Thousands of bodies of immigrants remain unidentified, unclaimed
SAN MARCOS, Texas — Case 0435 died more than a mile from the nearest road, with an unscuffed MacGregor baseball in his backpack. Case 0469 was found with a simple green ribbon tied in a knot as a bracelet. Case 0519 carried Psalms and Revelation, torn from a Spanish Bible. Case 0377 kept a single grain of rice inside a hollow cross. One side of the grain read “Sara” and the other read “Rigo.”
The belongings are part of a border-crossers’ morgue at a Texas State University lab in San Marcos — an inventoried collection of more than 2,000 objects and 212 bodies, almost all unidentified.
All 212 were undocumented immigrants who died in Texas trying to evade Border Patrol checkpoints by walking across the rugged terrain. Most died from dehydration, heatstroke or hyperthermia. Even as the number of people caught trying to illegally enter the United States from Mexico has dropped in recent months, the bodies remain a constant, grim backdrop to the national debate over immigration.
“When we get them, we assign them a case number because we have to have a way of tracking cases, but no one deserves to be just a number,” said Timothy P. Gocha, a forensic anthropologist with Operation Identification, a project at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Center that analyzes the remains and personal items of the immigrants in an attempt to identify them.
“The idea is to figure out who they are and give them their name back,” Gocha said.
The collection at the San Marcos, Texas, university represents only a fraction of the total deaths caused by immigrants trying to cross into the United States. Hundreds have died crossing the border in Texas in recent
years, and hundreds of others have died in the three other states that share a border with Mexico — Arizona, California and New Mexico.
In south Texas, the number of deaths has overwhelmed local officials and made the grisly discovery of decomposing bodies a commonplace occurrence. The body count since 2014 stands at nine at one ranch, 17 at another and 31 at a third.
About three hours south of San Marcos, in Falfurrias, Texas, the sheriff and his deputies call it a “Code 500”: a report of a deceased person.
The bodies and remains of more than 550 unauthorized immigrants have been discovered in Brooks County, where Falfurrias is located, since January 2009. And those bodies were only those reported to authorities.
“I would say for every one we find, we’re probably missing five,” said Sheriff Urbino Martinez.
More people have died illegally crossing the southwestern U.S. border in the past 16 years than were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined. From October 2000 through September 2016, the Border Patrol documented 6,023 deaths in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas; more than 4,800 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.
Local officials and immigrant advocates said the frequency of the deaths amounts to a humanitarian crisis.
“If this were any other context, if these were deaths as a result of a mass flood or an earthquake or a major plane crash, people would be talking about this as being a mass disaster,” said Daniel E. Martinez, an assistant professor of sociology at George Washington University and the lead author of a Binational Migration Institute report on migrant deaths in Arizona.
It was about 12:25 p.m. when the body of Isabel Cruz Cueto, 30, was found on a ranch in Falfurrias June 1, 2016. His birth certificate, from Chiapas, Mexico, was folded neatly in his wallet.
Around 4:45 p.m., a second body was reported at another ranch about 13 miles away. Juan Guzman Perez died of hyperthermia — illness from extreme heat — as did Cueto. The two men were about 80 miles north of the border. They had separately crossed it, but died in Brooks County trying to circumvent a lesserknown layer of border security: the Border Patrol’s inland checkpoints.
The traffic checkpoints are spread out along border counties in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. They are not on the borderline but up to 100 miles north, like the one near Falfurrias on Highway 281.
“Brooks County is a choke point,” said Don White, a reserve deputy with the sheriff’s office who has recovered numerous bodies. “You either go up the highway or you walk across the ranches. That’s it.”
The dead line the way. In March, immigrants came upon scattered bones as they hiked through a ranch. They picked up the bones, assembled the stranger’s skeleton and continued on.
Forensic anthropologists and college students were digging at Sacred Heart cemetery in Falfurrias in May 2013 when they noticed the outline of a coffin that was smaller than any others. Left: A pair of tennis shoes found with the remains of an immigrant who died after illegally entering Texas is among the items that forensics specialists hope will help identify the person. The unidentified remains of more than 200 immigrants are being kept at Texas State University in an attempt to find out who they are. Right: Some of the remains of illegal immigrants are the bones of children. Dolls and stuffed animals found with them are kept in boxes in hopes of eventually finding out who those children — many of whom died of heat-related causes while trying to get into the United States — were.
Researchers from the University of Indianapolis, Baylor University and Texas State University have exhumed dozens of graves of unidentified immigrants at Sacred Heart to analyze the bodies and help determine their identities.
The team from the University of Indianapolis realized the outline was not a coffin at all. It was a milk crate.
Someone had buried an unidentified immigrant in a milk crate and wrapped the remains in a red biohazard bag.
Inside the lidless crate were skeletal remains — a cranium, ribs and other bones — and a red bandanna.
The discovery of the milk crate hinted at a larger problem. For years, the process of examining and burying unidentified immigrants was mishandled along the Texas border. Bodies were buried in clusters of up to five. And many were buried either without DNA samples being taken or without any samples being submitted to a state DNA database, as required by Texas law. The situation has steadily improved, but immigrant advocates and forensic anthropologists continue to be concerned about the way officials in rural border counties handle migrant burials.
In 2014, the Texas Ranger Division looked into whether state laws had been broken at Sacred Heart. The Rangers concluded that there was insufficient evidence to open a criminal investigation. There are no Texas laws prohibiting one set of human remains from being buried with other bodies in the same grave or coffin. And as defined by Texas health laws, a coffin is any container used to hold the remains of a deceased person.
Service Corp. International, the parent company of Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams, which handles migrant burials, said in a statement that it had fully cooperated with the Rangers inquiry, which “concluded there was nothing unlawful or inappropriate” about the funeral home’s work on behalf of Brooks County.
The remains in the milk crate eventually were sent to Texas State University. Over time, the cranium’s contact with the red bandanna caused the dye to seep onto the bones.
It left a stain across the face of Case 0438.