Bodies Pile Up on Tex-Mex Border as Immigrants Adopt New Routes Into US Associated Press
go to original September 25, 2013

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

FALFURRIAS, Tex. — By the time the woman perished, she had probably slogged 25 miles through dry ranch lands in her quest to enter the United States. She was found just feet from a highway where she might have been picked up and taken to Houston with other migrants making the same journey.

Not long ago, her body would have been taken to a funeral home for a cursory attempt at identification, then buried in this town an hour north of the Mexico border under a sign reading “unknown female.”

Her death, probably from hypothermia, is part of a mounting body count that has overwhelmed the sparsely populated Brooks County, providing further evidence that immigrants are shifting their migration routes away from the well-worn paths into Arizona and instead crossing into deep southern Texas. The changing patterns have put an extra burden on local governments with limited experience in such matters and even fewer financial resources.

“There are some counties that have the economic wherewithal to take on these issues, and there are other counties that just don’t have any money, so that puts them into a real bad bind,” said Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, coordinator of the Associated Press at the University of Arizona, which researches immigration issues.

But Brooks County is trying to step up to the challenge. Now, all newly recovered bodies and skeletal remains of people suspected of being immigrants will travel 90 miles to nearby Webb County for autopsies, DNA sampling and more intense efforts at identification.

Read the rest at The New York Times

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