In one widely released 2019 account from the Del Rio Sector, BORSTAR agents watched smugglers carry two men with serious physical disabilities — one a double amputee, one paraplegic — to the Rio Grande and throw them into the current; agents entered the water, fought the current, and brought both men to the bank alive. The release quotes the sector chief commending the agents' swift action in an emotionally charged situation. The men were offered medical attention and then processed under CBP guidelines — enforcement followed rescue, in that order, in the agency's own telling.

That order — rescue first — is the professional point of this section. In the field encounter, the drowning person is not first a case category; he is a drowning person. Agents are trained and publicly expected to render aid to anyone in distress, including people who will afterward face immigration processing, and including people whose smugglers caused the emergency. Students from border communities will recognize the lived counterpart of the press releases: families who tell stories of an agent's water bottle, shade, or carried child with the same certainty as families who tell harder stories. This school does not ask students to resolve the nation's border debate. It asks them to see the rescuer role clearly, because it is published, documented, and central to how the Patrol itself describes honorable service — and because Unit 4's integrity discussion means little if students cannot first picture what the job looks like when it is done well.

There is also a cost carried by rescuers that public sources name and students should not skip: recovering remains, notifying no one because no name is known, and returning the next shift to the same terrain. Agencies publish support resources for their own personnel for a reason. Compassion fatigue is not a weakness in a rescuer; it is an occupational exposure, managed the way other exposures are managed — with rotation, support, honesty, and supervision that treats it as real.

5. What the community can hold — dignity in life and in death

The humanitarian frame widens once more before this unit closes. For families of the missing, the central need is information: Was he found? Is she in a hospital, in custody, or among the unidentified dead? The public systems described above — medical examiners, consulates, missing-person programs — exist in part so that a death in the desert does not compound into a permanent disappearance. Identification work is slow forensic work: effects catalogued, descriptions compared, DNA where families can be reached to provide it. When identification succeeds, a family gains a grave, a certificate, an ending. When it fails, remains may rest in a county cemetery, documented against a future match. Students should treat that work — largely invisible, largely done by county officials and forensic teams — as part of the border's humanitarian infrastructure, as real as any tower or team.

Dignity is the word this school will use for the standard underneath all of it. A person in distress is owed rescue without regard to status. A person who dies is owed a genuine effort at a name. A family asking questions is owed accurate information through the proper channel, in a language they understand. And a student of this track is owed the truth that the mission and the mercy are not two stories but one ground, walked by the same agents, in the same heat, on the same shift. Unit 3 returns to law — the checkpoint and the stop — with this ground in view.

Words to know — Border Patrol Unit 2

• BORSTAR — Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue, CBP's specialized unit, created in 1998, trained in search and rescue and emergency medical response in remote border terrain.
• Heat stroke — a life-threatening condition in which the body overheats and can no longer cool itself; a medical emergency requiring rapid cooling and care.
• Dehydration — dangerous loss of body water; it impairs judgment and endurance before it stops movement, deepening an emergency.
• Hypothermia — a dangerous drop in body temperature, possible in desert nights, wet conditions, and winter terrain even in the borderlands.
• Rescue beacon — a publicly described CBP tower in remote areas that a person in distress can activate to signal for help and be located.
• Medical examiner — the county official responsible for investigating deaths and identifying remains, central to missing-migrant identification work.
• Consulate — a home-country government office that assists its nationals abroad, including families searching for missing migrants.
• Missing-person coordination — the handoffs among families, consulates, agencies, dispatchers, and medical examiners that turn a last message into a search or an identification.
• Abandonment — the documented pattern of smuggling guides leaving behind people who can no longer keep pace, including injured people and children.
• Compassion fatigue — the occupational strain carried by rescuers and recovery personnel exposed repeatedly to death and grief.

Myths vs facts — Border Patrol Unit 2

• Myth: The 100-mile zone means no rights — and no help — for people found in the desert. Fact: The zone figure is a regulation about the reach of certain immigration authorities, not a suspension of rights or of rescue. The published duty in an encounter with a person in distress is aid first; legal process follows rescue, not the reverse.
• Myth: BORSTAR is a recent public-relations creation. Fact: Public sources date BORSTAR to 1998, with sector teams across the Southwest border and headquarters in El Paso; its rescue releases span decades of routine operations.
• Myth: A person who can reach a rescue beacon or a phone signal is safe. Fact: Beacons and 911 are real doors into the system, and CBP's own public messaging warns they cannot guarantee rescue — terrain, weather, injury, and time still govern outcomes, which is why prevention messaging exists.
• Myth: Everyone agrees on an exact annual death toll at the border. Fact: Counts vary by source and method — agencies, medical examiners, consulates, and humanitarian groups count differently — so this school teaches the documented human cost without printing an unverified single figure.

Think it through — Border Patrol Unit 2

The situation: A humanitarian volunteer takes a call from a mother in another country. Her 19-year-old son crossed three days ago with a group. His last message named a ranch area and said his water was gone and his feet were blistered. She is asking the volunteer: "Who can actually look for him — and what should I tell families like mine before someone crosses?"

Walk it through:

1. Treat the call as time-sensitive information, not as a debate about the crossing. The details the mother holds — last message time, named landmarks, clothing, medical conditions, companions, phone numbers — are exactly the material a search or a records check is built from. Write them accurately and completely.
2. Route the information to the published doors: local emergency dispatch through 911 where an immediate in-progress distress is reported, the consulate of the son's country, which works missing-national cases as a core function, and the Border Patrol / CBP missing-person channels, including the Missing Alien Program CBP describes publicly. One report may not reach every desk; the volunteer's job is to place the facts with each proper channel, not to pick a favorite.
3. Be honest about what a search is. Three days and a ranch name describe a vast area; ground and air searches follow the best available location information, and a parallel records track — custody, hospitals, medical examiners — runs at the same time, because "not found in the desert" and "found and unidentified" are different outcomes that both must be checked.
4. Prepare the mother for the identification system without cruelty and without false promise: if remains are recovered, identification can take time and may need family information or DNA; if he is in custody or hospitalized, consular notification is the bridge back to her. Give her the specific office names and numbers she was given, in writing, in her language.
5. Answer her second question plainly, because she asked it: tell families the published truth — the desert kills people who are young and strong; guides abandon people who slow down; a phone and a beacon are chances, not guarantees; and a person already in distress in the desert should call 911, the universal emergency route, rather than waiting to be found. Prevention spoken by a trusted voice at home is humanitarian work too.

Try this — Border Patrol Unit 2

Build a one-page "desk card" for a community organization, a church office, or a family resource center in a border state, using only public information: (1) If a person is in distress now: call 911. (2) If a loved one is missing after a crossing: write down every detail of the last contact, then call the person's consulate and the missing-person channels named in this unit. (3) If remains or identity questions arise: the county medical examiner is the office that holds identifications. (4) Three prevention lines, in the languages your community reads, stating plainly that desert crossings kill, that guides abandon the injured, and that no beacon or phone guarantees rescue. Have a second student review the card for accuracy against this unit — every number on it must be a verified, published number, and the card should carry no number you cannot source. That discipline — compassion with verified facts — is the activity itself.

Resources to keep — Border Patrol Unit 2

• 911 — for immediate danger, serious injury, or a medical emergency. People in distress in the desert who can reach a phone should call 911 — the published universal emergency route.
• 988 — call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, for a person in emotional distress or for guidance on helping someone else.
• Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 to connect with a live, trained crisis counselor by text.
• SAMHSA National Helpline — 1-800-662-4357 — free, confidential treatment referral and information for substance use and mental-health concerns.
• Poison Control — 1-800-222-1222 — for suspected poisoning or a harmful substance exposure; when in doubt about urgency, call 911 first.
• National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 — confidential support for people experiencing domestic abuse, including in border communities.
• RAINN — 1-800-656-4673 — National Sexual Assault Hotline, confidential support and referrals.
• Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline — 1-800-422-4453 — for concerns about a child in danger, including an unaccompanied child.
• CBP — U.S. Border Patrol — https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders — includes CBP's public description of the Missing Alien Program.
• 988 Lifeline — https://988lifeline.org/ — what to expect when calling, texting, or chatting the Lifeline.

Public sources — Border Patrol Unit 2

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "Along U.S. Borders: U.S. Border Patrol" (including the Missing Alien Program description) — https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "About CBP" — https://www.cbp.gov/about
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection public newsroom releases on BORSTAR rescues, including the Del Rio Sector rescue of two men with disabilities (May 31, 2019) and the Guadalupe Mountains hiker rescue (January 2025), via CBP's newsroom at https://www.cbp.gov/
• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — https://988lifeline.org/

What you earned / what's next — Border Patrol Unit 2

✅ Unit 2 complete (quiz score 80% or higher): You can describe the border environment's documented dangers without invented figures, explain what BORSTAR is and when it was created, trace how a rescue or a missing-person report moves through 911, consulates, agencies, and medical examiners, and state the professional order of operations — rescue first, process after.

Your certificate

Minister Destiny Testimony Schools Minister Destiny Testimony Schools — Law Enforcement Certificate of Completion — Border Patrol Unit 2: Humanitarian Realities: Rescue and Migrants in Distress

This certificate is presented by Muslim Ordained Minister Destiny Marie Morgan

Awarded to: ______________________________ (write your name here after you download — your name is never collected or stored by this school)

Date completed: ______________

Congratulations. You have looked at the hardest ground in this track without looking away — and you have learned that the hands that enforce the law on that ground are also, by their own published record, hands that carry water, litters, and people. Hold both truths; the families waiting by telephones on two sides of a border deserve nothing less. — Minister Destiny Marie Morgan

This is a certificate of educational completion from Minister Destiny Testimony Schools, a community-designed training program. It is not a state license, a POST certification, or an agency qualification, and this program is not agency policy.

What's next: Unit 3 — Constitutional Limits at the Border: Checkpoints, Stops, and the Fourth Amendment

Minister Destiny Testimony Schools — Law Enforcement: Professional Training Wing. Community-designed educational training compiled from public sources; not agency policy, not a certification, and not legal advice.