Law would help ID dead immigrants near border

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FALFURRIAS, Texas – The skeletons are kept in a storage shed next to the parking lot at the Brooks County Sheriff ’s Office, in large black body bags or brown paper evidence bags, depending on the number of recovered bones.

Sometimes deputies bring in a skull, spine and all 64 bones of an arm; other times just a handful of carpals, bleached bright white by the relentless South Texas sun.

Storing the remains, often the remnants of missing immigrants, is one thing. Identifying them is another.

“Counties like ours that are small counties, we don’t have specific line items for such things,” said Sheriff Urbino “Benny” Martinez, whose deputies patrol a county of 944 square miles and a population of about 7,200 people. “They don’t have the funding to implement and sustain this.”

In Texas, investigating remains found along the border falls to underfunded and undertrained county governments. A new bill backed by Texas congressmen could infuse the effort with federal funding and lead to many more skeletal remains identified.

If passed, the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act of 2018, sponsored by Republican Sen. John

Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, would expand federal funding to improve reporting of missing and unidentified persons, including immigrants.

Agencies would be able to use the funds to hire DNA analysts and acquire state-of-the-art forensic equipment.

There were 415 immigrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexican border last year, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.

Last fiscal year, the Border Patrol counted 294 deaths along the southwestern border. Of those, 104 occurred in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes Brooks County. Many more immigrants, advocates say, remain missing.

Besides the extra funding, the bill is a rare acknowledgment of the plight of undocumented immigrants whose deaths were often overlooked and rarely investigated, said Robin Reineke, an anthropologist and co-founder of the

Colibri Center for Human Rights, which helps family members find lost loved ones along the border and is based in Tucson, Arizona.

“This bill is one of the very few to even mention the issue of the loss of life on the Mexican border,” Reineke said. “Everyone can agree that no mother should be left without answers about what happened to their son.”

Historically, remains found along the border were collected by law enforcement and, if not claimed, were stored or buried in unmarked graves. In 2003, Lori Baker, an anthropologist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, began collecting DNA samples from remains and exhumed bodies in South Texas to attempt identifications. Her group, the Reuniting Families Project, has worked on 560 cases, identifying about 40 percent of them.

Texas law requires medical examiners to investigate unidentified remains, but smaller counties often lack those officials, Baker said. Texas, home to 254 counties, has only 17 medical examin- ers, she said. The state’s poorer counties, many of them along the border, can’t afford the cost of bagging and transporting remains to far-off medical examiners, which can cost about

$10,000 per set, she said.

Even after DNA samples of the remains make it into databases, family members are often reluctant to submit a matching sample for fear of retaliation by federal law enforcement, Baker said. A provision in the proposed bill would bar law enforcement agencies from using DNA databases to track undocumented immigrants.

Besides bringing closure to families, identifying remains is a necessary law enforcement tool, she said.

“We don’t know if they’re U.S. citizens. We don’t know if they’re homicides. They’re uninvestigated,” Baker said. “We don’t have a real rule of law with these migrant deaths. ... Each of these remains needs to be investigated.”

At a lab at Texas State University in San Marcos, 30 miles south of Austin, Kate Spradley led a team of volunteer students as they sorted through human remains, boiled the bones in an industrial-sized kettle to remove all flesh and analyzed them for age and gender. DNA samples are shipped to another lab in North Texas where they’re entered into a database.

Started in 2013, TSU’s Operation Identification has collected 270 sets of remains and identified

30 of them, Spradley said. The missing migrants bill includes funding for nongovernmental organizations such as hers and could greatly expand the effort, she said.

“I don’t think people really understand what’s going on at the border,” Spradley said. “There are people who are dying every day.”

As long as immigrants continue crossing the border in search of a better life, unfortunately, they’ll continue to get overwhelmed by Texas’ vast, unforgiving terrain and sun, Martinez said. “We need to know who this person is,” Martinez said. “We need to know why he died, how he died.”

He added, “Bottom line, it’s the right thing to do.”

“Everyone agree mother that should can no be left without answers about what happened to their son.” Robin Reineke Colibri Center for Human Rights