Last year, 651 people died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the highest count since the International Organization for Migration began tracking the numbers, in 2014. More than 100 of those deaths happened in Brooks County.
Eduardo Canales, who runs a water drop and a missing-persons recovery program at the South Texas Human Rights Center, and Matt Flores, a volunteer, replenish water stations.As soon as Eduardo Canales walked into the office of the South Texas Human Rights Center on a hot day in mid-July, his phone rang. The nonprofit’s mission is to “end death and suffering on the Texas/Mexico border,” and, as the co-founder and sole full-time staff member, Canales is always on the clock.
Falfurrias, the biggest town in Brooks County, has one of the state’s busiest border checkpoints. Migrants often try toby crossing nearby ranches, but the landscape can be disorienting and the heat punishing. Before the S.T.H.R.C. opened, Brooks County, which is one of the poorest in the state, had few resources to handle missing-migrant cases.
In many rural counties, when officials couldn’t identify a body, they would bury it, sometimes in an unmarked grave. This is illegal under Texas law, which mandates that unidentified bodies undergo DNA sampling. Operation Identification, a humanitarian program at Texas State University, in San Marcos, run by Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist, has been working to, disinter the bodies for DNA testing, and repatriate them.
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