At least 16 people were rescued from the Pacific Ocean off Mexico's Baja California coast in the predawn hours Friday after the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report of a vessel in distress around 1 a.m. Authorities were still searching for several others in the water.
The people were found floating about 140 miles, or 225 kilometers, west of Ensenada, far enough offshore to turn the rescue into a race against time. Janice Collins said three of the rescued people were taken to Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego, including one being treated for a suspected shark bite and two others with cold exposure.
The scale of the group was still unclear. One rescued person said as many as 27 people had been on board, but authorities had only confirmed at least 16 survivors by Friday and had not said how the people ended up in the water. Chris Sappey described the scene in blunt terms: there was no sight of a vessel, only people in the water.
The Coast Guard and U.S. Navy were assisting Mexican authorities with two helicopters, a fixed-wing plane and a cutter. That kind of response fits a stretch of water where migrant crossings by boat have repeatedly turned deadly, and where small boats called pangas are known to leave Baja in the dead of night and head north toward California.
The latest search comes after a series of fatal incidents on the same route. In May of 2025, at least three people died when a panga flipped about 35 miles, or 56 kilometers, north of the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2023, eight people were killed when two boats approached a San Diego beach in heavy fog and one capsized in the surf. In 2022, a federal judge sentenced a San Diego man to 18 years in prison for piloting a small vessel overloaded with 32 migrants that smashed apart in powerful surf, killing three people and injuring more than two dozen.
For now, the urgent question is not how the case will be described later but how many people were actually aboard when the boat failed. Crews were still looking for several others Friday, and the hospital cases showed that even those who made it out of the water were not out of danger.
