Gene Hernández speaks, with his hands folded, sheriff’s badge around his neck, in broken Spanish: “When I started here, I was the only one who spoke Spanish,” he says. Today, he is supervisor of medicolegal death investigators at the Pima Medical Examiner's office.
Hernández's father was a Mexican migrant who traveled to the U.S., perhaps with the same desires as those who wait to be identified in the boxes that Hernández works with. Hernández was born in the U.S. and learned Spanish as an adult because he married a Mexican woman. When he was a child, his father hardly spoke it at home.
For a long time, Hernández had the task of communicating with the relatives of dead migrants his office had just identified. In 22 years of work, the coroner said the case that marked him most was that of two bodies found together: a Guatemalan mother with her daughter. Only their bones remained.
Hernández's office opens onto a hallway that leads to a parking lot, where a trailer has been parked for more than 10 years. The coroner opens the two doors and lowers a folding ladder with three steps, places it on the floor close to the edge and climbs up. Inside are rows of cardboard boxes stacked, one on top of the other, from floor to ceiling. There are 200 boxes: in each, are the bones of one or two people.
For each box, there is also a family waiting, in some country south of the United States.
Asylum-seeking migrants with children sit on the river bank and wait as Texas Rangers escort them into custody after they crossed the Rio Grande River illegally into the US at the border with Mexico in Roma.
Carol Guzy/ZUMA
Dying in Arizona
Bodies in the desert deteriorate quickly, in less than a week they turn into bones. That not only makes it more complex and expensive to identify them, but it also leaves families with many questions.
"They don't want to believe that it's possible that they talked to their sister four weeks ago and now you're saying that the person is almost pure bones," Hernández says. "A family member tells you: 'My sister had a mole on her nose'. How can you tell that person that there is no nose anymore?"
Along with the bones in the boxes of the Pima morgue trailer, are the last belongings of the migrants: torn clothes, dried sneakers, rusty belt buckles, images of the Virgin Mary with a prayer on the back, bills, cell phones and small papers with telephone numbers.
“The remains arrive through different organizations. They notify the authorities and they notify us. It could be the Pima County police, the Tohono Oʼodham Nation (a local Native American community) or border patrol,” Hernández says.
Once the items are received, they are assigned a case number, the only one they have until identification is achieved. Forensic doctors do the first examination. Anthropological specialists then try to determine age, gender and cause of death. All this information is uploaded to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS), a free, public online database that anyone can consult.
Handwritten notes
In 2006, Robin Reineke, a cultural anthropology graduate student at the University of Arizona, was an intern at the Pima County Medical Examiner's office when she discovered that migrant families telephoned every day and office staff made unofficial “courtesy reports”.
These reports contained not only basic information, such as name, age, date of last visit, but also handwritten notes in the margins, such as “she was a good person” or “she didn't bite her nails.” The team, which made some 350 to 400 such reports per year, most of them handwritten, could not cope. So Reineke started digitizing everything.
“What I learned during this process was that families wanted a better system for searching for the missing," she said. They were tired of calling dozens of state offices and NGOs, always calling the wrong place. “They wanted to be able to send their DNA to compare with the unidentified dead, and they wanted to meet other families," Reineke wrote in her article “Forensic Citizenship Among Families of Missing Migrants on the U.S.-Mexico Border.”
That is how Reineke founded Colibrí Center, an organization that supports Pima forensic experts in the search for the DNA of families in their countries of origin.
Two women comfort each other as they are processed along with other asylum-seeking migrants recently arriving illegally from Mexico.
Carol Guzy/ZUMA
A new system
Today the process goes like this: When a body is in good condition, fingerprints are taken and a cross-checked against the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The data may be on record if, for example, the person was detained in the past trying to reach the U.S.
If there are no fingerprints, because the remains are very deteriorated, and there is no way to make a quick identification, Colibrí is notified. The organization then tries find the family to obtain DNA samples. The more samples they receive from direct family members, the greater the chances of a match.
If relatives are in the U.S., the Colibrí team tries to collect samples or ask people to send them by mail. One difficulty they face is that these relatives may be illegal residents and are afraid of being deported if they approach the authorities. For these cases, Colibrí assures the relatives that the organization will not report them, says Mirza Monterroso, director of the Missing Migrants and DNA project at Colibrí Center.
If relatives are outside the U.S., Colibrí contacts a network of allied social and family organizations, such as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), the Community Studies and Psychosocial Action Team (ECAP) in Guatemala, Fundación para la Justicia (FJEDD) in Mexico, among others, to coordinate sample collection. Sometimes, when possible, someone from Colibrí travels as well.
“The focus of our program is to take the DNA of families who have not found their loved ones and compare it against all the samples in the laboratory," Monterroso says, noting that Bode Cellmark Forensics in Virginia, where Pima County processes its samples, has around 1,300 profiles of unidentified people.
Few laboratories do these tests and their prices have increased greatly in recent years. Each bone sample for genetic crossing can cost $1,375. Added to the cost of cross-checking the family's DNA, the report can reach up to $4,000.
300 families are waiting
Identification was faster seven years ago. At the time, 80% of the migrants who died at the border were Mexican, and the Mexican government allocated a budget for identification. But Colibrí says that funding ended in 2016.
Mexico’s Foreign Affairs ministry has cut its annual budget for the repatriation of immigrants' remains from the U.S. to Mexico. It has been reducing this budget over the past 9 years, Distintas Latitudes has found.
Over the past five years, Colibrí Center has collected 1,888 family reference DNA samples, corresponding to 854 cases. Those numbers change constantly as more bodies arrive and more DNA is sought.
But when Mexico broke the contract with the laboratory, the DNA cross-referencing process began to slow down. “Today we have a backlog of 300 cases that are not in the laboratory. It is very difficult to explain to families how unfair it is that there is no money to process the samples,” Monterroso says.
A group of migrants gather in a plaza near the border crossing just before their protest begins.
Stringer/dpa/ZUMA
Texas ranchers
The situation in Texas is different. First, unlike Arizona, Texas has 32 border counties because the state has a double checkpoint. In addition to the counties that are on the geographic border with Mexico, there is a second police checkpoint 60 miles into the national territory.
Many migrants cross the border trying to avoid that second checkpoint, crossing expanses of private land, and dying along the way. In those cases, recovering the body depends on local ranchers finding them and notifying the authorities. Many times they do not do so.
When the ranchers do call the authorities, the county sheriff or border patrol picks up the body with a justice of the peace, who determines the next steps. Of the 32 border counties, very few have a morgue. So in many cases, it can cost up to $800 to transport the remains to the nearest morgue. Many times counties do not have that money.
In the best case scenario, the judge calls a funeral home that takes the remains to a morgue for examination and DNA sampling. Those samples are then sent to a laboratory, probably to the University of North Texas, and a case file is opened in NamUs. In the worst case scenario, the body will is taken to a community cemetery and buried in an unnamed grave.
Despite these difficulties in recovering and identifying bodies in Texas, initiatives emerged from universities and social organizations such as the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Texas in San Marcos and the Human Identification Center of the University of North Texas, which is one of the largest genetic identification laboratories in the U.S.
Border Project
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) is a not-for-profit NGO created in Argentina in 1986 to identify people who disappeared during the last military dictatorship. The organisation became the scientific reference for forensic anthropology in America, supporting many countries in the region in training and field work.
When the EAAF helped to identify femicide victims in Juárez in 2005, it realized that the identification challenges it faced were due to the fact that most of the women were migrants and their disappearances had been reported in other states or countries.
In 2009, the EAAF launched Proyecto Frontera to develop a regional mechanism for the exchange of forensic information about missing migrants and unidentified remains. It promotes the creation of forensic databases in countries of origin, trains local forensic experts, and encourages cooperation between migrants' homelands and the places where they go missing.
In 2010, EAAF started working with the Pima County Coroner's Office to collect and match DNA. Both work with the same U.S. forensic laboratory, so they allowed it to cross check genetic profiles. This has very simple method has made more than 100 identifications over the past 13 years.
Working with the University of North Texas, the EAAF has also achieved a long-term goal: access to CoDIS, the FBI's DNA database. FBI rules, however, presented many obstacles. So in 2018, the EAAF and more than 40 civil society organizations from the U.S., Mexico and Central America, backed wit the legal assistance of the University of Berkeley Law Clinic, asked for a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to discuss this issue.
“The U.S. has the technical capacity and resources to carry out this large-scale genetic comparison. This could not only serve the families of missing migrants, but also set an outstanding example of international forensic cooperation and can be a model for other migrant corridors around the world," Argentine forensic anthropologist and EAAF co-founder Mercedes Doretti said in her remarks.
The stories behind the bones
Between October 2019 and September 2022, more than 1,589 migrants died trying to cross the southern border of the U.S. If the remains of these people are in the U.S., they may end up in a cardboard box, cremated or in a mass grave without their relatives knowing.
Ofelia Muñóz Valenzuela lived in Veracruz, Mexico, with a husband who beat her and her daughter. In 1997 she decided to escape, leaving her daughter with her grandmother and setting out for the U.S. On her first attempt, she was deported. So she decided to try again, she told her daughter in their last phone call.
In 2011, a skull was found in a Texas county sheriff's office during a general cleanup. Someone had given it to a police officer in 1998, who had stored it in a locker. It was sent away for identification and in 2018, it was found to be Valenzuela.
For 20 years, her daughter, Elena, had not known the fate of her mother.
*This research was carried out thanks to the support of the Consortium to Support Regional Journalism in Latin America (CAPIR) led by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web