Data-sharing woes hinder identifying migrant remains
NOGALES, Mexico — In a hotel room illuminated by the fall sun, a social worker swabbed inside the cheek of Nohemy Alvares to collect a sample of her DNA.
A desperate search to find her son led Alvares to the U.S.-Mexico border, where nearly four years ago Gilver, then an impulsive 14-year-old chasing a dream, vanished in the vast desert expanse. By sending her genetic information out into the world, Alvares hopes that science might find her Gilver.
“I know my son is alive,” Alvares insisted. “If he were dead, his DNA would be collected, like mine, only from a bone sample.”
But making that connection between DNA samples isn’t as easy as many think.
Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is capable of identifying a person from as little as a strand of hair. But tapping its potential is quite another matter. For one thing, there is no central repository for storing genetic material. A government database might have the DNA of an unidentified person, while the DNA of a family member, necessary for an identification, is stored in a private database unconnected to the government one.
If they do not share information, as is often the case, an identification may never be made.
The difficult challenge of identifying the migrants who have disappeared on their way to the United States — since 2000 more than 6,000 migrants have been found dead along the Southwest border — and
countless other victims of Mexican drug cartels, is compounded by international borders and shifting immigration policies.
Amid this reality, teams of forensic anthropologists, academics and immigrant advocacy groups are cobbling together partnerships across the region broadly under the umbrella of the Forensic Border Coalition in an attempt to bring closure to grieving families.
“There’s a gigantic fragmentation at every level, at the DNA level, at the justice system, in Mexico and the U.S.,” explained Mercedes Doretti, director of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which was established in 1984 to investigate the cases of disappeared people killed during Argentina’s military dictatorship.
Since 2010, the Argentine team, known as EAAF by its Spanish-language initials, has collected about 3,000 family reference DNA samples across Central America and Mexico. EAAF was assigned to a forensic commission in 2012 in the aftermath of several massacres in northern Mexico.
Doretti’s team of forensic anthropologists was handed the remains of 200 people recovered from massacres in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, and mass graves in Nuevo Leon, which are kept in Mexico’s attorney general’s database. The remainder of EAAF’s work is stored at Bode Cellmark Forensics, a private lab in Virginia. Drawing leads to ID
As the forensic commission got underway, the bodies of hundreds more migrants were piling up all through the South Texas brush country. While Mexico and Central America pose one set of challenges to the practice of forensic science, the confounding variety of rules for handling the unidentified along the southwestern border offers up another, though none quite as muddled as in Texas.
Some counties have medical examiners to declare deaths, others rely on justices of the peace for those declarations, but all counties are required by Texas law to send a DNA sample to the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. The FBI program, administered by the University of North Texas, compares DNA against profiles of the unidentified human remains and missing-person reports collected in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, known as NamUS.
This didn’t happen in the cash-strapped county of Brooks. The tiny county, with around 7,000 people, buried dozens of migrants at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Falfurrias under nameless markers, a common practice in border counties that lack the financial resources for a medical examiner.
By 2015, the Legislature ordered the Texas Forensic Science Commission to develop a method for collecting forensic evidence of unidentified bodies located near the border, and Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Center in San Marcos was assigned the considerable task of exhuming human remains for identification.
“It was a mass disaster,” said Kate Spradley, the assistant professor of anthropology at Texas State University leading the effort. “It is some of the most unpleasant work you can imagine.”
Maria Dolores was identified using a child’s drawing. Her remains arrived with more than 100 sets from Baylor University over the summer. Among her personal effects was a colorful sketch of an anthropomorphic heart, with arms, legs, hair and a face. A name was written on the drawing and envelope, and a prayer in Spanish and specific mention of Ecuador. Confirming an identity
The Texas State forensic anthropologists created a missing persons profile for Maria Dolores on NamUS. A Google search turned up a flyer searching for a 28-year-old Ecuadoran woman last seen alive in Reynosa. Other biological details further developed their identification hypothesis. Still, they needed to locate the family.
Confirming the identity of Maria Dolores involved multiple lines of evidence, and DNA was the last. Texas State’s partners in the non-governmental organization community found her siblings in New York, and her parents and children in Ecuador.
By law, the forensic anthropologists were compelled to provide CODIS a sample of Maria Dolores’ genetic material. But her family preferred not to have their information in a U.S. government database, said Timothy P. Gocha, a forensic anthropologist with Operation Identification at Texas State University, so Bode’s private lab was used instead, and within two weeks they had a match.
“Ideally every family missing someone would provide a DNA sample, and every agency working with unidentified persons would do the same,” Spradley said. “In practice, it is quite complex, and ultimately the process is dependent on human analysts.”
A cold hit occurs when nuclear DNA, collected from the blood or saliva of a parent, is linked to the DNA profile of an unidentified or missing person in NamUS. When the nuclear DNA of the unidentified person is degraded, such as with skeletal remains, mitochondrial DNA can be used to match human remains to maternal relatives.
And yet, of the more than 225 sets of remains in the Texas State University lab, just six have been identified through CODIS. Another 17 identifications were solved with the help of the Argentine team. Four are pending. The rest are still unidentified.
While Spradley and her crew busily unearth remains, Dr. Corinne Stern, Webb County’s chief medical examiner, takes in the decomposing bodies collected above ground from 10 surrounding counties that lack resources or medical expertise. Last year, her office received 124 sets of remains. A long shot
To be sure, the preponderance of migrant deaths along the U.S. border is fraught with bureaucratic complication, but this pales in comparison to the scope of migrants who disappeared in Mexico.
The likelihood of an unidentified person’s DNA being deposited into the attorney general’s database, the largest repository of DNA in Mexico, or the Scientific Police database under the National Security Commission, depends entirely on whether state forensic services take the time to enter the genetic information, which many are under no obligation to do. And still the profile is only useful if there is a family reference sample to compare the two.
Despite advances in recent years, it remains a long shot for most Central American families to find their lost loved ones in Mexico.
Nonetheless, Alvares joined a caravan of families from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua late last year to search for their missing sons and daughters in Mexico. They gave blood and saliva at stops along the way, recounting the disappearances to forensic investigators.
Alvares told of how Gilver was left with a smuggler while his older cousin went searching for water. She has filed missing person reports in Honduras and Mexico, and provided her DNA to databases across the region. Her last deposit was made with Colibrí Center for Human Rights on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Back in Honduras, the uncertainty of his disappearance haunts Alvares’ thoughts.
“He left with a dream,” Alvares said. “I’m left with the pain of not knowing.”
“Ideally every family missing someone would provide a DNA sample, and every agency working with unidentified persons would do the same. In practice, it is quite complex, and ultimately the process is dependent on human analysts.” Kate Spradley, assistant professor of anthropology at Texas State University