Chasing danger: How border patrol chases have spun out of control, with deadly consequences

On a rainy November afternoon last year, eight men held tight to a gray tarp, their bodies pressed against one another as they lay feet to head in the bed of a pickup truck. Most knew one another from Acatic, a Mexican town in the state of Jalisco, where the country's most vicious cartel has caused the morgue to overflow.

Rainwater pooled on the tarp, running in rivulets down the sides and soaking the men underneath. The closeness provided only some warmth, as the men lay shivering, feeling every bump of the rocky scrubland as they crossed into the United States.

As many modern police agencies move away from high-speed chases, placing tight restrictions on when their officers can pursue suspects, the Border Patrol allows its agents wide latitude to use them to catch people trying to enter the country illegally, a practice that often ends in gruesome injuries and, sometimes, death, a ProPublica and Los Angeles Times investigation has found.

At speeds deemed by experts to be wildly unsafe, agents box in moving vehicles, puncture tires and employ tactics intended to spin cars off the road.

They initiate dangerous chases after noting that cars are carrying unrestrained children or are packed so far beyond capacity that the weight makes them "ride low." They catch up to find people screaming and banging from the insides of trunks.

Every nine days, on average, these chases end in a crash. One caused a fire that spread over more than 20 acres. Another injured a dozen bystanders and six immigrants, including a 6-year-old girl who wound up on life support.

In the last four years alone, along the U.S. side of the border, at least 250 people were injured and 22 died after a Border Patrol pursuit.

The Border Patrol did not provide these numbers or fulfill requests made for months seeking to document what agents do after suspected smugglers fail to pull over.

Instead, reporters mined more than 9,000 federal criminal complaints filed against suspected human smugglers from 2015 to 2018 to build a database about Border Patrol pursuits and tactics. The documents describe agents' reasons for initiating a pursuit, whether there was a crash and how it happened. The database is almost certainly an undercount - it does not include cases in which the driver got away or died, since