Immigrants crossing into Texas have a high likelihood of dying

Eddie Canales and I have been privileged to work with Genevieve from No More Deaths (NMD) in Arizona to learn the tools and systems that they have in place to assist with search and rescue as well as search and recovery. Genevieve is at the South Texas Human Rights Center for a few days using our cases to introduce us to their process.

The willingness to share freely what NMD has learned through years of hard work and revision is amazing. NMD has been in existence for 10 years and has hundreds of full and part time volunteers and many programs. Check out their Web site at www.NoMoreDeaths.org.

Besides having an intake form on a missing person which consists of the story in words, Genevieve draws a picture of the details. It is like a story map. She created a story map to detail the account of the journey for Florencio, who with eight other persons were left behind on a trip that started with 12, including the coyote. Only four persons arrived at the final destination.

By using Google maps, an attempt is made to connect the dots in order to give a highly probable educated guess on the actual path taken through the desert wilderness. Genevieve has been working for days on the map. Zeroing in on the location of a person is important before sending out a team from the sheriff's office or border patrol because of the need for permission to search on private ranch land.

So, though we have had information on this case for at least two weeks, no physical search has yet been done and we are not aware of any of the eight having been found alive, deceased or in a detention center.

In an attempt to move the case forward, Genevieve and I went to the sheriff's office and spent several hours working with someone there using the drawing as well as Google maps. We were not able to draw enough conclusions to send out a search team. The persons in the office were very accommodating and helpful. They also want to find the missing persons.

I am using the tools that Genevieve taught us to work on the case involving Julio, who I reported on in my Aug. 23 blog. I also learned that there is much information at the sheriff's office that I will be able to view. This might help us to keep abreast of persons found or detained. My hope is that both the sheriff's office and the border patrol office will allow us equal access to their maps, technology and information so that we can pursue the humanitarian and human rights aspects of the case even as they pursue other goals.

Genevieve made an interesting observation that helped me to visualize the situation along the border. Moving from west to east, there are four border states: California, Arizona, Mew Mexico and Texas. A person crossing in California has the best chance of living through the event and the best chance of getting caught in the process. A person crossing in Arizona has a 50-50 chance of living through the event and of being caught. A person crossing in Texas, particularly the further west one goes, has a high likelihood of dying and the best chance of not getting caught.

Recent months have seen the shift of movement to the east, leading to more deaths.