Texas county is overwhelmed by migrant deaths
EAGLE PASS, Tex. — The undertaker lighted a cigarette and held it between his latex-gloved fingers as he stood over the bloated body bag lying in the bed of his battered pickup truck.
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 muddy boat ramp and toward an overcrowded freezer, passing mobile homes and a casino along the way.
Maverick County purchased the trailer during the pandemic to handle covid-19 victims. It was designed to hold 20 bodies but on this day held 28 — the putrefied 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 national 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 Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, toward handling migrant remains but that auditors now 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?”
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Migrants are drawn to this stretch of Texas borderland 150 miles east of San Antonio because it is perceived as relatively safe. The city of Piedras Negras across the river in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila reports fewer migrant kidnappings and extortion cases than other border communities. But the Rio Grande is a different story.
On certain days the turbid water is only knee-deep. But a dam upriver periodically releases water, changing the depth. Smooth rocks beneath the surface make it hard to find a grip. And a powerful undercurrent can drown even the strongest. Videos on social media showing migrants easily crossing lure many into a false sense of comfort.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection rescues along the nation’s southwest border have been skyrocketing, jumping from 2,920 in fiscal 2019 to 37,323 in 2023. Current data for the Del Rio sector, which includes Maverick County, isn’t available, but older records show the number of migrants in need of help has been on the rise. There were 2,000 rescues in fiscal 2021, compared with 480 in 2019.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths is also mounting. Border Patrol agents documented 281 fatalities along the southwest border in 2018; that figure had climbed to 895 in 2022, the last year for which data is available. Those numbers are an undercount because agents are not called to every incident. The Del Rio sector reported more deaths than any other.
Some of the deaths involve migrants found in the region’s vast ranchlands — hot places where dehydration can quickly turn lethal. But in Maverick, most succumb to the Rio Bravo, as it is known in Mexico — the furious river.
Firefighter and emergency medical technician Marcos Kypuros is usually one of the first to respond. His shifts used to consist of responding to car wrecks or the occasional grass fire, but now it is recovery calls that crackle in most days across the radio. During two weeks this past November, all seven drowning victims were children. He tries not to talk about it at home with his family and dreads the detailed, obligatory debriefings with his supervisors, because of what he has to remember.
“It got to the point where I’d put them in the body bags in a way so that I wouldn’t have to even see their faces anymore,” he said.
Deputy Sgt. Aaron Horta is next at the scene. He searches the dead for scars, tattoos, birthmarks and clothing that might signal who they were. As illegal crossings have surged, he has built a collection of hundreds of images.
By the end of 2022, Horta had recorded 225 deaths. He said it bothers him when no one claims a body, so he tries to do what he can. This past Thanksgiving, 11-yearold Cristal Tercero Medrano of Nicaragua drowned while wearing a bright-yellow Tweety Bird sweater. Horta worked with Border Patrol agents to identify her. Not long after, they found the girl’s family. Relatives sent in a photo of Cristal wearing the same yellow sweater.
“I get mad, as the father of a little girl,” Horta said. “There should be a process that isn’t the river. It gets to me, but I have to be a professional.”
Sometimes the bodies are found with ID cards and passports. Other times a surviving witness or inquiring family member helps identify them. Then there are the cases where there are no names and few clues.
The haphazard process for identifying remains leaves families to do much of the work themselves. Funeral homes also fill the void. Relatives looking for family members call searching for clues. When remains are identified, morticians work with consular officials to repatriate the body.
]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 identification cards found with bodies.