FBI, groups at odds over efforts to ID immigrant remains
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. — all 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-yearold 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, who lives in Philadelphia, submitted DNA to U.S. authorities, many others choose a different 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, instead 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 gone unresolved for years, leaving unused a valuable source of genetic data that could bring closure to hundreds of cases.
How big is the problem, and how somber are the findings? More than 2,900 immigrants have died while 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 Texas-mexico border since 2007 are likely immigrants.