Last year, the bodies of 176 immigrants were recovered near the US-Mexican border. A shocking jump from 20 people in 2019.
Human bodies are discovered by volunteers near the boundary wall
Battalion search and rescue volunteers have discovered dozens of human bodies in the desert of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, Ares, used in organized crime
Editor’s Note: This story contains reports and images that some readers may find worrying.
Santa Teresa, New Mexico – White human bones against orange sand are hard to overlook and easy to forget.
Once a month, Carpenter from the Retirement Abbey leads volunteers through sand dunes near the border searching for the remains of immigrants. Within two years she found 27 sites in southern New Mexico.
However, the bones – the femur, ribs, jaw – exhale every time.
Among them, Carpenter, who taught English as a second language, sees a journey created by her former students, immigrants who live and work in the United States and learn English in the classroom. Man under construction. Women in the service industry.
When she first joined the Desert Search, she said, “I felt like I was walking in their footsteps. I could see their backpacks, shoes and clothes.”
President Donald Trump’s border crackdown has helped him push illegal intersections over the past four months to record lows. With triple-digit summer temperatures looming here, there is growing hope that a decline in migration could result in the Border Patrol El Paso sector, which is likely to result in horrific deaths over the past two years.
Last year, border agents discovered the bodies of 176 immigrants in a 264-mile sector extending from West Texas in New Mexico. They found 149 the remaining 149 of the previous year. The toll represents a shocking increase from 20 deaths recorded in 2019.
The sector has become a focus. That’s because of the increase in deaths, and in part because local border patrol leaders shared sector statistics in two years when the Biden administration was unable to provide more numbers despite Congressional orders.
US Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for missing data for USA Today for 2023 and 2024.
Along the length of the US-Mexico border, immigrant deaths have risen five years into fiscal year 2022. This is the last period when the data is published. According to CBP, deaths increased from 281 to 895. The figures include human remains discovered by the Border Patrol and other federal, state, local and tribal agencies.
Climbing deaths prompted CBP to create a “missing immigration program” under the first Trump administration in 2017. According to a report from the government’s Accountability Office, the goal was to “rescue suffering migrants and reduce the deaths of migrants along the southwest border.” The program also helped to promote immigrant identification and reinstatement. Under the new Trump administration, the effort was renamed “Missing Alien Program.”
The majority of immigrants in the El Paso sector were found in a single county of Doñaana in New Mexico.
Looking north from the border fence, the desert appears flat, with naked Franklin mountains in the northeast in the distance. New Mexico’s two-lane Highway 9 parallels the border about three miles north.
The proximity of the urban footprint is part of what has made the area a highly trafficked intersection.
But within minutes of hiking into the desert, the creosote bushes and mesquite pull the sand into a confused mound that can block the view in any direction without warning. If tired immigrants collapse in a slight shade, summer can get as hot as 150 degrees in the summer.
“I wondered why these individuals, or these bodies, were found so close to the border,” sector spokesman Border Patrol Claudio Herrera told USA Today.
“The saddest thing is that the surviving immigrants told us, “For weeks, they had no proper food or water, and they were already dehydrated by the time they made an illegal entrance.”
“Open Cemetery”
The New Mexico medical researcher’s office is tasked with investigating reports of uninhabited deaths, including people in the desert near the border. In 2023, the agency officially began tracking down ruins that could belong to “possible immigrants.”
Last year, the agency actively identified 75% of immigrants as either southern New Mexico or 112 individuals, according to data provided to USA Today.
The carpenter and her partner, Marine James Holman, organize a desert search through a nonprofit battalion search and rescue.
On a Saturday in May, nine volunteers met Carpenter and Holman at the Loves Truck stop as temperatures rose towards 90 degrees. They wore fluorescent orange and yellow shaded hats. They prepared the radio, turned on the GPS tracking app on their phones for safety, and mapped the terrain they covered.
“It’s a straight open cemetery,” Holman said of the 10 x 20-mile section of the border that he’s been covering little by little since late 2023.
Mary Mackay, a teacher at a local school, volunteered at Carpenter for the first time that day.
“Emotionally, it was more than I thought,” she later told USA Today. “You feel ready to see your body, but then you actually see it and realize that it’s a real person with a backstory and family, wishes and dreams. And it all ended alone in the desert.”
The search for immigrants in New Mexico state battalions follows in the footsteps of other volunteer teams working in deadly stretches in Arizona and California. Search volunteers usually try to comb through border patrols and areas that local law enforcement may have missed.
Volunteers don’t touch bones, said Carpenter, a former university administrator. They mark the site with brightly colored tape tied to the brush. They alert local law enforcement in the hopes that they will record accurate locations and start collecting remaining bones.
Sometimes they do. That’s not often, Carpenter said.
Animals and winds sometimes scatter bodies before volunteers or officials reach them. Still, she said, each one is important to identify missing immigrants. A missing bone can hold a clue.
“It takes time and effort to work on a wider circle around the site to identify everything,” Carpenter said. “But that’s important. Who is the family that doesn’t want all the bodies of the family to recover?”
Lauren Villagran can be accessed at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
