Work to identify border-crossers’ remains stalls
DNA collected by U.S. authorities and other groups is not shared
HOUSTON — Rolando Arriaza has visited hospitals, morgues and even the harsh, mesquite-covered terrain in South Texas that his brother trekked nearly two years ago after illegally crossing into the U.S. — as part of an ongoing effort to find his sibling’s remains and bring his family closure. “You want to know if he died and you want to find the body,” said Arriaza, whose 50-year-old brother Hugo Arriaza, from Guatemala, disappeared in August 2015 after being abandoned by a smuggler when he became ill. Like many family members of missing immigrants, Arriaza, 45, has submitted DNA so it can be compared to remains found along the Texas-Mexico border. But while Arriaza submitted DNA to U.S. authorities, many others choose a path that complicates potential identification of their loved ones’ remains. Many missing immigrant family members living outside the U.S., or who live in the country but fear going to authorities due to concerns about their immigration status, give their DNA to nongovernmental organizations working on this issue. But advocacy groups say these families’ DNA samples are being denied access to an FBI database used to make matches in missing persons cases because law enforcement didn’t collect the sample. The groups say this issue has for years left unused a valuable source of genetic data that could bring closure to hundreds of cases. How big is the problem? More than 2,900 immigrants have died crossing the Texas-Mexico border alone since 1998, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. But it’s unclear how many remain unidentified. Since 2003, 222 of 879 cases of unidentified human remains sent from Texas border counties to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification have led to identifications. But the center — which works with law enforcement on missing persons cases — cautions there’s no way to definitively say if the identified remains belong to immigrants. A review of reports on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System’s database shows more than 320 unidentified remains found along the TexasMexico border since 2007 are likely immigrants. A large number of immigrant remains in Texas have been found in Brooks County, where authorities about four years ago discovered many had been haphazardly buried in a local cemetery. The county is home to a Border Patrol checkpoint 70 miles north of the border that immigrants avoid by walking for days. Arriaza’s brother was attempting to do so when he disappeared. Kate Spradley, a biological anthropologist at Texas State University in San Marcos who is helping identify remains found in Brooks County, said she’s frustrated by the slow pace. Her lab has received 238 sets of remains, but only 24 have been identified. Most are from Brooks County, but some are from other counties, including 13 sets exhumed in May in Starr County. “The DNA samples that are collected by (nongovernmental organizations) in Latin America are what we need to make identifications,” she said.