Shadow of death

Rain splattered the windshield of Maverick County Deputy Sgt. Aaron Horta’s dark gray Chevy pickup truck as he barreled down Highway 481. Keeping one hand on the wheel, Horta radioed Border Patrol for the exact location of the body found on that stormy morning in late March. Then he alerted the local funeral home. Horta arrived at the site about 45 minutes later, dreading what he would find on the sprawling ranch outside Eagle Pass, Texas.

The rain stopped as the caravan jolted down a narrow dirt road for several miles into the 17,000-acre ranch. The body of a heavyset female, likely in her mid-20s or 30s, lay facedown on the other side of a cattle fence, covered in maggots. “It had been there for days,” Horta said, scrunching up his nose as he recalled the smell. “Thank God it wasn’t hot.”

Birds chirped softly and a soft breeze ruffled the tall grass as the group gathered around the body to take pictures. One of the seven Border Patrol agents handed a pair of blue plastic gloves to Polo Vargas, a Memorial Funeral Chapels employee. Another cut a hole in the cattle fence. Vargas slid the woman into a gray body bag, and four agents helped him push it through the hole and onto a stretcher.

Agents rifled through the woman’s small, black backpack but found nothing more than a half-full bottle of water and a bag of Doritos. The woman had no identification. She most likely dropped it along the way in case law enforcement caught her, Horta said.

Last year, authorities logged 2.7 million encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. At least 853 migrant deaths—a record high—accompanied the influx, according to internal Border Patrol data reported by CBS.

Like this woman, most of the dead don’t have IDs. Along the southern border, a haphazard network of law enforcement agencies and nonprofits is working to find out who they are and provide closure for their families. But many rural borderland counties aren’t equipped to handle the rising toll, so the identification process is often disorganized and sporadic. That means many immigrants remain unidentified, with families left wondering what happened to them.

Back in his truck, Horta called Justice of the Peace Kina Mancha and sent her photos of the grisly scene. Mancha declared the time of death at 2:05 p.m., the same time as their phone call. Horta jotted it down on a torn piece of ­yellow paper.

Then he paused, and his eyes filled with sadness as he thought about his own three daughters. “She had a family, and they don’t know where she is,” he said. “That’s the thing I think about.”

Horta, 34, grew up in Eagle Pass, a small border city of about 28,000 in southwest Texas. This wasn’t the first time he’d come across the unidentified body of an immigrant extinguished by the elements. Still, he’s never gotten used to it. “Imagine walking for miles and miles. No food. No water. I don’t understand,” he said.

Photo by Bonnie Pritchett

ONCE A MIGRANT crosses the border illegally, he or she falls under the federal government’s jurisdiction. But immigrants who drown in the Rio Grande or dehydrate to death on some remote American ranch become the respective county’s responsibility. Maverick County Treasurer Rito Valdez watched his county buckle under the weight of this reality when it became the epicenter of the border crisis last year. His family’s funeral home, Memorial Funeral Chapels, was on call for Maverick County, and Valdez was responsible for picking up the bodies.

Valdez is the third generation in the family business and grew up around death in the two rooms above his father’s funeral home. “I was in diapers and I was at the chapel, so, it’s something very normal.” He was 14 when his grandfather let him do his first embalming. But nothing in his 30 years of experience prepared him for last year’s surge. The sheer volume of bodies was crippling.

The funeral home built an extra room to hold 10 bodies at a time. But sometimes as many as seven arrived in one day. Maverick County doesn’t have a medical examiner. So, for $247 per case, the funeral home transported the bodies 2½ hours to Webb or Bexar County for an autopsy that cost about $4,000, a sum the county couldn’t pay. The Webb County medical examiner gave them a discount: $2,500 per body. But as freezers filled up, “no one was taking cases,” Valdez said.

Border Patrol found the remains of 256 immigrants last year in the Del Rio Sector, one of nine southwest border regions, one of which includes Maverick County.

Many of the bodies were found floating in the Rio Grande, known in Mexico as the Rio Bravo: fierce, wild, and agitated. The “river is very tricky,” Valdez said. “Underneath the water, there’s a lot of current. They won’t realize it until they’re there.”

Horta responded to 69 deaths in 2022. One day, he was called to respond to the discovery of five bodies in one day. He has trouble getting the children out of his head, like the 3-month-old baby he saw bobbing in the current.

Crossings plunged to their lowest level since the beginning of the Biden administration after Title 42 ended this year on May 11. But Border Patrol still stops more than 3,000 immigrants per day at the southern border, and county authorities worry the summer death toll will climb along with the temperature.

Migrants cross the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Nick Wagner/Xinhua/Alamy

By mid-June, large swaths of Texas and Mexico had already hit triple-digit temperatures with several border cities reaching all-time highs. As of June 27, Maverick County had filed about 44 immigrant death reports this year, Horta said. He’s responded to 18 of them, but expects more: By mid-July, forecasters were tracking a potentially record-setting heat wave they predicted would scorch the southwest with temperatures of at least 115 degrees.

Amid the spike in deaths last summer, Maverick County began burying the bodies in the county cemetery. “It was the only option we had,” Valdez said. “No one was helping us.” From hours spent working with grieving families on both sides of the border, he understood the importance in Latino culture of having the body. Without it, mourning families wouldn’t be able to take their loved one’s remains to church or comfort one another at a viewing. For Valdez, burying them seemed like the best of only bad options. “This is a ­person,” he said. “You need to treat that person with dignity.”

But those bodies weren’t being identified. With no ­cohesive system in place and no time to create one, the rows of small white crosses with no names grew longer. Valentin Guerra, a cemetery employee in a neon vest and dirt-splattered jeans, helped dig the graves. He pointed to the piles of dirt left behind the crosses. “It was just too much at a time,” he said.

TEN YEARS AGO, nearby Brooks County faced a similar crisis. The county is one of Texas’ poorest and home to only about 7,000 people. It’s “in the middle of nowhere and the middle of everything,” said Sheriff Benny Martinez. Though the 944 square miles of scrubland doesn’t border Mexico, it acts as a funnel for illegal immigrants crossing through the border counties directly beneath it.

Martinez, who sports a gray mullet with shoulder-length curls, was elected sheriff in 2017. He keeps a spreadsheet ­cataloging the number of deaths per year in the county since 2009. That was the year crossings through Brooks began to pick up as U.S. Customs and Border Protection focused more resources on the Arizona-Mexico border. “South Texas was the area of less resistance,” Martinez said. It is also harder to patrol since, unlike the federally controlled Arizona ­border, most of the Texas borderland is privately owned by ranchers.

Fearing detection, smugglers and other immigrants traveling in groups often don’t call 911 right away if someone starts to struggle. Martinez winces when he considers the lives that could have been saved if only they’d known where they were. Too often, agents “rely on the buzzards” to find the bodies of those abandoned, he said.

In 2012, the county hit 129 deaths, sometimes four to five in one day. Between paying for autopsies and the funeral home that transports the bodies, Martinez is still working on reimbursing the county 11 years later. At the time, the county was forced to cut salaries and lay off staffers to compensate for the $700,000 it cost to care for the bodies. Their local funeral home couldn’t keep up and their cemetery was ­running out of plots. Most of the bodies they buried were unidentified and likely to stay that way.

Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez looks through binders documenting migrant deaths. Photo by Bonnie Pritchett

All that changed in 2013 when Brooks County received a visit—and much-needed funding—from the state of Texas, when Martinez was chief deputy. The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure requires counties to perform a forensic examination on unidentified bodies and collect DNA samples. Officials must also submit information to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System or a ­similar database. Now Brooks County rarely buries the ­bodies. Instead, it sends bones to the forensic anthropology team at Texas State University for DNA analysis. Full bodies are kept in the morgue while Border Patrol takes fingerprints and collects DNA in hopes of repatriating them to their home countries quickly. The sheriff’s department meets with the Mexican and Central American consulates every three months.

Since 2009, Brooks County has found 932 bodies and skeletal remains and has identified about 60 percent of them. Martinez pointed to rows of large white binders that line the conference room’s built-in wooden shelves. They’re filled with photos in plastic page protectors. “Every single case is right there in those books,” he said. Law enforcement found 26 skeletal remains and 24 full bodies last year. In one photo, a skull rests next to an El Salvadorian passport.

When family members ask to see photos of their loved ones’ remains, Martinez hesitates. He urges them instead to enjoy the photos that are full of life and memories. “You don’t want to see them [like that],” he tells them.

Last year, Maverick County filed 121 immigrant death reports, a staggering jump from 63 in 2021. Desperate to improve their own process, Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber met with Martinez, Border Patrol, and the Mexican and Central American consulates last October. Jeannie Smith was one of the two Maverick County justices of the peace to attend the meeting in the sheriff’s department conference room.

“I think it’s important that we do whatever we need to do to find these families,” she said. “They belong to somebody.”

Smith’s office, a blue clapboard trailer, sits off the highway running through the center of Quemado, a small border town about 20 miles from Eagle Pass. Her black-and-white robes hang on a closet door, and a large American flag is ­centered on the wall behind her desk. With neat gray hair and eyes that crinkle with motherly concern behind her glasses, Smith said she tries her best to keep track of what she calls “my bodies”—the unidentified immigrants discovered during her shifts as justice of the peace.

“It was unbelievable,” Smith said as she recalled declaring a time and manner of death for eight immigrants in one day last year. “I had never seen anything like that.” She watched with apprehension as groups of up to 300 immigrants crossed pecan orchards or made their way through ranches last ­summer, dreading the calls she knew she’d eventually get.

“They’re all humans,” she said. “They have somebody back home that’s looking for them that hasn’t heard from them and maybe doesn’t have the means or know-how to find them.” More than once, family members have come to her house in hopes of relaying information about a missing loved one’s facial features or clothing. Others call with descriptions. Six of her bodies were buried, unidentified, in the Maverick County Cemetery.

These days, the files stacked behind her desk are dwindling thanks to efforts to identify previously buried bodies using DNA. But many are still unclaimed.

“I have bodies from 2020 that have never been claimed,” Smith said. “I’m always hoping.”

NO ONE KNOWS how many bodies are yet to be found. Brooks County Search and Recovery Deputy Don White is one of the few people looking. With an AR-15 slung over his shoulder and a sidearm on his hip, White spends hours ­scanning the brush for the tell-tale signs of human remains. The white-bearded deputy’s khaki shirt and brown utility vest blend with the dusty scrubland. He spent several years as a department volunteer and $100,000 of his retirement until he received a state grant two years ago that enabled the county to cover his expenses.

On a steamy afternoon in late March, White walked toward a “layup,” a makeshift campsite for immigrants under a motte of mesquite trees. He stopped and sniffed the air for what he thought might be a whiff of human decomposition. Dusty backpacks and empty water bottles scattered the ground under the trees. The ranch is a popular crossing point for immigrants avoiding the checkpoint. Nothing about the landscape is inviting. He ducked to avoid a branch of catclaw acacia. The spiny plant forms dense shrubs with rows of thorns in alternating directions that yank at clothing and scratch careless limbs.

Some days, his morning begins at 3 a.m. when he scans the surrounding ranches for fresh remains with an infrared drone. He hopes to recover them before the maggot bloom—the period of the most intense maggot activity—about four days after death.

Other times he waits for a call from Eddie Canales. For the past 10 years, the easygoing advocate in his mid-70s has directed the South Texas Human Rights Center, a tiny building directly across from the Brooks County Courthouse. Canales gets 20 to 30 calls per week from families of missing immigrants. Some send Google Earth maps with an X or ­circle marking where they last heard from their loved one. Others send GPS coordinates over Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Canales passes the information along to Border Patrol and other searchers like White.

On a day when temperatures surpassed 100 degrees, Brooks County Deputy Sheriff Jose Lemus stands over a migrant woman who survived by calling 911 for help, saying she could not walk anymore and wanted to be found. Kevin C. Downs/Redux

In 2013, Canales led a rally outside the courthouse, ­urging the county to collect DNA and establish a protocol to deal with the flood of corpses. He protested again last summer when he found out Maverick County had buried bodies without collecting DNA.

The center’s busy hotline reminds him of the thousands yet to be found. Though the remains of nearly 1,000 immigrants have been found in Brooks County, many believe there are five more undiscovered bodies for every one that’s been recovered. “That’s a lot of people,” Canales said.

White urges relief organizations and border shelters to tell immigrants to send their GPS coordinates to their ­families when they head into the brush. “You don’t make it? I’ve got a starting point,” he said.

The Texas heat saps White’s strength in the midafternoon, so he rests in the shade and plans his evening search. It may take him hours to locate all of a person’s body parts. Wild hogs fight over the skeletons, swallowing hands and feet whole. “I know people that won’t eat the hogs here,” he said. Other times he finds the skin completely mummified from the sun.

Most days, White parks his large black Jeep and sets out on foot, using tracking software to record his movements. He walks in ever-widening circles, never straying more than 2 miles from the Jeep in case he finds someone who needs help. The SUV is packed with extra liters of water, IV bags, flags to mark off a search area, and food for up to five days. Also: body bags and a large bottle of turquoise Listerine mouthwash—the best way to kill the decomposition odor.

Border Patrol searches when they can and often are the first ones to find a migrant in distress. “We’re pulling people out of the desert that had been abandoned,” said Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, who led the Del Rio Sector until his appointment as chief in June. “We’re pulling people out of locked containers that have been shut in by the smugglers.” As of April 26, the sector had recorded 50 deaths so far this year. That number has climbed, but Border Patrol could not provide official data for May and June.

Eddie Canales carries jugs of water to a blue water drum for migrants who venture into the rough terrain. Gregory Bull/AP

Though the bodies of unidentified immigrants are ultimately the county’s responsibility, agents provide what help they can through the Missing Migrant Program, an effort Border Patrol launched in 2017. Agents volunteer to work with the team for up to a year. They collect DNA and fingerprints to compare the information with records of immigrants who have crossed before. Along with county law enforcement, they work with the consulates to repatriate the bodies as quickly as possible.

“That’s very traumatizing if you think about the things that you’re going to see over the course of those months,” said Owens. “Yet, we never have a shortage of people that step up and want to do it.” Agents also put out placards directing wandering immigrants to the nearest checkpoint and set up beacons equipped with strobe lights “hopefully to prevent the deaths from occurring in the first place,” he said.

DURING HER LUNCH BREAK at a local elementary school, Justice of the Peace Kina Mancha picked up Deputy Sgt. Horta’s call about the woman found on the ranch outside Eagle Pass. Along with Jeannie Smith, Mancha is one of Maverick County’s five rotating justices of the peace. She also teaches full time. She’s seen her fair share of bodies during 16 years on the job.

She winced as she remembered the flood of death that last summer left the county reeling. “Now they’ve come up with a plan, with a protocol,” she said. But it’s far from perfect. Time and resources are still in short supply, and too often the haphazard system hangs on the decision of one person already stretched to the limit.

Mancha didn’t send the Eagle Pass woman to Webb County for an autopsy. Horta asked Border Patrol to take her fingerprints to see if they match any already on file. “It takes time, weeks, even months to get a positive ID,” he said. But the woman’s fingerprints had deteriorated too much for a clean print. Horta said the nameless woman will soon get her own white cross in the county cemetery. The small plaque at the top will say “Jane Doe.”