The Long Journey and Short Life of Gurupreet Kaur

For years, Gurupreet told everyone in her family how much she wanted to see her father again. Just one month shy of her seventh birthday, it seemed like Gurupreet’s wish was finally coming true.

Her father had immigrated from Punjab when she was an infant. He was living in New York, his asylum case still pending. Gurupreet’s mother intended to join him by also crossing the border the “right” way.

In this case, the right way to cross was for the mother, S. Kaur, to declare her credible fear of persecution and request asylum for herself and her daughter at either a port of entry or once inside the United States. Both international and federal law protect the rights of those fleeing persecution to request asylum. In other words, Kaur and her daughter were breaking no laws. Crossing the border to request asylum is itself not a crime.

On June 12, 2019, migrant smugglers took Kaur and Gurupreet to the border between Arizona and Mexico, along with another mother, her 8-year-old daughter, and a woman traveling alone. They crossed approximately seventeen miles from the Lukeville Port of Entry, and the smugglers left them there.

In 2019, this section of the border was blocked only by a three-foot-tall fence designed to prevent vehicles from crossing. The fact that the fence was easy to scale did not mean it was safe. In fact, this small group of women and children were abandoned in one of the deadliest places on the planet.

They crossed at mid-morning when June temperatures were already hovering in the mid-90s. By noon, the temperature would soar to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A blast furnace of 108 degrees hit the women and children by mid-afternoon.

They were out of water and the two little girls were struggling in the intense heat. The group decided that Kaur and the woman traveling alone should go find help. They wandered, lost in the desert for the rest of the day and all night, but were not found until the next morning when a border patrol agent tracked their footprints. A search by ground and helicopter was initiated, but it was too late.

Gurupreet, all of six years and eleven months, wearing black pants and a short-sleeved black shirt, her wispy brown hair gathered in a hair tie, died of heat stroke in a desert a long way from home in India. Her small body was found not far from Quitobaquito Oasis, just 22 hours after she crossed the border with her mother.

After Gurupreet’s death, her parents released a statement:

“We wanted a safer and better life for our daughter and we made the extremely difficult decision to seek asylum here in the United States. We trust that every parent, regardless of origin, color or creed, will understand that no mother or father ever puts their child in harm’s way unless they are desperate.”

US officials were quick to blame the cartel-run smuggling operations: “Our sympathies are with this little girl and her family,” said Tucson Chief Patrol Agent Roy Villareal. “This is a senseless death driven by cartels who are profiting from putting lives at risk.”

Advocacy groups placed the blame on U.S. border policies. The 1994 policy, “Prevention Through Deterrence,” which is still a primary border enforcement strategy, was explicitly designed to discourage crossings near urban ports of entry, forcing migrants to cross through remote areas, without shade, water, services, or roads north.

Since 2000, more than six million people have not been deterred, but have attempted to cross through the brutal and beautiful landscape of Arizona’s Sonoran desert. Since the mid-1990s, at least 4,177 people have died, largely from dehydration and hyperthermia. In short, this policy has not prevented immigration. It has only made it harder to cross and easier to die.

The exhibit Hostile Terrain 94 is a visceral and visual representation of the human toll exacted by the 1994 policy of Prevention Through Deterrence. More than 4,000 handwritten toe tags are geolocated on a wall map at the exact location where remains were found in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2024. These tags are also color coded: manila for identified bodies and orange for the approximately 1,300 unidentified.

Hostile Terrain 94 is a traveling exhibit of the Undocumented Migration Project, directed by anthropologist, Jason De León. It will be on display at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon in Eugene from April 9 to May 9, 2025. Other events about the militarization of the border and the search for the missing are scheduled during the exhibition.

Since Gurupreet’s death, Humane Borders has installed a water station near where she crossed the border and named it in her honor. You can help maintain the station by making a donation. No amount is too small or too much.