With rise in border migrant deaths, forensic volunteers and students work to identify remains

Amerika Garcia Grewal is a lifelong resident of Eagle Pass, Texas, and a volunteer with Operation Identification, a project that works to identify the bodies of migrants discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border. 

The hope is to notify loved ones in their home countries and when possible, repatriate the remains. 

“The body keeps the score,” Grewal said, as she explained her work, which includes removing clothing “to look for any identifying marks,” including tattoos. 

Operation ID was formed at Texas State University in 2013 and uses both students and volunteers to aid border counties that have found themselves with a backlog of bodies. 

Remains of migrants who might die from exposure or by drowning in the Rio Grande are often buried in county cemeteries or in the case of Maverick County, sometimes stored in a mobile morgue.  The refrigerated trailer was originally used during the pandemic to hold the overflow of Covid victims. 

The work requires specialized training in forensic analysis, given that the bodies can be in varying stages of decomposition when they’re found.  Each corpse is carefully examined and documented.  Tattoos, scars and other identifying characteristics are photographed.  Fingerprints are taken, as well as bone samples, to be used for DNA analysis.  Personal items such as jewelry, clothing and backpacks are also recorded as clues to who the person might be or where the person came from.

“It’s very intimate.  It’s very touching. And there’s this hope that, you know, maybe this necklace, maybe this, you know, belonging, will help us connect this person to the people who love them,” Grewal said.

The work is constant, according to Courtney Coffey Siegert, a Texas State University postdoctoral scholar and an Operation ID team leader who supervises the field work.  

“We’ve seen the deaths increasing in different areas that have never experienced this before and that’s alarming,” she said. 

Not only are Texas border counties running out of room to store the remains, but only two of them across the more than 1200 miles of the state’s border have medical examiners on hand to handle death investigations.

“It’s gotten to the point where there are just so many people dying and not enough forensic services in the region to really accommodate this level of mass disaster,” Siegert said.  

Operation ID helps to fill that gap by training civilian volunteers and other county officials like justices of the peace to do the forensic work.

“If it would not have been for Operation ID, I think that we would have been placed into a position where we would have really been at a greater emergency,” Maverick County Judge Ramsey English Cantú said. 

Though the number of illegal border crossing attempts  had fallen to their lowest level — since President Joe Biden took office — as of September, Operation ID volunteers and coordinators said there’s  apprehension in the community  over whether President-elect Donald Trump’s threats of mass deportation and future immigration restrictions could potentially drive  more migrants to make a push to cross the U.S. border before he takes office. 

Operation ID has made nearly 200 identifications out of more than 600 cases it has taken on.  The project receives funding from grants provided by the Justice Department, while each county can pay for the services with funding from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, known for sending Texas National Guard troops to secure the southern border. 

Back at Operation ID’s lab in San Marcos, still unidentified remains are processed to remove any soft tissue and scrubbed clean down to the bone.  The skeletal remains are then examined for even more forensic clues such as past medical procedures or dental work that could provide additional information.  Photos of personal effects are catalogued online through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System or NamUs.  Families can search the site to see if they recognize any belongings. Finally, everything is placed in a box and labeled with an identification number.  Siegert says the cases are often revisited. 

“We’re actively searching out ways to reinvigorate some of the older cases that we’ve had where DNA has been submitted to all of the places it’s been analyzed, and we still have no hit.  That doesn’t mean that there’s not family out there still looking for answers. So we keep working.”

The work constantly goes on in hopes of turning those identification numbers into names. Grewal adding, “We’re doing it for the living. We’re doing it so you know, the families that don’t have closure, that don’t know what’s happened to their brother, their sister, their mother, their father, that they know where they are and that somebody cared about them.”