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Border Patrol and Security

Hundreds die crossing US-Mexican border, and lawmakers want to help ID them

Rick Jervis
USA TODAY
Brooks County Sheriff Urbino "Benny" Martinez reviews the evidence sheet to a set of skeletal remains. The county recovers around 50 sets of remains a year, usually of migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

FALFURRIAS, Texas – The skeletons are kept in a storage shed next to the parking lot at the Brooks County Sheriff's Office, in large black body bags or brown paper evidence bags, depending on the number of recovered bones. 

Sometimes deputies bring in a skull, spine and all 64 bones of an arm; other times just a handful of carpals, bleached bright white by the relentless South Texas sun.

Storing the remains, often the remnants of missing immigrants, is one thing. Identifying them is another, complex challenge.

"Counties like ours that are small counties, we don’t have specific line items for such things," said Sheriff Urbino "Benny" Martinez, whose deputies patrol a county of 944 square miles with a population of about 7,200 people. "They don’t have the funding to implement and sustain this."

In Texas, investigating remains found along the border falls to underfunded and undertrained county governments. A new bill backed by Texas congressmen could infuse the effort with federal funding and lead to many more skeletal remains identified.

If passed, the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act of 2018, sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, would expand federal funding to improve reporting of missing and unidentified persons, including immigrants.

Agencies would be able to use the extra funds to hire DNA analysts, acquire state-of-the-art forensic equipment and install "rescue beams" along the border that could help prevent deaths.

There were 415 immigrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexican border last year, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration. 

Last fiscal year, the Border Patrol counted 294 deaths along the southwestern border. Of those, 104 occurred in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes Brooks County. Many more immigrants, advocates say, remain missing. 

Besides the extra funding, the bill is a rare acknowledgment of the plight of undocumented immigrants whose deaths were often overlooked and rarely investigated, said Robin Reineke, an anthropologist and co-founder of the Colibri Center for Human Rights, which helps family members find lost loved ones along the border and is based in Tucson, Arizona.

The bipartisan proposal in Congress is even more remarkable given the political fervor over immigration and the border, she said. 

“This bill is one of the very few to even mention the issue of the loss of life on the Mexican border,” Reineke said. “Everyone can agree that no mother should be left without answers about what happened to their son.”

Historically, remains found along the border were collected by law enforcement and, if not claimed, were stored or buried in unmarked graves. In 2003, Lori Baker, an anthropologist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, began collecting DNA samples from remains and exhumed bodies in South Texas to attempt identifications. Her group, the Reuniting Families Project, has worked on 560 cases, identifying about 40 percent of them.

Texas law requires medical examiners to investigate unidentified remains, but smaller counties often lack those officials, Baker said. Texas, home to 254 counties, has only 17 medical examiners, she said. The state’s poorer counties, many of them along the border, can’t afford the cost of bagging and transporting remains to far-off medical examiners, which can cost about $10,000 per set, she said.

Even after DNA samples of the remains make it into databases, family members are often reluctant to submit a matching sample for fear of retaliation by federal law enforcement, Baker said. A provision in the proposed bill would bar law enforcement agencies from using DNA databases to track undocumented immigrants.

Besides bringing closure to families, identifying remains is a necessary law enforcement tool, she said.

“We don’t know if they’re U.S. citizens. We don’t know if they’re homicides. They're uninvestigated," Baker said. "We don’t have a real rule of law with these migrant deaths. ... Each of these remains needs to be investigated.”

At a lab at Texas State University in San Marcos, 30 miles south of Austin, Kate Spradley led a team of volunteer students as they sorted through human remains, boiled the bones in an industrial-sized kettle to remove all flesh and analyzed them for age and gender. DNA samples are shipped to another lab in North Texas where they're entered into a database.

Brooks County Sheriff's officials recovered 52 sets of skeletal remains last year, usually belonging to migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The department, like others along the Texas border, doesn't have enough funding or expertise to identify and transport the remains on their own and relies on grants and outside groups.

Started in 2013, TSU's Operation Identification has collected 270 sets of remains and identified 30 of them, Spradley said. The missing migrants bill includes funding for nongovernmental organizations such as hers and could greatly expand the effort, she said.

“I don’t think people really understand what’s going on at the border," Spradley said. "There are people who are dying every day.”

As a chief deputy a decade ago, Martinez watched in dismay as Brooks County Sheriff's deputies returned with load after load of immigrant remains, at times bringing five bodies a day to the station. The most troubling year was 2012, when 129 bodies were recovered – more than in any other county along the border. 

As the bones piled up, deputies buried the remains at nearby Sacred Heart Cemetery in unmarked graves, often multiple sets to a box, he said. From 2009 to 2012, the sheriff's office spent $680,000 in bagging and shipping the remains for analysis – an unfathomable amount for a department that size, he said. Starting in 2013, the state supplied them with grants to help cover the expenses. Other counties along the border need help, Martinez said. 

As long as immigrants continue crossing the border in search of a better life, unfortunately, they'll continue to get overwhelmed by Texas' vast, unforgiving terrain and sun, he said. Finding out whom the remains belonged to is crucial. 

"We need to know who this person is," Martinez said. "We need to know why he died, how he died."

He added, "Bottom line, it's the right thing to do."

Follow Jervis on Twitter: @MrRJervis.

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