At the US-Mexico border, volunteers conduct a grim search for human bones
At the US-Mexico border, volunteers conduct a grim search for human bones Remains of 176 migrants were recovered near the US-Mexico border last year, a shocking jump from 20 in 2019. With crossings down, volunteer searchers hope for fewer this year.
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Human remains are found by volunteers near the border wall
Battalion Search and Rescue volunteers have found dozens of human remains in the desert in Santa Teresa, New Mexico in ares used by organized crime
Editor's note: This story contains reporting and images that some readers may find disturbing.
SANTA TERESA, N.M. – Human bones, white against the orange sand, are hard to miss and harder to forget.
Once a month, retiree Abbey Carpenter leads volunteers through a field of dunes near the border, searching for the remains of migrants. She has located 27 sites in southern New Mexico in under two years, artefacts of a wave of migration that has ebbed to a trickle.
But the bones – femur, rib, jaw – take her breath away each time.
In them, Carpenter, who taught English as a Second Language, sees the journeys made by her former students ‒ migrants who live and work in the United States and learned English in her classroom. Men in construction. Women in service industries.
When she first joined the desert searches, she said, "I just felt like I was walking in their footprints. I could see them: their backpacks, their shoes, their clothes."
President Donald Trump's border crackdown has helped push illegal crossings to record lows over the past four months. With triple-digit summer temperatures looming here, there are growing hopes that the decline in migration could bring relief from the horrific death toll of the past two years in Border Patrol's El Paso Sector.
Last year, border agents found the bodies of 176 migrants in the 264-mile sector stretching from West Texas across New Mexico. They discovered 149 remains the year before. The toll represented a shocking increase from the 20 deaths recorded in 2019.
The sector has become a focal point. That's in part because of the rise in deaths and in part because local Border Patrol leaders shared the sector statistics during two deadly years, when the Biden administration failed to provide broader numbers – despite a congressional mandate.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn't respond to a USA TODAY request for the missing data for fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
Along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant deaths climbed five years running through fiscal 2022, the last period for which data is publicly available. Deaths rose to 895 from 281 over that time, according to CBP. The numbers include human remains found by Border Patrol and other federal, state, local and tribal agencies.
The climbing death toll prompted CBP to create the "Missing Migrant Program" in 2017, under the first Trump administration. The goal was "to help rescue migrants in distress and reduce migrant deaths along the Southwest border," according to an Government Accountability Office report. The program also helped facilitate the identification and return of migrant remains to their families. Under the new Trump administration, the effort has been renamed the "Missing Alien Program."
The vast majority of migrant remains in El Paso Sector have been found in a single county, New Mexico's Doña Ana, in an area painfully close to life-saving assistance: main roads, a cluster of factories, residential neighborhoods.
Looking north from the border fence, the desert appears flat, the bare Franklin Mountains in the distance to the northeast. New Mexico's two-lane Highway 9 parallels the border about three miles to the north.
The proximity to the urban footprint is in part what made this region such a heavily trafficked crossing point.
But within minutes of hiking into the desert, creosote bushes and mesquite pull the sand into disorienting mounds that can, without warning, block the view in every direction. Should a tired migrant collapse in their scant shade, the sand can run as hot as 150 degrees in the summer.
"We were wondering why these individuals, or these bodies, were found very close to the border," Border Patrol Agent Claudio Herrera, a sector spokesman, told USA TODAY.
"The saddest thing," he said, is that migrants who survived told us "they'd been in a stash house for weeks … without proper food and without water. So by the time they made the illegal entry, they were already dehydrated."
An 'open graveyard'
New Mexico's Office of the Medical Investigator is tasked with investigating reports of unattended deaths, including those in the desert near the border. In 2023, the agency officially began tracking remains that could belong to a "probable migrant."
Last year, the agency positively identified 75% of migrant remains recovered in southern New Mexico, or 112 individuals, according to data provided to USA TODAY.
Carpenter and her partner, Marine veteran James Holeman, organize the desert searches through a nonprofit, Battalion Search and Rescue.
On a Saturday in May, as temperatures climbed toward 90 degrees, nine volunteers met Carpenter and Holeman at a Love's truck stop. They donned fluorescent orange-and-yellow shade hats. They readied their radios and turned on a cellphone GPS-tracking app, for safety and to map the terrain they covered.
"It is a straight-up open graveyard," Holeman said of the 10- by 20-mile section of border they've been covering little by little since late 2023.
Mary Mackay, a local school teacher, volunteered with Carpenter for the first time that day.
"Emotionally, it was more than I expected," she later told USA TODAY. "You feel like you would be prepared to see a body, but then you actually see it and you realize that's a real person with an entire back story and family and wishes and dreams. And it all just ended there alone in the desert."
The Battalion's search for migrant remains in New Mexico follows the footsteps of other volunteer teams working in deadly stretches of Arizona and California. Search volunteers typically try to comb through areas Border Patrol or local law enforcement might otherwise miss.
The volunteers don't touch the bones, said Carpenter, also a former college administrator. They mark the sites with brightly colored tape tied to the brush. They record the precise location and alert local law enforcement in hopes that officials will come to collect the bones that remain.
Sometimes they do; too often they don't, Carpenter said.
Animals or wind sometimes scatter the remains, before volunteers or officials can reach them. Still, she said, each one matters in the quest to identify a missing migrant. A chipped bone could hold a clue.
"It takes some time and effort to work wider circles around the site to identify everything," Carpenter said. "But that's important. Which family member wouldn't want all of their family's remains recovered?"
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
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