Migrant deaths stagger Texas county
One or two a day perish crossing the Rio Grande
EAGLE PASS, Texas — The undertaker lighted a cigarette and held it between his latexgloved fingers as he stood over the bloated body bag lying in the bed of his pickup truck.
ºGuatemalan cardinal fights for migrants and poor. A4.
The woman had been fished out of the Rio Grande minutes earlier. Now, her body lay stiff as mortician Jesus “Chuy” Gonzalez drove away from the boat ramp and toward an overcrowded freezer, passing mobile homes and a casino on the way.
Maverick County purchased the trailer during the pandemic for COVID-19 victims. It was designed to hold 20 bodies but now held 28 — the remains testifying to two dozen shattered dreams of reaching the United States. Only half had names.
Gonzalez didn’t flinch as he swung the freezer’s doors open. He has been around so much death that the stench of decomposition no longer bothers him. A large silver Virgen de Guadalupe dangled from his chest as he maneuvered the woman into a wooden barrack.
Nearby lay the body of a man whose arms were frozen as if he were blocking a blow. His jeans and shoes were still covered in river mud and his face marbled with sickly discoloration. Several members of a Venezuelan family who drowned together were also scattered inside the trailer. They had been there since mid-November.
Record-level migration has brought record-breaking death to Maverick County, a border community that is ground zero in the feud between Texas and the Biden administration over migration. Whereas in a typical month years ago, officials here might have recovered one or two bodies from the river, more recently they have handled that amount in a single day. While border crossings draw the most attention in the debate about immigration, the rising number of deaths in the Rio Grande has gone largely unnoticed.
First responders have run out of body bags and burial plots. Their rescue boats and recovery trucks are covered in dents and scratches, scars from navigating through the brush to retrieve floating bodies. County officials say they don’t have the training or supplies to collect DNA samples of each unidentified migrant as required by state law, meaning bodies are sometimes left in fridges for months or even buried with scant attempt to identify them.
At one point in 2022 as the body count rose, officials buried migrants in a potter’s field, their graves marked with crosses made out of PVC pipes. Over the past month, the number of deaths has dropped as migrant crossings dip, but officials are still girding themselves for another increase later this spring. To prepare, they are creating a new space to bury unidentified migrants, the boundaries already demarcated with wooden sticks spray-painted red and lodged into the dirt.
Maverick County Attorney Jaime Iracheta said that the border community budgeted $100,000 of a nearly $4 million grant from Governor Greg Abbott’s border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, toward handling migrant remains but that auditors expect they will need to spend over $1 million.
“I have one now. I had one yesterday. I’m going to have more this week,” Jeannie Smith, a justice of the peace tasked with recording migrant deaths, said in February. “There is an overwhelming sense of ‘What are we going to do?’ You want to make sure they get back to their loved ones, but it’s too many people crossing the river. Where do we put the bodies?”
The crude and haphazard manner in which migrant bodies are often being stored, identified, and buried here is adding to the indignity of their deaths. It is also compounding the anguish of relatives, many of whom wait months or years to learn about the fate of loved ones, if at all.
On that January afternoon, officials at least had a clue as to who the woman was. After plucking her body out of a bend downriver from Shelby Park, where Texas forces have seized city land and set up a base, they searched her body and found an ID tucked into her bra.
Her name was Irma Marivel Cú Chub. Maybe someone would inquire.
By early March, the number of bodies in the trailer holding Cú Chub’s corpse had grown to 40. The county commission requested two additional refrigerators to handle the overflow after inquiries from The Post. For now, their plan is to continue storing bodies until more money becomes available for transportation and autopsy fees.
As they wait for answers, relatives mine Facebook pages dedicated to reuniting dead migrants with their loved ones. They post photos of bodies. Sometimes a jacket or a tattoo offers a hint. Other times, news organizations broadcast images of ID cards found with bodies.
That is how Cú Chub’s daughter found her.
It started with a shakedown. Extortion is common in Guatemala, and families with little money are frequent targets. Cú
Chub, a Mayan seamstress, mortgaged her house to pay the gang harassing them the equivalent of $4,000, said her daughter, Evelin Gabriela Gue. But the family struggled to pay and was on the verge of losing their home. They weighed options and landed on sending someone to America to earn money.
In WhatsApp messages to her daughter, Cú Chub described a harrowing journey. As they approached the border, the smugglers divided the 40 migrants into two groups. One was sent to the desert, the other to the river. Cú Chub would cross by water.
“I can’t deny it, I am nervous and trembling,” she said in a Jan. 25 audio message. “But I know God will give me the strength. … We have suffered, but here we are, in God’s hands. I am confident that He is with me no matter what happens.”
Cú Chub told her daughter to pray because the river had risen and was high.
“En el nombre de Dios nos vamos,” Cú Chub said in the last recording she sent her daughter. “In God’s name, here we go.”