Guide Bodies Along the Border

Additionally, PCOME started receiving desperate calls from family members of people who'd gone missing while crossing. Normally, these sorts of calls would be handled by police, but that was an impossible option for many of these families. To begin with, many police would reject the case, either because they didn't speak Spanish or because they declined jurisdiction, or because the missing person was undocumented.

In many people's eyes, "an illegal". Secondly, AZ's law SB made it so any interaction with police could result in the person getting detained and deported, even when seeking help.

Many of the families caught in this situation are undocumented. For a few years, Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist tasked with trying to determine the identity of many of these migrants, was taking reports of missing people by hand. This is in no way part of his job description, he did it because he is an incredible person.

In , a graduate student in cultural anthropology named Robin Reineke came to PCOME to help Dr Anderson, and she started organizing and archiving the missing persons reports, as well as matching them with the unidentified remains that were coming in. I met Robin in , stayed in touch and eventually worked on a separate but related study with her that focused on migrant death.

I manage the Missing Migrant Project, meaning I take missing persons reports which I organize and archive for easy searching. Our office is physically located within PCOME, so I have access to all information surrounding unidentified border crosser deaths. You can think of it as two sides of a puzzle.

On one side is all the information about the missing: On the other side is the information on the dead: The biological profile will tell me an age estimation, usually given as a range. It may mention any abnormalities, like a previously fractured leg or an implanted medical device, and dental information.

I conduct comparisons between these two sets of data and I make suggestions for possible matches. If PCOME goes over my ID hypothesis and cannot find any reason to exclude it, we'll usually communicate with the consulate of the country of origin to follow up with DNA analysis and radiograph comparison, or other means to scientifically constitute the ID.

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I also manage our internship program with the Honors College at the University of Arizona, speak to press, conduct research and participate in community outreach to raise awareness about the issue, usually by giving presentations to student groups. What has been driving this?

Although myriad factors motivate migration, my understanding is that the spike in the number of child migrants is deeply related to increasing violence in the northern triangle of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador.

Basically, the region was plunged into decades of civil war, puppet governments, horrendous human rights violations and, in the case of Guatemala, full-blown genocide. Also, it's worth noting that cartel culture was in many cases introduced to the region by the US through deportations of 'undesirables', leading to the rise of the world's most notorious international gang, Mara Salvatrucha.

Mexico's migration crackdown escalates dangers for Central Americans

I think the impact of the U. What I've heard from fellow activists is that the children were coming because they were in life-or-death situations back home. Many have parents in the U. Since Santa Cruz first came to the States as an illegal immigrant in , her son and daughter have shuttled back and forth between Mexico and the U.

He owned a shop in Nogales, Mexico, and lived comfortably, according to his mother, who spoke to NationSwell through an interpreter. But Marco was depressed. A divorce from his wife, who barred him from visiting his children, sent him into a depression, says Santa Cruz. In August, three weeks after he said he would arrive, Santa Cruz panicked and went searching for him. But that was just one of many stories Santa Cruz heard about what had happened to her son.

Santa Cruz followed every lead. She began her search at the Mexican Consulate in Tucson, but quickly realized that they would not be able to help her. In this time of anguish, the only thing that you want is for someone to open a door for you. To say the trek over the U. I grew up in Arizona, where oven mitts and beach towels were common driving accessories inside hot cars, which could top degrees when parked outside for even short periods of time.

Mexico's migration crackdown escalates dangers for Central Americans

We even had a pool cooler , growing up. So I wanted to see what it was like crossing the border myself, or at least experience what it was like to walk through the desert — something I had never done outside of recreational camping. In my visit to Tucson, I parked my car on the shoulder of a highway southwest of the city and walked south into the San Xavier Indian reservation toward the Mexican border. Close to bodies have been discovered in this area since , according to the Arizona Open GIS , which tracks migrant deaths along the border through the nonprofit organization, Humane Borders.

Most of the bodies and skeletal remains found there are unrecognizable. Once a person dies, decomposition begins. Leave a body in the desert for even a day and, with the help of heat and hungry desert animals, faces become unrecognizable. Identifying marks, such as tattoos and birthmarks, quickly fade away.

But immigrants coming to the U.

In that short time, the bottoms of my feet were burnt through my shoes, and I was drenched in sweat. I could have easily become dehydrated within a few more hours — which is how most people crossing the border die, according to Pima County officials. According to Hughes, corrupt US government agencies and banks allied with Marxists have opened the borders to an invasion of drug traffickers and illegal immigrants who steal jobs and leach money from the welfare system.

Even so, he said, his patrols sometimes assisted them. We render first aid if necessary, then call border patrol. Whatever the individual intentions or actions, US immigration policy remains deadly. Poverty impels people north but the absence of a guest worker programme for agricultural labourers, for instance, sends them on desert treks, a brutal contrast to decades ago when labourers could work for a season and return home, said Edmundo Hidalgo, who heads Chicanos por la Causa, a Phoenix-based non-profit organisation.

This flow will never cease.

And still she went for it. The border patrol arguably saved her life. But what about the next time she tried? Would they catch her again, would she somehow slip through, as many do, or would she collapse in the sand, gasping, exhausted, abandoned? Some corpses are discovered and reported within hours, others lie there for years.

Once found, they are taken on Interstate 19 to Tucson and an ochre-coloured one-storey building: They join other bodies in a large cooler, all in white bags with red tags, stacked six-high on metal traysalmost to the ceiling. The smell is unmistakable. When the Guardian visited, about of the bodies in the office were border-crossers. The morgue received this year, down from in Many were unidentified, the tags saying John or Jane Doe.