At Arizona's border morgue, illegal immigrant bodies keep coming

In the past 15 years, at least 5,513 migrants have been found dead along the 1,954-mile border with Mexico, including 463 in fiscal year 2012, the Border Patrol reports. The Tucson sector, which since 2001 has accounted for more migrant deaths than any other Border Patrol sector, located 177 bodies in the last fiscal year. Texas’ Rio Grande Valley saw the greatest jump in bodies found: 150 last year compared with 66 in 2011. In that state, migrants cross the Rio Grande, catch a ride north and then hike for days on vast ranches in Brooks County to avoid a highway checkpoint. The county has no medical examiner and does not test DNA of deceased migrants, who are buried in unnamed graves at a cemetery in the town of Falfurrias. The situation is similar to what Pima County authorities faced when Arizona became the busiest corridor for illegal crossings more than a decade ago. At the Pima County Forensic Science Center on The University of Arizona Medical Center campus, file cabinets hold dossiers on more than 700 unidentified corpses discovered since the late 1990s. Many bodies were too decomposed to identify. Others carried false identification or no identification. Coolers for 262 corpses and refrigerated trucks on call with room for another 45 give the nation’s 30th-largest city one of the country’s largest morgues. “Nobody has this problem. Nobody,” said Dr. Gregory Hess, Pima County medical examiner. His office rules on more than 2,000 deaths a year by murder, suicide and other causes, but migrants pose the biggest challenge because they so often cannot be identified. Since 2001, the office has examined the bodies of 2,067 border crossers, the vast majority of them Mexican men...more