U.S.-Mexico Border: Unmarked Graves and Thousands Missing

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And turning to a new documentary now that’s exposing harsh realities on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Missing in Brooks County” focuses on the Texas town where thousands of migrants are missing, presumed dead. Award-winning director, Jeff Bemiss, and activist, Eddie Canales, join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the growing humanitarian crisis.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN: Thanks so much. Jeff Bemiss, Eddie Canales, thanks for joining us. Eddie, I want to start with you. What does your organization do, the Center — the South Texas Center for Human Rights? What kind of work do you do on a daily basis?

EDDIE CANALES, FOUNDER, SOUTH TEXAS HUMAN RIGHTS CENTER: The South Texas Human Rights Center, we feel calls that — from families, from Central America, from Mexico, from the United States of their loved ones that have crossed the border and have gone missing. So, we facilitate some rescues, some recoveries, everything that deals with a missing person and how they can — you know, how we can help them facilitate the process to locate that person. And then, if somebody, you know, also has already perished and they are aware of that, we explain the whole process that they have to go through. This past year in Brooks County, there was 119 bodies and skeletal remains recovered in Brooks County alone. You know, so, that’s a — that in itself, you know, it gives you a sense of the humanitarian crisis that we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis. And, of course, we have water stations that are out there, you know, to try to save lives and mitigate the fact that, you know, people are suffering out there. You know, whether it’s cold or super-hot during the summer, we’re constantly, you know, servicing those water stations.

SREENIVASAN: Jeff, Eddie just said that had a number that, I think, would be startling for anybody, that 119 bodies were found in Brooks County just last year alone. Give us a sense of the scale of how bad this problem is.

JEFF BEMISS, CO-DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER, “MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY”: Right. The sheriff of Brooks County, Benny Martinez, I mean, he believes that for every one individual that’s recovered, there’s five that they do not find. One of the reasons is that these tracks of land, these private ranches out in South Texas are so vast. I mean, you know, the King Ranch, for instance, is bigger than Rhode Island. So, a lot of individuals are never found. I think for Lisa Molimot, the co-director and I, it was really shocking to learn that we may be talking about 20,000 individuals since the advent of the policy that’s created this problem. And some organizations such as No More Deaths out of Tucson, Arizona, they published a report last year, they are actually citing 80,000.

SREENIVASAN: And, Jeff, this is not a problem that occurred just under one president or another. I mean, can you trace this policy back as — well, even as far as Clinton, probably before that.

BEMISS: Yes. When you get into immigration, the traditional notions of left and right politics really do flip and mix. The Clinton administration put this policy prevention through deterrence in place, which is most responsible for this crisis, and it’s been in place now for, you know, 27 years, and it’s really become a matter of national security since 9/11. You know, immigration used to be more of a labor and economic issue. And now, it’s a national security issue, and it’s really — there’s an enforcement only mentality and it created the smuggling industry. If you close the safe ports of entry and push people into clandestine crossings, you create value for the smugglers’ services, and that’s really what happened.

SREENIVASAN: I want to share had a clip of the people who are out there trying to catalog and trying to find through DNA who these people might have been and get that word back to their families. Let’s take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. KATE SPRADLEY, BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST, TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY: We realized there was a big problem along the border, and I don’t think anybody realized just how big it was. We were trying to answer the question, how many people have died along the U.S.-Mexico border. You couldn’t answer that. We realized we hardly anything. Will go to county records. Some counties have intelligent (ph) burial records and have records. And what we found is their records are not always accurate and they’re fairly incomplete. We supposed that just about every single individual had to have a death certificate. We got records from vital statistics, but they only date back to 2006, and they are not complete either. We generated ourselves a list of cemeteries in each area. So, we go and we physically walk through the cemeteries looking for unidentifieds. We have physically found about 130 burials. And then, areas where there’s potentially up to 300 more. We’re not even scratching the surface with the three counties we visited.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There’s another cemetery that’s got some unidentified.

DR. SPRADLEY: Oh, really?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

DR. SPRADLEY: What’s — it’s not (INAUDIBLE)?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It’s Latina. And the owners —

DR. SPRADLEY: We haven’t been there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

DR. SPRADLEY: It’s shocking to find that there’s been thousands of people that have died, and we don’t know what happened to them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: Jeff, back to that scale question that we started our conversation with, the fact there are still discoveries of people who have been buried with no identification and that we just accept that.

BEMISS: It is shocking. I mean, in 2014, right before we started making the documentary, Lori Baker from Baylor University in Texas, had a team of students and they were down in Brooks County. They were exhuming the bodies of anonymously buried migrants, and they found — I mean, it was really essentially some kind of a mass grave, a co-mingled grave. There were no records, no DNA had been taken, you know, bodies were mixed in trash bags, and it was a scandal. But what they found out is that the law was really not being followed. When you bury someone in an unmarked grave without taking a DNA sample, not only is it illegal, but you’re essentially closing all doors to the possibility that their family will ever get closure, will ever know what happened to their loved. And so, Kate Spradley, who you saw in the clip, and her students at Texas University, I mean, they are trying to locate and exhume and identify every anonymously buried migrant in South Texas. And, I mean, Kate will tell you, I mean, she doesn’t think she will ever complete that work. I mean, that’s how extensive the burials are.

CANALES: We’ve had 200 — over 220 bodies or exhumed graves from Brooks County, the burial park right there. And this is a project, you know, that we’re part of, a forensic party coalition. I work with Dr. Spradley on a daily basis. The Cemetery Mapping Project is something that we undertook as a project, and we’ve gone through about seven counties already. So, the process is ongoing in terms of the unidentified graves that exist all over South Texas is daunting as it may be, who knows how many bodies are — you know, that are buried and unidentified, and that’s what we’re trying to find.

SREENIVASAN: Jeff, you also tried to personalize this by following families who are searching for their loved ones, that they know made it across the border but then nothing more. Tell us a little bit about them.

BEMISS: Well, one of the families is the family of the missing person Homero Roman. And we actually met them because they were searching for information online and they were using search terms like missing in Brooks County, and we had a little website up in our filming. So, we connected on the phone and then, sat down with them in person in Texas maybe a week later, and we actually proposed participating in the film, and they went and had a family meeting and came back and very bravely said yes. They would like the story of what happened to their brother, Homero, to be a part of the film.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE CHINOS, HOMERO’S SISTER-IN-LAW: We don’t know where he’s at, but I still talk like he’s still here. If he’s alive, maybe somebody can recognize his picture and let us know. And if he’s dead, we just want a place where we can go to leave some flowers but to know that he’s there. We just want that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: Eddie, I want you to describe what the conditions are that migrants face when they get across the Texas border and they are in Brooks County and they are trying to circumvent that checkpoint, what are they experiencing?

CANALES: All right. We’ve got several processes. Once you get to the border in Mexico, you’re going to — you’re kind of turned over to somebody that’s going help you cross the river and they make it through the river there. And then, once you cross the river, you’re being turned over somebody. Now, this is individuals that are trying to make it all the way up to their destination point. A lot of people are realizing now that it doesn’t — it’s not serving them well to turn themselves in, you know. And then, once they are turned over to somebody that’s going to guide them through the — that they may go to a safe house for a little bit but then, they will be staged into the brush. Well, you know, at this point right now, you’re encountering a lot of cold, hypothermia, that’s really something that’s present right now. But if you don’t have the right shoes, if you don’t have the right clothing, if you don’t have water, and what’s really critical is the water situation because it could be a three-day trail, you know, walk, or it could be — you know, it depends on how close you get to circumventing the checkpoint. It is harsh. It is deadly. And people are suffering and people are dying.

SREENIVASAN: Eddie, there are people along the border, some ranchers, that do help in some of the work that you’re doing by allowing you to have water stations on their land and giving you access when you need to search for someone. And then, there are also ranchers who don’t see it the same way as you, who see this in a different sort of national security context. They are concerned that this is a gaping hole, that there are severe threats, and there are some who form different kinds of vigilante organizations, who set up watches, and I want to play a clip here to — just to show our audience.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can see this thing for three miles. This is what they use in Afghanistan. What they used in Iraq.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is Interstate Highway 281. This is a caliche road into one of the main ranches down here, and illegal aliens will be coming up through this area and we’ll be covering a wide swath with a relatively thin net but with good visibility and with night vision equipment.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Last month, 12 were running right up the fence. When they got to the cattle guard, they turned and went across. That could be sleeper cell.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Or the other thing, is just use them as cartel soldiers within, you know —

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: — enforcers within the United States.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And — yes. Cartel enforcers is definitely a possibility. You know, (INAUDIBLE) army. You know, I know this. If you’ve never thought of these things before, this sounds way far out, but I’m not at all convinced that they are not the enemy countries in (INAUDIBLE) that are going to attempt to overtake us internally.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: Eddie, you’ve tried to meet some these people before. Do you try to have a conversation with them about what they think?

CANALES: In the beginning of my presence there in (INAUDIBLE), Texas, in Brooks County, I attended the border patrol meetings that they had on a monthly basis. It was a liaison meeting with all the ranchers. And that’s how I began to make the build relationships and make connections. You know, I would extend my hand out as I introduce myself and say, hey, you know, I’m the guy that’s starting to place water stations out there. You know, could you — do you think that you could, you know, entertain and have a water station? It could, you know, prevent them from coming to your door if we place a water station somewhere else in your property. And, you know, so it took — you know, it was painful because a lot of different opinions were taking place. Fairly some of them fairly raunchy and racist in terms of that aspect of it and how people are reacting. But at the most time, most people in Brooks County are — have the feeling that we should not have death. We should — people should not die. And there’s, you know, compassionate perspective regarding, you know, having access to some of these ranches.

SREENIVASAN: You had access to members of the border patrol, and you were able to ride along with them and see the work that they are doing and what they are going through as well. And I want to play a quick clip of that quick clip of that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In this ranch, as you can see, everything looks the same. So, a person can say, well, we’re waiting by a fence and the fence is the same three miles back in right here. So, for us to find that one place is very, very hard. And this is the third one in a week. It used to get to me. So, now, it kind of — you know, we don’t call them — we call them what we call them bodies. If you start calling them people then it starts getting to you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: You know, what struck me about that is that he is self-aware enough to know what is causing his pain, and at the same time, his solution is really almost to sort of clinically dehumanize what he has to go through every day.

BEMISS: Yes. Look, I think really that moment says as much about the policy that he has to enforce as it does about him. We met a lot of border patrol agents that were suffering PTSD from this sort of work. What the border patrol has done is instead of changing the tactics, which are really causing these to put people in mortal danger, they have formed another division, and he was a part of that division called Border Star, which is their search-and-rescue division. But what you end up with is a policy that’s really in conflict with itself. It’s like the right-hand strikes and the left-hand saves. So, his job is to save people who are in jeopardy from the border patrol’s own tactics. So, instead of changing their tactics, that was their solution. And as you can see, you know, he is struggling emotionally to cope with his job, which I think is a red flag that something has gone very wrong somewhere with the way we’re administering our border.

SREENIVASAN: The film is called “Missing in Brooks County.” Eddie Canales from the South Texas Human Rights Center, and filmmaker, Jeff Bemiss, thank you both.

BEMISS: Thank you, Hari.

CANALES: Thank you very much.