The bodies are typically found by accident. A decaying corpse drying out in the Texas sun, stumbled upon by a hunter or ranch hand. A call might be placed to the sheriff’s office or the remains might be loaded into the back of a pickup truck. Often, they will be delivered to a rural cemetery where paperwork may or may not be filled out before they are lowered into a hole in some unclaimed corner of the graveyard. Sometimes, a tin marker bearing words such as “unidentified male” or “unidentified female” will be left to signal the deceased’s final resting place, but often not. And so it has been for years in Brooks County, an expanse of sprawling ranches some 75 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than 550 dead migrants have been found since 2009, marking the highest total for any county in the state.
From left, Texas State University students Shelby Garza, Audrey Schaefer, and Kari Helgeson remove an unidentified victim’s remains from a grave in Falfurrias, Texas, on Jan. 5, 2017, as part of Operation Identification, an initiative to identify and repatriate the remains of migrants recovered along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Photo: Robert Shults
Robert Shults, a photographer based in Austin, Texas, did not set out to document his state’s crisis of unclaimed dead, at least not directly. Shults’s professional area of interest is science and scientists at work; it’s what first brought him to the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State in the winter of 2015 and kept him coming back in the year that followed. Shults’s idea was to assume the role of a “participant observer,” visiting with graduate students each day, sitting in on their classes, accompanying them as they gathered donations for their program, and watching as they learned to untangle complex forensics cases, all the while snapping photos.
The star of Texas State’s forensic anthropology program, where Shults spent much of his year, is a 26-acre outdoor laboratory that allows students to study donated human bodies in various stages of decomposition. Only a handful of such facilities exist in the world and the lab here is the largest. Officially known as the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, it is sometimes referred to simply as the “body farm.” Predictably, the decomposition lab, with its ready-made imagery, has received extensive coverage in the press since its 2008 opening. “It’s the thing that gets most of the attention,” Shults told The Intercept. Unfortunately, he added, those accounts have often rung hollow. “One of the things that gets missed is the mission, is the reason why,” Shults said. “Why does this university take donors’ bodies, set them outside, and watch them decompose?”
Clothing and personal effects recovered with the remains of unidentified suspected migrants dry on the floor of Texas State University’s Osteological Research and Processing Laboratory in San Marcos, Texas, Jan. 14, 2016. These items will be catalogued and investigated as part of Operation Identification.
Photo: Robert Shults
Camera in hand, Shults set out to examine those questions, ultimately finding the answers he was searching for in another component of the university’s forensic anthropology program, an initiative known as Operation Identification. The program began in 2013 amid a swirl of grassroots organizing and the exhumation of more than 50 unidentified human remains from a rural graveyard named Sacred Heart. Discovered by a team of student researchers and anthropologists from Baylor University and the University of Indianapolis, many of the bodies pulled from the ground at Sacred Heart had been buried together, five at a time. Some were found in coffins, others were not. One migrant’s remains were buried in a milk crate.
In the years after researchers first broke ground, exhumations of Sacred Heart have yielded nearly 200 sets of unidentified remains. Since that time, Dr. Kate Spradley, a professor at Texas State and founder of OpID, along with her colleagues and students, has made it her mission to push back against the institutional shortcomings across south Texas exemplified by the Sacred Heart exhumations. Adopting a “biocultural approach” that fuses “osteological, dental, isotopic, genetic, and histological analyses,” OpID builds biological profiles of unidentified remains in hopes of reuniting the dead with their families. Much of the work focuses specifically on the “long-term dead,” those buried years ago with little to no attempts at identification or record-keeping. The most difficult part of the job, Spradley told The Intercept, is simply finding the bodies. “That is the hardest part, figuring out where they’re buried,” she said. “It’s all memory recall. It’s going into the community and asking the people who were there at the funeral home that picked up the bodies, the people who worked for the county that dug the burials — ‘Do you remember where these burials were?’”
“Even if they write down, ‘Oh, they’re buried in the cemetery,’ they don’t know where in the cemetery and the temporary markers will fail after six months,” Spradley explained. “So it really takes a lot of work. We just went to Rio Grande City to perform exhumations there and it took almost two years of work to figure out where the 13 individuals were that we exhumed.”
Since its founding, OpID has completed roughly 120 biological profiles, identified 26 sets of remains, and repatriated approximately 12 people to their home countries. The numbers are a reflection of painstaking work but only hint at the scale of the unexamined deaths on the border. Over the last decade and a half, Border Patrol agents have documented more than 6,000 migrant deaths in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. As the New York Times noted in January, that means “more people have died illegally crossing the southwestern border of the United States in the last 16 years than were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined.” In Brooks County alone, Sheriff Urbino “Benny” Martinez has estimated that for every body found in his area, there are five that are not. “The short answer is we will never know,” Spradley said of the true toll, adding that all available evidence indicates current Border Patrol tallies are a “gross underestimation” of the scope of the problem.
For Shults, embedding with OpID brought the work of Texas State’s famous decomposition lab, and his representations of it, full circle — educational opportunities provided in the decomposition lab make the critical work of OpID that much better. “OpID became this really important part of where it feels like this is the why,” he explained. “To give victims their names back, to speak for them when they can’t speak any longer, and hopefully send them back to their families with some dignity restored.”
Shults, who describes himself as a “well-informed Texan,” said that while he follows the immigration debate in his state, stepping into OpID’s world gave him new insight. He recalls joining student researchers on a trip to a south Texas cemetery last winter, where an exhumation of six grave sites uncovered more than two dozen unidentified bodies. In another example of how little attention is paid to remains found in the desert, Shults described an incident in which researchers exhumed a marked grave said to belong to an “unidentified individual” only to find it contained a body bag with no human remains. “That body bag in that grave that had been marked there in that cemetery for years didn’t even have a single human bone in it,” Shults said. “Essentially what had happened, investigators figure out, was a rancher found a pile of bones and a piece of clothing nearby, assumed it was person, brought it to the sheriff’s department, sheriff’s department said, ‘Oh, unidentified person,’ buried it, but so little investigation was done that no one even noticed that it was a deer.”
Texas State University associate professor Dr. Daniel Wescott, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center, digs in a suspected clandestine burial, while postdoctoral researcher Dr. Timothy Gocha, left, and graduate student Courtney Siegert, right, sift the excavated dirt for human remains at a crime scene in Austin, Texas, July 20, 2016.
Photo: Robert Shults
“No one even bothered to look closely enough to say, ‘Are these bones even human?’” he said. “No one looked at all. No one did anything.”
Immersing himself in a world of corpses and death, Shults said he was often asked how he was handling it all. In the case of the decomposition lab, he explained, he quickly grew accustomed to what he was seeing. “For me, and I think for me and most of the people that work there, it’s actually really easy to get used to,” he said. After all, he added, the donors are willing participants in the program. The migrants who come to OpID, however, are another matter. “The donors come in essentially with nothing. They come in usually naked, at most they might have a hospital gown. They don’t have any personal effects because their family has probably taken them or the funeral home has returned them or that sort of thing, and so they’re usually anonymized from the time they come in,” he said. “The OpID bodies, on the other hand, come in very much as people, and people that care deeply. They come in with the things that mattered to them the most. Whatever personal effects they chose to take, it had to be very minimal in order to safely get across the desert, so they selected what was valuable, and we see a lot of prayer cards, letters to and from family members, things that are very clearly intended as gifts for family members and children.”
“When presented with the scale of OpID’s bodies, essentially looking in the evidence and just seeing stacks of hundreds of skeletons, and certainly with the personal effects and the clothing — that to me was much harder to take than anything that I saw at the decomposition lab,” Shults explained. “And it’s never gotten easier.”
Shults is convinced that one day, in the course of exhuming graves and identifying corpses, the body of someone who is not a migrant will be found. “It’s just going to happen,” he said. “It’s going to be a hiking accident or something like that.” He believes the American public might then understand how broken the system in Texas is and, he suggests, change could come because the injustice of tossing a person in a grave without attempting to identify who they are will be plain to see. But while any progress in identifying bodies found in the Texas desert would be welcome, Shults said, the subtext of such a reaction would also underscore an ugly truth about the slow-motion disaster on the border right now; that in the minds of many, “The migrants somehow have family members who are grieving less.”
Graduate student Alejandra Ayala Bas rests on her shovel while burying a donor’s body at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in San Marcos, Texas, Nov. 18, 2015. Researchers will compare the vegetation growth atop this grave to that from a nearby plot containing only backfill, refining methods for identifying clandestine burial sites. This image has been digitally altered to preserve the donor’s confidentiality.
Photo: Robert Shults
Top photo: Graduate student Devora Gleiber photographs a donor’s body during human decomposition research at Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in San Marcos, Texas, May 12, 2016.
Was it an editorial decision to publish these pics and this article on black background ? Because I’m afraid its made it incredibly uncomfortable to read and even look at. Which is a pity.
I have been looking at the granny surreal quality of the photographs, did you use infrared film or similar Photoshop technique? http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/infrared-photo/
In any case a ghostly unworldly quality very effective for the grim subject matter.
Bravo Intercept. Haven’t seen such a moving piece from you guys in a while.
i want all persons who came to the US illegally since 1975, OUT OF MY COUNTRY.
Look at it this way, besides polluting the economy with labor dilution, besides becoming a racist and condemning others to do jobs you are unwilling to do, the invasion drains the offending country of people who want to change and should change the country they left – like mexico. After these “wanna better life” sorts evacuate their country – like mexico – GUESS WHAT THAT LEAVES IN MEXICO? A country ruled by drug cartels, murderers, dictators and their political whores.
PS – mexico has an agenda, occupy and gain control of US territory one town at a time. Get a clue.
The US is partly responsible as to why many of these “foreigners” native country is in disarray. Trying to deflect the United States’s role in all this is irresponsible. COMPLETE FAILURE of the drug wars that only made the situation worse in the US and Latin America. If you cannot see the US’s villainous role in all of the immigrant/migrant issues then your argument falls on its face.
I think there’s a group of people who feel the same, except change that year to 1492.
WOW. I bet you voted Trump, only someone as dense as you appear to be would be so candid about their colossal ignorance.
It is amazing how ignorant you are.
Every day I wake up to the fact that Spanish culture fucked up half of the continent and that I should feel responsible for that, because, not coming from that culture , I was certainly responsible, thus I should throw in some $$$ of mine, just to make them happy.
LOL!
An obvious truth brilliantly put.
Southwest Texas State University is our party school.
I hadn’t realized that Texas was such a bastion of socialism. Each morning, they gather up the bodies and bury them. In laissez-faire economies, you have to spend most of your time negotiating your way around and over the dead bodies. This results in reduced productivity. Thank you, Texas, for proving that socialism works.
the cultural differences are IRRECONCILABLE
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/01/in-texas-the-bodies-of-migrants-who-perished-in-the-desert-provide-clues-to-the-living/?comments=1#comment-421117
Moving article; beautifully displayed.
Seconded.
These are migrations of opportunism and greed. They were safer at home and their living costs are also lower at home.
Where did your ancestors migrate from, Carol? Would you describe them as opportunistic and greedy?
Yes I would. Migrants are by nature aggressive, Type-A go-getters.
America first. I wish the media would focus on the Americans who are suffering and dying instead of foreigners. How about spending your time researching a story on the horrid conditions in prisons? We’ve got Americans getting arrested for marijuana every few seconds and we have to listen to endless immigrant stories.
You’re being callous, Bryan. Is a human being from one country more valuable than another? All the issues you raise are of course valid and demand outrage and attention. But this article shines much needed light on less known issue that equally demands outrage and attention.
Liliana Segura writes wonderful articles on the abusive justice system via specific tragic prison stories HERE.
Sad & grimm, well written article. The B & W photos and white text adds to the sadness
Well said B&W is effective for the life or death issue. a grim topic in a grim and beautiful landscape. Better policy and better law could avoid desperate dangerous effort in an unforgiving country. Miscalculate water or your strength and you are lost.
No kidding, that which was revealed about the living is the cultural differences between those who prefer and strive for a democracy of equality for life which reveals the difference between American culture and Mexican culture . Those cultural differences are plain as day by this simple example where a person with residency in the US committed crimes in mexico had to be tried in the US – and the crime in the culture is quite shocking –
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4652938/Mexican-cartel-leader-chopped-girl-6-jailed.html
or maybe you can look up for the mass graves of the unburied dead murdered by the mexican culturalists who kill women for jobs and unwilling slaves.
It’s not a crime to want to have a better life for you and your family and live in a safe place.
You are absolutely right Tom. It is not.
The problem is that (entirely legitimate legal considerations aside) it is a physical and practical impossibility for everyone who lives in a less affluent country to migrate into a more affluent country, simply to improve their standard of living and perceived safety of environment.
In the case of the US, all those who live in poverty in South America cannot immigrate into the US.
In the case of Europe, all those who live in poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot cross the Mediterranean and be accommodated in European countries. Add pressure from the Middle East and you get the mess currently seen.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
What is far worse is that the migration denudes the countries where the immigrants are coming from of one of the most basic things they need to improve their own situation – human capital. It will inevitably be the case that those with ambition, drive and possibly education will try to move first, and these are the people who their own countries can least afford to loose if they are to improve the situation within their own borders.
As an example, I am from the UK. Around 30% of nurses and doctors are imported (trained, intelligent, skilled and highly qualified) labour from foreign countries. I actually regard their employment as immoral on two levels. Firstly we should be training and employing our own citizens first before importing foreign labour. Secondly, and more to the point, by their presence in the UK, we are depriving the home countries of these staff of precisely the human resource required to improve the quality of life of the rest of the inhabitants of the source country. And in doing so encouraging more people to leave their own homes to come to the UK to take advantage of free health care, paid for by the UK tax payer and delivered potentially by their own countrymen.
That approach is insanity and utterly sustainable on many levels.
What is really needed is not open borders and a ‘take all who come’ approach. What is really needed is a two pronged approach of discouraging immigrants, whilst at the same time seriously investing properly targeted foreign aid and material and training support into the countries in need of it. This will enable those countries to, over time, improve their own standard of living, safety and security, so that their citizens don’t want to leave home in the first place, instead choosing to remain to contribute to the improvement of their own home.
We might be good at doing the discouragement bit, but we fall rather short on the second aspect. That and the fact that we appear to be rather good at bombing the crap out of those countries infrastructure but rather less good at fixing again afterwards.
And yes. This white on black theme is bloody awful and hurting my eyes.
Yes, and you can stand for the betterment of your life, your children , your home your nation, like the many, the Berta Caceres and millions, or you can try for the easy readymade way.
I don’t disagree with that sentiment either.
From the point of view of the individual, it is a damn sight easier to burn your papers and hop on a rubber boat to cross the Mediterranean before sticking your hand out and saying the one word you know in English – asylum. Particularly if, in reality, you have absolutely nothing to offer the new country other than a lifelong burden on the taxpayer and the ‘right’ to then bring your entire extended family once you are there.
That really is my point. We need to be actively discouraging this behavior. However it is critical that we at the same time set the conditions that will result in the individual not feeling the need to leave his home. The only thing that will achieve this is improving the standard of living in the countries of departure such that the motivation to leave is not there. Simple handouts will not do it. These have not worked for decades. What will work is training and infrastructure development. None of that comes cheap, but the social costs (to everyone) will in the long run be a lot less than having the current unsustainable wave of migration into Europe, not to mention the human toll.
Im not trying to comment about Europe, because this piece is about Texas. You didnt bring up remitance payments, or however ya spell that, cultural variety, such as restaraunts, nor knowledge brought from other parts of the world. As an example of this, not pertaining to the hospital industry, the city I grew up and live in was a falling down mess of beautiful brick buildings that no one knew how to effectively rebuild. The unions didnt teach restoration, what with all the Walmarts and subdivisions to sprawl on out. We learned by watching the Bosnians do it. It sucks what happened over there. But we’re glad they’re here, along with all of our immigrant communities. This is the melting pot afterall. This whole country would suck without immigrants like the places that are hostile to them do and have. I can only hope whatever hick part of this country you long for or reside in has fishnchips
“This whole country would suck without immigrants like the places that are hostile to them do and have. I can only hope whatever hick part of this country you long for or reside in has fishnchips”
Mate. With respect. Did you actually read a word I said? If so, did you engage your brain before you started typing?
Europe or Texas, it doesn’t matter. There is one basic driver pushing people to illegally migrate across a border from place a) to place b). That is that they perceive (correctly) that their (and their immediate families) personal situation will be appreciably better in place b) than it was in place a). This is one of the fundamental principles driving migration, human or animal.
I don’t blame the individual migrant in the least. I thought I made that really clear. As it happens I am also an economic migrant who left the UK and went somewhere else for better conditions. The difference it that I did it legally within the immigration system of the country I went to, as opposed to hopping on a boat or walking across a desert. I am assuming based on your user-name and current location that you or your family also left your home and went somewhere else for the same reason. I do still demonstrate the point though that a skilled individual is now lost to his home country because he has found a better place elsewhere which now benefits from his professional skill set, to the disadvantage of the home country.
Nothing you say though alters the basic point that the solution to preventing unsustainable migration (legal or otherwise) from place a) to place b) is to make place a) as good a place to live as place b). The West’s foreign policy is not achieving this and it absolutely needs to change whether place a) is Mexico or Libya, Peru or Sudan.
As for the “cultural variety” argument I have always found that a bit fatuous. Firstly we already have all the Indian restaurants and kebab shops which we can cope with in the UK at the moment (and some besides) and we don’t need to import the population of half the Indian sub-continent or Turkey into the UK to ‘improve’ upon the current situation. I can get my Tikka Massala perfectly well already, thank you without a further 250,000 immigrants landing annually on a small island which is already over-full. Also, frankly if I could wind the clock back and exchange a significant amount of the supposed ‘cultural enrichment’ for a situation in which I can walk across Westminster Bridge without having to check over my shoulder for an Irate Islamist, or indeed buy a house at an affordable price without the current pressure on the housing stock, I would probably happily swap one for the other. So on that single point we will have to agree to differ.
I do however like your example of the Bosinian-led restoration of your brick buildings because (thank you) it underlines precisely what I was saying about foreign medical workers in the UK – you have just provided another example of what I was saying. By allowing the skilled Bosnian tradesman who you refer to into the US on a permanent basis you have generously deprived Bosnia of exactly the sort of people that they need to rebuild their own country after NATO (read the US) finished blowing the shit out of it and allow it to modernise into the future. This is exactly the same as the UK and the medical workers example. What you could and morally should have done is awarded restoration contracts to Bosnian companies, granting temporary work visas to bring skilled workers over for the duration of the project. That would have fixed your buildings, given a lot of money and experience to Bosnian workers to take home when the work was completed, and handed significant amount of money to the Bosinan economy to allow them to restore and improve their own infrastructure. The workers would then be personally better off in Bosina and would be able to contribute to improving the situation in their own country for the benefit of all concerned. Unfortunately following your model, the lot of the Bosnian worker has certainly improved immediately (to be sure), but all that you have actually done in the long term is strip out skilled workers from another country which desperately needs them. And guaranteed that migrants will continue to flow from place a) to place b).
So well done for that. This is a perfect illustration of precisely what we the West are doing wrong and it lacks vision, morality and sustainability for all concerned.
Paddy July 1 2017, 9:16 p.m.
“I can only hope whatever hick part of this country you long for or reside in has fishnchips”
I wasn’t going to rise to this trollbait, and thought I would constrain my answer to the slightly more reasoned one like the one I made above.
Then I went away and thought ‘fuck it’ and I came back.
The ‘hick part’ of the UK that I come from is central London. Specifically Tower Hamlets. When I was growing up there it was a pleasantly diverse and multicultural, predominantly working class area but certainly not ‘hick’ by any definition of the word.
Unfortunately it is now widely known as “The Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets” and is the administrative centre of Londonistan. It is a bi-cultural hell hole populated in one ghetto by tooled up Somalis who (statistically) have managed to make London the knife crime and stabbing capital of Europe. On a positive note they do for the most part roam around in gangs intent on stabbing each other, rather than any other Londoner who is trying to go about their lives. The other ghettoised group live in Little Riyadh. I can’t tell you much about them really because they all dress head to foot in black, wear face coverings and don’t seem to feel any need to learn to speak English, interact with wider society beyond going to the benefits office, or abide by our legal system.
It wasn’t ‘a hick’ part of the country before, but it certainly is now after 30 years of enlightened immigration policy.
And the annoying thing? I can’t even get a decent curry there anymore (let alone a curry and a pint of lager) much less ‘fishnchips’. So I got out and went somewhere else.
So whilst I am genuinely interested to hear any reasoned points of view that you may have, please don’t presume to patronise me. Also, if you are serious that the only benefit of multiculturalism that you can immediately think of is ‘restaurants’ you seriously need to take a reality check.
So, in conclusion:
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Alistair, you’re ignoring that those countries are impoverished (and the US enriched) through American policies every bit as ‘fair’ as the ones that kept Black Americans impoverished in the Jim Crow states.
Absolutely right. I am not ‘ignoring’ anything. We are in violent agreement.
The point is that it the failure over decades of our (the developed world’s) foreign policy and collective responsibility to help the developing world bring its standard of living up to what we enjoy in the West.
What you say underscores this point.
Argentina? Mexico? Venezuela? Brazil (champion exporter of economic greed migration)? Ecuador?
The Americans keeping them down?
Not crazy about the white text on black background.
Some of us weren’t crazy about the black text on white background when the Macintosh first came out. White on black is still perfectly fine IMHO.
Good for you…but it’s not a good idea to dilate your pupils in bright environments, and since most (nearly all) other websites utilize black text on a white background, the eyes must annoyingly readjust every time you read this one article.
Well, if I ever should find myself with the need to dispose of a body, now I know where to leave it…
This work fills a gap in the DNA sampling of all arrestees, permitting better profiling of their relatives going forward…
I trust the 12 repatriated remains have been added to Donald Trump’s deportation count?…
(cf. http://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/ms-13-gang-nonsense/ on the last)
the bodies, piling up. what a grotesque testament.
nice work on the photos and article.