Amerika Garcia Grewal has lived in Eagle Pass, Texas, all her life. She volunteers for Operation Identification, an initiative that aims to identify the bodies of migrants found along the border between the United States and Mexico.
Notifying loved ones back home and, if feasible, repatriating the remains are the goals.
As she described her job, which involves taking off clothes to check for any identifying markers, such as tattoos, Grewal stated, “The body keeps the score.”
In 2013, Texas State University established Operation ID, which uses volunteers and students to help border counties that are facing a backlog of bodies.
The remains of migrants who may drown in the Rio Grande or die from exposure are frequently interred in county cemeteries, or in Maverick County’s instance, occasionally kept in a mobile morgue. During the pandemic, the refrigerated trailer was initially utilized to house the excess number of COVID-19 victims.
Because the remains may be in different stages of decomposition when they are discovered, the process necessitates specific forensic analysis expertise. Every body is meticulously inspected and recorded. Photographs are taken of scars, tattoos, and other distinguishing features. Both bone samples and fingerprints are collected for DNA analysis. Personal belongings like backpacks, clothes, and jewelry are also noted as hints as to the identity or origin of the individual.
It’s really personal. It’s really heartwarming. According to Grewal, there is a hope that this necklace, this sense of belonging, will help us link this person with their loved ones.
Courtney Coffey Siegert, a postdoctoral scholar at Texas State University and an Operation ID team leader overseeing the field work, said the study is ongoing.
It’s concerning that we’ve observed an increase in fatalities in many places that have never seen this before, she said.
In addition to having limited space to hold the remains, only two Texas border counties—out of the more than 1200 miles along the state’s border—have medical examiners on staff to conduct death investigations.
According to Siegert, there are currently too many fatalities and insufficient forensic services in the area to adequately handle this magnitude of a mass catastrophe.
By preparing civilian volunteers and other county authorities, such as justices of the peace, to perform the forensic work, Operation ID helps close that gap.
Judge Ramsey English Cant of Maverick County stated, “I believe that we would have been in a situation where we would have truly been at a greater emergency if it hadn’t been for Operation ID.”
The community is concerned about whether President-elect Donald Trump’s threats of mass deportations and future immigration restrictions will encourage more migrants to attempt to cross the U.S. border before he takes office, according to Operation ID coordinators and volunteers, even though the number of illegal border crossing attempts has decreased to its lowest level since President Joe Biden took office as of September.
In the more than 600 cases Operation ID has taken on, it has made almost 200 identifications. The Justice Department provides financing for the project, while Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which involves the deployment of Texas National Guard personnel to guard the southern border, provides funding for the services in each county.
Still unidentified remains are treated to remove any soft tissue and washed clean down to the bone at the San Marcos lab of Operation ID. After that, the skeletal remains are inspected for any further forensic hints that might offer more details, such previous dental or medical procedures. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, is an online database that catalogs photographs of personal belongings. To find out if they recognize any items, families can search the website. Everything is then labelled with an identification number and put in a box. According to Siegert, the cases are frequently reopened.
We’re actively looking for ways to resurrect some of our older cases, where DNA has been submitted to every analysis facility and we have yet to receive a hit. That doesn’t imply that there aren’t still families searching for solutions. Thus, we continue to work.
The effort to convert those identification numbers into names is ongoing. “We’re doing it for the living,” Grewal continued. We’re doing this so that the families who are left without closure—who don’t know what happened to their father, mother, brother, or sister—know where they are and that someone genuinely cared about them.
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