Remembering the lost dead

The drive to Holtville, Calif., a tiny desert city near the U.S.-Mexican border, runs on an asphalt ribbon winding through the forbidden Southwest wilderness: A white sun beats down on cactuses and sand. Granite rocks sit stacked on each other like blobs of baked dough. Shrubs sprout from dusty hills like an old man’s unbrushed hair. Blankets of snow and blustery winds hint at freezing nighttime temperatures. And all throughout that drive between mountains and deserts, I thought about the thousands of migrants who have died in these valleys.

After weeks of reporting on the migrant caravans from Central America, I realized that although I’m also an immigrant to the United States, I know next to nothing about the lives of the millions of immigrants who dwell among us without legal status. So I decided to continue asking and learning—and that brought me to last week’s visit to Holtville’s Terrace Park Cemetery, a private burial site for migrants who died crossing over the southwestern border.

That morning, I crawled out of bed at 3 a.m. and drove 250 miles from Los Angeles to the 3-acre cemetery, where all the way in the back, beyond the well-trimmed lawns filled with headstones and flowers, is a locked gate. Behind that gate lie 520 bodies, half of them unidentified. There, the final resting place of the poor has no headstones, no monuments, no flowers, no grass, no mourning family members. Instead, it’s basically a field of soil and wood chips, where neat rows of bricks mark the bodies as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe”—graves so shallow that visitors are not allowed to step on them in case their feet crush the decomposed remains.

Usually the cemetery administrators don’t allow the public into that burial site, but I had special access that day thanks to Border Angels, a humanitarian nonprofit that has escorted people to the Terrace Park Cemetery since 2001. With me were Border Angels volunteer Hugo Castro and a group of students from Mount St. Mary’s University, a private Catholic women’s college. We were in Holtville for one simple reason: To remember the forgotten.

A brick inscribed with the words ‘John Doe’ sits as a marker on a grave. Sophia Lee

Nobody spoke a word as we stood staring at the dirt and bricks. Compared with the loving memorials in the first section of the cemetery, the inscriptions on the bricks seemed so clinical and impersonal: Jane Doe … John Doe … John Doe … Jane Doe ... Row 13-37 … Row 17-37 … Row 11-28. Who knows how much these individuals suffered before death? Who knows what sort of desperate conditions drove them into the desert, knowing yet refusing to believe the dangers ahead? Why would they take such a risk? Do their family members know what happened to them? Do they miss them?

In death, when our bodies are disintegrating back into the earth, our possessions and documents shouldn’t matter, yet somehow they still do, at least in the way flesh and bones are buried and memorialized. Here in this dirt field rest the nameless sojourners—and in great irony, their bodies are now one with the land for which they lost their lives to reach.

Today at Terrace Park, that’s no longer the case for newer migrants. Since 2009, county officials have stopped burying bodies, a practice that used to cost taxpayers up to $1,200 per person. Instead, they cremate the bodies and toss the ashes into the sea, a lot cheaper at $645 per cremation. But even that’s too much for some anti-illegal immigration folks, who protest that the county is diverting funds away from more important needs. Even in death, some people view these migrants as a nuisance.

For years, particularly after the United States built a wall in 1994 and toughened its enforcement against illegal immigration in San Diego, more and more migrants have crossed the border using less traditional routes. Those routes cross areas where the U.S. Border Patrol didn’t bother to build walls, because they thought the deadly terrain—where temperatures can rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and then dip below 30—would be a natural barrier.

But the terrain didn’t stop people from coming. Americans who haven’t been in these migrants’ situations cannot imagine the depths to their desperation, and there is no greater courage—or foolishness—than desperation. People climbed mountains, hiked deserts, or swam the All-American Canal, a man-made river that runs along the border in southeastern California. Those who died got lost or drowned or came unprepared, without sufficient water, proper clothing, or enough food. That’s how Border Angels got started—its founder Enrique Morones heard about the corpses strewn across the desert and began carrying jugs of water out into those remote regions, hoping they would save a life.

A brick inscribed with the words ‘John Doe’ sits as a marker on a grave. Sophia Lee

According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, border agents found 294 dead bodies in the southwest border region in fiscal year 2017. The highest figure was 492 bodies in 2005, and the numbers have gone up and down over the years. Many of these bodies have no IDs, since their coyotes (smugglers) advise them to throw IDs away so they can lie about their identities to Border Patrol agents. That idea appeals to Central American migrants, who may lie to ICE that they’re from Mexico so that agents will deport them to Mexico, not farther out to Honduras or El Salvador (though with fingerprints, agents can figure out where they’re from anyway). As for those bodies with identification, often their family members back home are too poor to pay for a funeral, so the bodies end up in U.S. gravesites like the one I visited in Holtville.

“The border has become a river of blood,” Hugo said as we crouched before one of the cemetery bricks. Yes, these people broke the law when they crossed the border. Yes, they chose to cross a hostile terrain, and paid for it. But we can still honor their dignity as human beings, Hugo said: “Dignity shouldn’t be based on a piece of paper.”

So we planted wooden crosses in front of the bricks, kneeling and pausing before each one. Local schoolchildren in San Diego had decorated these crosses, some painted pink with white dotted flowers, some fiery orange and red, some plain white with the words “No Olvidado”—not forgotten—painted on them. Most crosses had Spanish words written on them—“Paz,” “Descansa en Paz,” “Amor sin Fronteras.”

A brick inscribed with the words ‘John Doe’ sits as a marker on a grave. Sophia Lee

Later we gathered in a circle to pray in unison, both in English and Spanish: “Lord Jesus, help us to recognize You in the face of the stranger and welcome Your presence among us. You have graced us with the gifts of many cultures and nations. Free us from the fear of those from other lands. Teach us to share our gifts with newcomers in return, so that You may say, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed Me. Come now into My Kingdom.’ We ask this in Your name, from the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”