A Border Patrol agent rescues a migrant, treating him respectfully the rescue probably means expulsion, but that is preferable to death. His deputy, driving the county roads, twice points out that he is the only deputy on duty for the county of over 900,000 acres (360,000 ha).
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We meet the Brooks County Sheriff, who tries to help migrants' families as best he can he has binders full of pictures of remains. Let the audience decide what kind of country they want to have and what kind of policy they want to have about their border." We wanted to just show them what's going on and let people make up their minds, but in order to do that, they have to see what's going on, so we tried to make it a 360 degree view and let everybody have their moment to say their piece. According to co-director Bemiss, "We wanted to treat the audience as intelligent. The film does not have a narrator, and it more presents a situation than tells a story. After speaking with them, she remarks that she now knows that there are many more bodies than had been made public, and that her team has years of work to do in that one cemetery. Spradley learns, when she visits the Sacred Heart Burial Park, the Catholic section of the Falfurrias Burial Park, that only the men who cut the grass know where the unmarked migrant burials are. The DNA is entered into a national DNA database called CODIS (the Combined DNA Index System). They dig up and take the bodies they can locate to her lab, where they try to identify them, in order to notify the deceased's families. She brings teams of her students to Falfurrias to recover some of the hundreds of undiscovered bodies. īaker does not appear in the movie, but Kate Spradley does she is a forensic anthropologist from the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Molomot and Bemiss accompanied her to Brooks County, and there realized that the story needing telling was larger.
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The movie project began when Molomot and Bemiss, who met while teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, heard a story on NPR's Story Corps series about Lori Baker, a Baylor University associate professor of anthropology, who has spent years volunteering her time and expertise to ID bodies of anonymous dead migrants. : 31 Anthropologists exhuming bodies and analyzing DNA However, when factoring in these and other costs, a single migrant death could cost a county upwards of $13,100. This total assumes that county officials do not request an autopsy, pay nothing for a burial plot, and use no specialized equipment to retrieve a drowned individual.
Overall, when traced from discovery to burial, the death of a single migrant costs a county a minimum of $1,100. In 2020, it cost the county about $2,000 per body (equivalent to $2,000 in 2020) to remove the remains from the scene and obtain an autopsy.
According to Martinez's remark in the movie, the ongoing expense of dealing with the bodies found has bankrupted the county. Most of the corpses that are found-skeletons, in some cases, 62 such in 2017 -are never identified. According to Brooks County Sheriff Urbino "Benny" Martinez, only 20% of the bodies of those reported missing are ever located another estimate is that the number of deaths is 10 times the number of bodies found. Many migrants die of dehydration hiking through open land so as to bypass this border checkpoint Brooks County leads the nation in illegal migrant deaths, estimated at 2,000 since 2008. It is also the biggest employer in the poor, rural county. One was built near Falfurrias it is the largest and best equipped internal border checkpoint in the country. This proved not to be the case, and a network of internal checkpoints up to 100 miles (160 km) from the border was set up to catch those who made it in. It was believed that the desolate, almost uninhabited land without a reinforced border would be too difficult for migrants to cross. To deter illegal border crossings, the main crossing points, such as El Paso and Laredo, were strengthened. See also: Brooks County, Texas and No More Deaths The Falfurrias checkpoint Īs is explained in the film, in 1994 the federal governent began Operation Hold the Line in Texas, together with similar operations in California and Arizona.