Migrants Are Vanishing Along the US-Mexico Border, and That's Not a Good Thing Roc Morin - VICE News
go to original April 2, 2015

In a rural Texas county, a large number of illegal immigrants are dying before they can complete the journey to what they hoped would be a better life. (NBC News)

We ran out of water. We are very tired. Please keep praying for us.

It was the last of six texts sent by Jerónimo Hernandez from the desert of Brooks County, Texas to his sister Luisa. The series of increasingly desperate messages chronicle the 41-year-old's trek into the United States from Mexico with his best friend, three other migrants, and their "coyote" - a smuggler hired to help them evade border security. It was July 25, 2013.

It had been much easier the first time Hernandez crossed, back in the late 90s. The Mexican national had walked through an immigration checkpoint and spent the following years in Florida as a construction worker with his wife and two sons. In 2007, after a miscarriage plunged his spouse into depression, the family immigrated back to Mexico. Hernandez worked in a warehouse until the summer of 2013, when, for reasons Luisa still does not understand, her brother decided to return to the States.

It was not the same border he remembered. Extensive security enhancements have compelled migrants to risk multi-day hikes through the most remote and desolate stretches of desert where the temperature regularly hits triple digits. As a consequence, the mortality rate has surged. Dr. Kate Spradley, who analyzes migrant remains at Texas State University, equated it to "an airplane crash every month." That's a lot of corpses to deal with, and by many accounts the local authorities are overwhelmed.

In the year prior to Hernandez's crossing, the US Border Patrol reports having recovered the bodies of 463 suspected migrants coming from Mexico. That number however, does not include all those found by local law enforcement. "What's reported could be a gross underestimate," Spradley told me. "Here in Texas, we don't have a tracking system, so we really don't know.

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