LA GRULLA — The graveyard sleuths moved with surgical precision. Even the big backhoe operator cooperated, chiseling a dirt staircase step by step into the rectangular hole now 6 feet below where the earth met blue horizon.
This was an exhumation for unidentified migrants. Even before President Donald Trump’s ever-hardening immigration policies, places like this border village near the Rio Grande have had a need for the tender hands of forensic scientists.
They use DNA to end the mystery and ease the misery of families worried they’ll never know what happened to sons and daughters, husbands and wives who hit the migration trail and vanished, often years earlier.
The Organization of International Migration, a U.N. agency, recorded the deaths of 405 migrants on the U.S. side of the border last year alone. An additional 91 migration-related deaths were recorded on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Many others may never be documented.
Since 2014, at least 1,750 have perished along the border region, according to the international migration agency. Half of the deaths have been in Texas, surpassing Arizona, whose blistering terrain was once the leading death trap.
Eddie Canales of the South Texas Human Rights Center estimates there are hundreds more migrants buried throughout South Texas.
“I have compared South Texas to the Mediterranean,” he said. “It swallows people.”
La Grulla cemetery is a place of polished marble and pink granite headstones with Spanish surnames and unsubdued “forever-in-our-hearts” epitaphs. But on this recent day, the workers, led by the director of Operation Identification at Texas State University in San Marcos, were carefully pulling up pine boxes and thick bags from simple graves near the back fence of the cemetery.
Six unidentified migrants were laid to rest here at least four years ago. Their bones are unusual in that they were buried with care in a cemetery, placed a luxurious foot or so between one another. Each had a white wooden cross, set off with red plastic carnations.
Many immigrants who die on their journey end up in shallow, unmarked graves, or in cemetery plots paid for by overstrapped county governments. These had a measure of dignity in their burial.
But that’s not exactly the view of Kate Spradley, the forensic anthropologist who runs Operation Identification.
“Dignity is giving a person an identity so that the information on the remains can be given to their families,” the scientist said as she stood amid the dusty graves.
Under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, when a person dies and the circumstances aren’t known, a forensic exam and DNA samples must be collected and submitted to the unidentified and missing persons database at the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas in Fort Worth. UNT houses a DNA clearinghouse known as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUS. There, law enforcement and family members can access the databases.
But many counties have no medical examiners. That’s when forensic anthropologists like Spradley move in to begin the meticulous process of finding and identifying the bones with DNA sampling.
This sunny day, Spradley and her crew found papers on the bones of one man that indicate he was born in 1965 and died in 2016. Sixteen pesos buried with the body indicate he probably passed through Mexico or was born there.
Maybe he’ll soon get a name, too. Maybe he’ll be identified and matched with his family, perhaps remembered with sturdy Salmo 23, Psalm 23, as some of the nearby graves are marked: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not be in want … Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
While Spradley brings her science to the bones, Canales brings his Mexican-American culture. Canales’ bilingualism helps him connect to the families that call him at the South Texas Human Rights Center searching for lost relatives. There have been 1,300 such calls just in the past 18 months, he said.
Sometimes, families find relatives alive in federal immigration detention. But at the end of the year, Canales said, he had a list of 490 missing migrants.
When he works with the families, Canales tries to draw out details about the coyote who smuggled the migrant into Texas. “They know where they were left behind and I emphasize that — and that I understand their anguish,” he said.
Uncertainty over a missing loved one can weigh on family and friends forever. DNA and the work of Canales and these anthropologists can change that. Only then can the true process of borderless grieving begin.
Canales’ payback is often parting words of protection: Que Dios te bendiga, God bless you.
A retired organizer for a teachers’ union in Corpus Christi, Canales got a fresh career when he began hearing of bodies left in shabby, makeshift graves in Brooks County, a blistering hot stretch of land in the summer about an hour north of McAllen. More than 650 bodies have been unearthed in Brooks County in the past decade.
That’s why he started his organization in Falfurrias, the county seat, in 2013, only a month after the U.N. migration agency launched its own Missing Migrants Project after nearly 400 migrants died in two shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy.
There’s also a crucial Border Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias, a key place that immigrants without legal status must pass to slip deeper into the country for work or to reach family.
Now, Canales works closely with ranchers and undertakers of funeral homes who are called to pick up bodies. “If you find the funeral home, you find the memories,” he said.
And that has led him and Spradley to La Grulla, after representatives of the Sanchez funeral home in nearby Rio Grande City told them they remembered unidentified remains being buried in the village of only about 1,700 that abuts the serpentine Rio Grande. It’s in Starr County, just southwest of Brooks County.
Spradley has exhumed more than 200 sets of remains since she began her work in 2013. If families want to come to the lab and see the remains after they’ve been identified, or even physically hold them, they can, she said. If they want a priest or a musician there, that, too, can be arranged.
As she stood in her hiking boots near the fresh exhumation, she called such reunions gratifying.
“They don’t have to wake up anymore and wonder,” Spradley said. “They know.”
