AJO â It was a simple message scrawled into a basalt rock lying near-empty cans of beans and jugs of water that volunteers had left deep in the Sonoran Desert for undocumented immigrants passing through: âGracias.â
But to Mikal Jakubal, who, as a volunteer with the Ajo Samaritans, had been making weekly trips into the backcountry to stock water drop locations, the note was affirmation that the groupâs efforts were appreciated.
âFor the most part, we will never hear from the people who use this,â Jakubal said. âWe donât know what it was like getting to this point. We donât know what is after this. But you have this one little connection across massively different life experiences: They found some water and you found a thank you note.â
Advertisement: “You can’t even describe what we are doing as a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” Jakubal said. He said a long history of U.S. policies in Latin America has contributed to the reasons migrants are risking their lives to trek for days through harsh terrain in hopes of finding better lives in the U.S. In other words, Jakubal said, “what’s going on at the border now is like a symptom on top of a symptom on top of a symptom of the deeper problem.”
A shift in policy Doug Ruopp, a veteran volunteer with the migrant aid group Humane Borders, remembers a time before people started to die at striking rates in the Sonoran Desert. He moved to Tucson from New England in the late 1990s to become a bilingual teacher. Back then, the border crossings he heard about were different.
Operation Identification has grim task of examining migrant remains
Federal law seen as first recognition of lives lost entering the U.S.
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Operation Identification has grim task of examining migrant remains
SAN ANTONIO – Locating the graves of migrants who died entering the U.S. illegally is the starting point for the grim, often complex task undertaken by Operation Identification at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University.
Dr. Kate Spradley, a professor of anthropology and the director of Operation Identification, said she and her students have examined more than 300 remains recovered from cemeteries throughout South Texas since 2013, but only 43 have been identified.
Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act provides funding to Coastal Bend counties facing immigration issues
In 2020, there were some 35 bodies found in Brooks County alone, bringing the total to around 800 remains found over the past 10 years. Author: Michael Gibson (KIII) Updated: 6:57 PM CST February 1, 2021
TEXAS, USA Brooks, Duval and Kenedy County are soon going to get some financial relief thanks to a new law that Congressman Vicente Gonzalez helped get enacted. The law will reimburse counties for the cost associated with immigrant bodies discovered in South Texas.
The remains of immigrants have turned up around Brooks County for as long as anyone can remember. The county sits in some of the hottest and driest stretches of the Wild Horse Desert, or as some people call it, The Desert of the Dead.