Missing migrant remains out of reach in protected Arizona wilderness

CABEZA PRIETA — James Holeman and his partner Abbey Carpenter move across the desert with practiced intention, periodically spinning around in what they call a “pirouette” to view the same spot from different angles as they walk.

On this overcast day in mid-March, they scan the sky above Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge for circling vultures. They peer into the sparse shade under spindly trees. They study the desert floor for flashes of white that could signal sun-bleached bones. Among the cactus and creosote, a new crop of white wildflowers are in bloom, which keep catching their eyes as they search.

Holeman, 58, is a former Marine and founder of Ajo-based Battalion Search and Rescue, one of a number of volunteer groups devoted to finding the remains of missing migrants, or rescuing migrants in distress, in remote areas of the borderlands.

“We’ve trained ourselves,” he said. “I tell the volunteers, if you see a white rock bigger than a softball, go check it out. And multiple times, they’ve found craniums that way.”

An avid hiker and retired higher-education administrator, Carpenter, 66, began joining Holeman’s searches after they met last year.

“I’m hiking with a purpose now,” she said.

Before they were even out of sight of Holeman’s white truck, parked along the El Camino del Diablo roadway, Holeman spotted a human femur bone lying among small yellow flowers, ants crawling slowly across it.

The pair began marking the spot with high-visibility pink tape so it would be easy for law enforcement to find. They snapped a photo of the bone next to a forensic ruler to send, along with GPS coordinates, to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.

Afterward, Holeman paused to embrace Carpenter. Each finding weighs on them, they say, and they’re wary of the cumulative secondary trauma that can occur in this kind of work.

“We’re not trained in this way,” he said. “We’re retirees. We’re just regular people, and it’s graphic images that you can’t easily forget.”

In the last three months alone, Battalion Search and Rescue has found 21 sites with human remains, the bulk of them during overnight searches in the Growler Valley of Cabeza Prieta, Holeman said.

“I have never found so much so fast in one specific area,” he said.

But despite their successes, Holeman is anguished to know that even on their longest hikes, the search group can only traverse a tiny fraction of Cabeza Prieta’s more than 800,000 acres, due to federal restrictions on motorized vehicle use in designated wilderness areas.

He’s hoping an act of Congress, or a concession from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, could give groups like his an exception and potentially bring peace to more families left wondering about their missing loved ones.

“The laws they use to restrict us were put in place decades before these areas became open graveyards,” Holeman said. “Clearly there need to be some changes.”

Remains hidden in wilderness

Cabeza Prieta is the site of Luis Alberto Urrea‘s book, “The Devil’s Highway,” a nonfiction account of the tragic 2001 journey of 26 Mexican migrants. Only 12 survived after their guide got lost and abandoned them. Urrea recounts the reality of death by exposure in excruciating detail.

The area has little water or shade and is routinely crossed by migrants seeking to avoid detection by border agents.

Holeman says likely hundreds of sets of remains lay undiscovered in Cabeza Prieta, west of the town of Ajo and is adjacent to Organ Pipe National Monument, the site of another mass-casualty event in 1980, when 13 migrants died after fleeing the civil war in El Salvador.

He said recovering these remains is “a race against time:” Bodies quickly decompose in the harsh environment and are scattered widely by desert scavengers.

For members of the public, motorized vehicle use in Cabeza Prieta is limited to the historic route known as El Camino del Diablo, or the Devil’s Highway, and a couple other small roads.

Holeman’s searches aren’t casual endeavors; they’re grueling and focused. He only allows practiced hikers with strong endurance to join. He and his fellow searchers cover about 10 miles roundtrip on a typical day-long search, and they often make successful finds within that limited range, close to the road.

But on overnight backpacking trips into the wilderness, his crew can cover more than 30 miles in two days.

On those longer searches, sleeping on the desert floor for one or two nights at a time, they reach an area that Holeman calls “the Zone,” in the miles beyond what hikers can manage on foot in a day.

Here, Holeman says they’re virtually guaranteed to make significant findings.

“We average locating five sites with human remains every single time,” he said. “Clearly there is a need for greater access and accountability.”

On a February overnight hike, Battalion Search and Rescue discovered seven sets of skeletonized human remains, including four human skulls. The remains — which the Pima County Medical Examiners’ office determined were at least six to eight months post-mortem — are still unidentified.

Those findings added seven more red icons to an interactive map of known migrant deaths, updated monthly by Tucson nonprofit Humane Borders, in partnership with the Pima County Medical Examiners’ Office.

Today, more than 4,100 red icons are crowded onto the map of Southern Arizona, each marking a life lost.

But those overnight hikes are punishing, time-consuming and risky for the searchers, Holeman said. They carry as little food and water as possible, and they sleep under the stars, without a tent, to keep their packs light. They usually do those overnight hikes in the winter, to reduce the chance of encountering rattlesnakes while sleeping on the ground.

“It’s straight-up dangerous,” he said. And even those long hikes are barely scratching the surface of the unexplored acres in Cabeza Prieta.

During the March visit to the wilderness area, Holeman pulled out his cell phone and opened a mapping app, displaying a web of dirt access roads only open to refuge administrators and Border Patrol, under a law-enforcement exception to the wilderness area’s vehicle restrictions.

Holeman pointed to an access road heading north from El Camino del Diablo and continuing deep into the Growler Valley, in the shadow of the Growler Mountains that bisect Cabeza Prieta.

If the searchers could get permission to use this and other existing access roads, they’d reach “the Zone” within minutes, Holeman says. From there, the searchers could start fresh, with fewer supplies, and penetrate miles deeper into the wilderness.

“Hundreds of people would be added to Humane Borders’ map,” he said.

And hundreds of families, grieving their missing loved ones, might find a measure of comfort, he said.

Holeman says he’s frustrated that his requests to Cabeza Prieta management and to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the area, have resulted in refusal after refusal.

“They make no effort to search themselves, and restrict folks like us that are willing to do the work,” he said. “We as a country are grateful when remains of U.S. citizens are returned. Yet through our policies and practices, we are complicit in concealing deaths on our soil and preventing any opportunity for dignity, peace and closure.”

But legal experts who spoke with the Arizona Daily Star said it would likely take an act of Congress to grant an exception for the volunteer searchers, or other humanitarian groups, allowing them access to those existing paths.

Officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service and Cabeza Prieta declined the Star’s interview requests. But a FWS spokeswoman said the agency has no authority to create exceptions to federal legislation governing Arizona’s wilderness areas.

Holeman maintains that FWS has the ability, and obligation, to coordinate with search groups, even by escorting the searchers on the access roads. But he doesn’t believe officials have the will to do it.

“It’s shameful. If it was their relative out there lying in the desert, it would be a different story,” he said. “They could find a workaround.”

Path to an exception

Cabeza Prieta was established as a game range in 1939 and became a wildlife refuge in the 1970s. Then the 1990 Arizona Desert Wilderness Act classified more than 800,000 acres in Cabeza Prieta — about 93% of the refuge — as a designated wilderness area.

Restrictions on motorized-vehicle use for designated wilderness areas in the U.S. were laid out in the 1964 Wilderness Act. The act includes an exception for vehicle use in response to “emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the area.”

But courts and legal experts usually interpret that phrase to mean a specific emergency involving a known individual, said Dana Johnson, attorney and policy director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness nonprofit based in Montana.

Holeman and other groups’ searches don’t typically have a specific missing person in mind.

Plus, “the emergency exception clause is limited to use by government agencies,” Johnson said. “It has not been extended to private citizens and NGOs, so far as I’m aware, and I don’t think a fair reading of the statute would support it.”

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Holeman says he sees the damage done by Border Patrol vehicles driving off-road in the protected wilderness area as he’s hiking there. It stings that his group is prohibited from using existing paths while border agents cause damage regularly, he said.

“I’m certainly sympathetic to the frustration with Border Patrol driving all over wilderness,” Johnson said. “The (border) wall and the maze of roads is an ecological disaster. I’m also sympathetic to the tragic situation on the ground for so many migrants. ... I’m not sure what all of the answers are, but I don’t think solutions can be found with the Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Legislators could add an additional exception into Arizona’s wilderness law, she said. Currently, there’s no formal proposal to create this exception for humanitarian groups, but Holeman is hoping legislators will take up the cause.

The idea drew mixed reactions from conservation groups the Star contacted. Four members of Congress’ Arizona delegation didn’t respond to the Star’s request for comment on the idea last week.

A spokesman for long-time Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva said in a Friday statement, “Rep. Grijalva believes there must be coordinated solutions to help save lives and return those who did not survive the harsh borderland climates. He supports federal and local government agencies, non-governmental organizations, working together in support of search-and-rescue operation missions to recover migrants and migrants’ remains in Cabeza Prieta and areas across Southern Arizona.”

Johnson said Wilderness Watch generally doesn’t support that kind of special provision added to a wilderness statute, because it could set a problematic precedent.

“The border situation is unique, but there is some risk that private-party motorized-use provisions would start popping up elsewhere if included here,” she said in an email.

Families suffering

The 1994 Clinton-era “Prevention through Deterrence” policy has, through an increasingly militarized border which channels migrants to remote and dangerous areas, contributed to at least 10,000 deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border over the last three decades, a figure that is certainly an undercount, according to Human Rights Watch.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show border agents rescued more than 22,000 migrants in distress in fiscal year 2022. But migrant advocates say the agency, and local law enforcement, fail to respond with adequate urgency to reports of migrants in distress or missing.

A November report from humanitarian group No More Deaths alleged Pima County Sheriff’s Department dispatchers transfer emergency calls they suspect to be from migrants to the Border Patrol, which the sheriff’s office disputes.

Families of missing migrants suffer unimaginably, and the work of finding and identifying migrant remains is urgently needed, said Robin Reineke, sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona. She’s co-founder and former director of the Colibri Center for Human Rights, which worked to reunite families with the remains of loved ones believed to have gone missing in the borderlands.

International human rights law protects the rights of the missing to be searched for, and the rights of families to know what happened to their missing, Reineke said.

“It’s searing pain every minute, every hour, every day and year that someone remains missing,” she said. “What these (search) groups are doing, when they’re going out and finding people who have died, is they’re addressing that urgent need on the part of families, and they’re honoring the human rights of these families.”

Identifying remains through DNA is costly and time-consuming, and the longer someone remains missing, the less likely their remains will be found with other identifying features such as fingerprints and clothing, before the remains are scattered by animals and degraded by the elements, she said.

“We have normalized the fact that, 20 minutes from (Tucson), right at this moment, there is someone who is dead, in the desert, who is alone, who is being allowed to decompose, who is being allowed to be preyed upon by animals and vultures, and be destroyed by the environment,” she said. “That’s completely unacceptable.”

Conservationists’ perspective

Some Arizona environmental advocates say additional impacts from allowing searchers greater access to Cabeza Prieta would be less worrisome than the extensive environmental damage caused by border militarization and border agents’ vehicles.

“I think there are some valid concerns, but any impact from isolated rescue events would pale in comparison to the huge amount of damage Border Patrol inflicts driving thousands of miles through designated wilderness and Sonoran pronghorn habitat at Cabeza Prieta every year,” said Laiken Jordahl, Southwest conservation advocate for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.

Last summer, the federal government agreed to spend more than $1 billion remediating environmental damage from border-wall construction, under a settlement to a 2019 lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and others, though a Texas judge recently issued an injunction pausing that work, said Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club.

Meza said he’s not completely opposed to the idea of search and rescue groups utilizing already existing access roads.

“I think access needs to be limited,” he said. “But it is also very important that organizations that are doing humanitarian work are able to get access to do what they need to do there, using roads that are already established.”

Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator for the Wildlands Network, said any move to open access further is “a slippery slope.”

Severe damage has already been done to the borderlands through border-wall construction, which caused “irreparable damage” to sacred tribal sites, depleted water resources, damaged critical wildlife habitats and introduced invasive species, according to a September report from the Government Accountability Office.

“Desert landscapes are very sensitive. The soils are very fragile, the recovery time is very long for vegetation to reestablish. Road scars and even foot traffic can remain there for decades after the original impact,” Traphagen said. “So it’s already a bad enough situation that Border Patrol gets access to places that formerly didn’t have access.”

Desert bighorn sheep and Sonoran pronghorns — whose habitat has already been dramatically disrupted by border wall construction — are sensitive to vehicular disturbances, Traphagen said.

“They don’t like to be around cars and people,” he said. “Here’s a huge landscape that is one of the last left of its size in this area, and I think it’s important that we protect that as well as we can.”

Many environmental groups want some of those access roads to be taken out of use entirely. Roads in flat desert “fundamentally change the hydrology of that area,” Traphagen said.

After rainfall, flat desert land relies on “sheet flow” of water to spread widely and get absorbed into the soil, he said.

“Every road you have out there bisects that. It changes the nature and flow of water, and then it ends up channelizing in these roads,” making it less likely the water will infiltrate the soil, he said. “Just because roads exist there doesn’t mean they should be used.”

A Customs and Border Protection spokesman said agents abide by a 2006 memorandum of understanding guiding law enforcement behavior when operating in designated wilderness areas like Cabeza Prieta. Agents can go off-road in response to cases such as a specific threat or emergency, or when the pursuit is “reasonably expected to result in the apprehension” of a suspected border crosser.

The Sierra Club says agents do engage in damaging activities that shouldn’t happen, such as unnecessarily driving vehicles off-road and dragging tires behind vehicles to smooth the landscape and make migrants’ footprints easier to spot.

“We have a lot of evidence of those practices,” Meza said. “They also need to get some environmental training so they know ... those reckless actions are going to have long-term consequences.”

Burden on searchers

The Armadillos Search and Rescue of San Diego routinely take weekend trips to Arizona for searches in Cabeza Prieta, said co-founder Roque Mateo, 61, who in his day job runs a nursery north of San Diego.

Most of the group’s members have roots in Mexico and Central America, said Mateo, whose family is from the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. Most also work physical jobs in landscaping and construction during the week, he said.

After work on Friday, they drive six hours to Arizona, usually Ajo, and start hiking early Saturday morning. They often sleep in the desert and search for half the day on Sunday before returning to southern California that night in time for work on Monday, Mateo said.

The work is meaningful, but exhausting, he said.

“Sometimes it’s very difficult just to walk the next day,” he said. “But, well, we have to work.”

The group has recovered more than 60 sets of remains, but Mateo says access to the roads Border Patrol uses would boost that number and save the group precious time and energy during their whirlwind weekend searches.

“There are some places that have never been checked because there’s no way to do it” without access to the government-use roads, he said.

For Mateo, the work is personal. He began searching for missing migrants in California and Arizona after encountering first-hand the endless, ambiguous grief of having a loved one disappear without explanation, or justice.

In 2014, his godson disappeared in Mexico, one of 43 students who went missing after a violent confrontation with local police and soldiers in Guerrero, Mateo said. It was one of Mexico’s most notorious cases of enforced disappearance. A decade later, despite international pressure and investigation, families of the missing students still don’t have answers.

Mateo said families of the missing, feeling dismissed by law enforcement, often see the volunteer search group as their last hope.

“That’s our motive to do this,” he said. “If we don’t find them, nobody is going to find them.”