James Holeman’s first encounter with the deadly toll that illegal migration takes came in August 2018 on his first patrol with Aguilas del Desierto, a group devoted to rescuing missing migrants.
It’s a gruesome reality for volunteers whose goal is to save lives. They don’t reach everyone in time.
His small group was assigned to scour an area called Growler Valley, about 30 miles from Ajo — his home — and 75 miles from Yuma. They found two sites with human bones that day — 13 individuals desperate enough to brave some of the most unforgiving terrain in the country.
“The desert is very efficient at making people disappear,” Holeman said. “The people that die there often don’t have somebody looking for them, but they still matter.”
More than half the deaths among migrants in the Americas occur in the U.S.-Mexico border region, according to the International Organization for Migration. IOM called it the deadliest land crossing in the world in 2021.
May through September is the hottest and deadliest time of year at the border, according to Pima County Medical Examiner Greg Hess.
The precise toll is unknown. The Department of Homeland Security says 9,520 people have been found dead since 1998 after crossing from Mexico. But many others are never discovered, and the true number is likely much higher.
“Far too many people who made the decision to place their lives into the hands of the criminal organizations have died of dehydration and heat stroke,” the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector deputy chief patrol agent, Justin De La Torre, said in a statement after three bodies were found in a remote area called Sheep Peak last month.
Both the Government Accountability Office and the National Immigration Forum have identified chronic undercounting by Customs and Border Protection.
Hardly any local authorities keep detailed records of migrant deaths in their jurisdictions. One of the few is Pima County, which has registered 64 this year.
With limitations at ports of entry, many migrants trust their lives to smugglers.
Smugglers charge more to escort migrants into the United States near cities, Holeman said. A crossing through the desert means less chance of crossing paths with authorities, though that cheaper alternative comes with huge risk.
Vanessa Savel writes “We support you” on a gallon of water left for migrants. Other messages that volunteers write in Spanish on water bottles include “Good luck” and “Go with the force of God.”
In 2020 Holeman started his own group, Battalion Search and Rescue, one of many such groups that try to find migrants before they succumb to the heat but sometimes stumble across skeletal remains.
“Last year we found 30. This year I anticipate us to find over 50 sites just in the Growler Valley,” he said.
A group called Humane Borders works with Pima County to maintain an online database to help loved ones learn the fate of a missing brother, sister, spouse or child.
“Even if they don’t get identified, get to go home to a family member, or even if they’re just a little red dot on the Humane Borders map, they matter,” Holeman said. “They’re part of the whole story of policies that kill people.”
Border Patrol agents found three bodies on June 26 near Ajo. Other migrants had activated a rescue beacon — one of hundreds scattered along remote desert corridors for migrants to use.
Agents arrived within an hour, Border Patrol officials said. Four panicked migrants told them about three others they’d left behind. By air and on the ground, agents backtracked along the path and found them, dead of dehydration and exhaustion.
“Try to imagine how bad it would have to be for you to do something like that, if you had to leave your own country and go to some place completely unknown,” said Mike Kreyche, a 75-year-old volunteer at Humane Borders who inputs locations and, when possible, names for the database of deaths.
Pima County began tracking the deaths of undocumented border crossers in the early 2000s. In a typical week, multiple bodies are found.
“Our strongest indicator for volume is just going to be how hot it is,” said Hess, who continued the database started by a predecessor.
The county has registered over 4,000 remains since 2000, according to Hess. More than half have been identified and sent to relatives.
Just to the east in Cochise County, which covers much less of the border than Pima, some weeks go by without a discovery, but hardly ever a month.
“If they go through Sells,” a small town in the Tohono O’odham Nation, “or through the (Organ Pipe Cactus) National Monument area, that is definitely a rough row to hoe,” said Cochise County Sheriff spokesperson Carol Capas.
Pima’s terrain is somewhat less rugged, but often hotter and more deadly, she added.
Last week, Cochise County reported the discovery of three bodies. Two were found in June, and one each in April and May.
Yuma County’s medical examiner, which doesn’t offer a public database, reported 63 migrant deaths in 2022, according to KYMA-TV. That’s almost double the previous year.
For most bodies found in the desert, it’s impossible to pinpoint the cause of death.
“Most of the decomposed and/or skeletal remains that we find of suspected migrants are also people who died from exposure, but we can’t prove it,” Hess said.
He can only guess at the scope of the death toll beyond his own county because there’s no mandate for local, state or federal authorities to keep a comprehensive record.
“You would expect to know what the total number of deaths are on the U.S.-Mexico border but actually nobody does,” Hess said.
A moral obligation
Volunteers for No More Deaths walk through an abandoned corral, one of many sites where the organization leaves food and water for migrants crossing the desert in Southern Arizona.
For Holeman, 59, who spent four years in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, there’s a moral obligation to find and bury victims of the desert akin to the military’s duty to find missing personnel.
“We should provide the same dignity and honor to people who die on our soil,” he said.
With six to eight-person groups, he hikes 30 miles through the desert over the course of two days, camping overnight. When they find a corpse, they treat it like a crime scene, he said, taking photos with forensic rulers and marking the coordinates for deputies who will come and do their own examinations.
Last month, Holeman traveled to Hidalgo County in New Mexico to examine sites where remains were reported to the sheriff by local volunteers.
“Lots of times we’re not hearing about these until they’re bones or partial remains,” Hidalgo County Sheriff William Chadborn said. “It’s very seldom … that we get real fresh remains because it doesn’t take long.”
The remains are collected and sent to the closest medical examiner’s office in hopes they can be identified and reunited with family.
Holeman is sure that many more migrants die in remote and restricted areas than are ever found. Much of the desert is hard to access or restricted by the government, like the vast Barry M. Goldwater Range — 1.9 million acres where military pilots practice.
That’s where he saw human remains for the first time.
“We want to hike. We want to find these people. We want to bring closure,” he said.
Tucson artist Álvaro Enciso wants to make a largely invisible tragedy unfolding in the Southern Arizona desert more visible to the world. For the past decade Enciso and his team of friends and volunteers from the Tucson Samaritans, have spent every Tuesday placing his hand-made crosses at the site of migrants' deaths.
