Uriel J. Garcia, Patrick Lohmann, Yuriko SchumacherJune 23, 2025, 3:04 a.m. MTThis article is co-published and co-reported with The Texas Tribune, an independent nonprofit newsroom.Editor’s note: This story includes images of skeletal human remains found by volunteers in the desert. SANTA TERESA, New Mexico — On a hot morning in September, after hours of trekking through the Chihuahuan desert, Abbey Carpenter and her partner James Holeman spotted a pile of scattered bones. Near a yucca plant, a human jawbone lay partially buried in the sand. Around it were vertebrae, femurs and ribs. Next to the bones, they saw a woman’s purple underwear with two tiny hearts on the corner and a Salvadoran passport.The bones were among six sets of human remains they found that month. Carpenter and Holeman founded a volunteer group in 2020 called Battalion Search and Rescue to search for migrant bodies in this patch of desert just west of El Paso. They took photos and recorded the coordinates on their cell phone. They tied a pink ribbon to a nearby branch. Later, they mailed the passport to the Salvadoran consulate and reported the body to the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office in New Mexico — even though the sheriff sometimes doesn’t respond and has accused volunteers of planting bones in the desert.Since September 2023, the group has found 27 sites with human remains in the desert, Holeman said. “How did we get to this place as a country that we think so poorly of migrants?” Carpenter said during a recent search in the desert.Historically, Border Patrol’s El Paso sector — which includes all 180 miles of New Mexico’s border with Mexico and 84 miles of El Paso and Hudspeth counties in West Texas — has had among the fewest migrant deaths across the southern border. That changed in late December 2022, according to an investigation by The Texas Tribune and Source New Mexico, when the city of El Paso joined forces with Gov. Greg Abbott to participate in his signature border mission, called Operation Lone Star. By 2024, the El Paso sector had become the deadliest place for migrants to cross along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. From January 2023 to August 2024, 299 human remains were reported in the El Paso sector, the most of any sector along the southern border, according to the most recent data available from federal government data. That’s more than double the number of cases reported during the 20 months prior, when 122 remains were recorded before El Paso had adopted Operation Lone Star.Since El Paso joined Texas’ border mission in 2022, migrant remains discovered in the El Paso sector have increased every year, even as they have declined in every other part of the border. “We have people dying in New Mexico deserts because of Texas policies,” said New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva, a Democrat from nearby Las Cruces.Though many factors determine where and when someone crosses an international border — including federal immigration policies, organized crime and natural disasters — experts and advocates say any policy that pushes migrants into the desert will likely cost lives.Immigrant rights groups and researchers say more migrants are taking deadlier routes to enter the country since Texas launched Operation Lone Star in 2021 — flooding the border with state troopers, National Guard and miles of razor wire — as the federal government’s ever changing immigration policies have delayed or blocked migrants who want to claim asylum in the U.S.“Any state lawmaker or local leader should be aware that these policies come at a human cost,” said Aimée Santillán, a policy analyst at the Hope Border Institute, an immigrant rights advocacy group in El Paso. “So anyone that decides to approach this type of enforcement is making a decision that they can live with these deaths.”Meanwhile, bodies lie in the desert, unidentified, for months at a time. Eight months after Carpenter and Holeman’s group reported the set of six remains to authorities, many of the bones were still there. It remains unclear how New Mexico state and local officials intend to address the need for more resources to retrieve and identify the bodies. The striking increase in deaths in the New Mexico and West Texas desert is part of a global surge in migration. According to United Nations statistics from 2024, the number of immigrants worldwide has doubled since 1990, with 304 million people living in a country other than the one in which they were born. Last year was also the deadliest on record for migrants worldwide, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration. “The rise in deaths is terrible in and of itself, but the fact that thousands remain unidentified each year is even more tragic,” said Julia Black, coordinator of IOM’s Missing Migrants Project. Neither the Trump administration nor elected officials from Texas or New Mexico have addressed the issue, even as the number of bodies discovered has skyrocketed. Abbott’s office blamed former President Joe Biden’s “open-border policies” for the loss of life when asked for comment. “The heartbreaking increase in deaths is the direct result of the chaos President Biden unleashed on the border,” said Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary.New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham also laid the blame on the federal government. “While state officials are sometimes called upon to respond to emergencies, immigration remains a federal responsibility. Gov. Lujan Grisham has consistently called on every administration — Trump, Biden, and now Trump again — to fulfill federal obligations at the border and provide adequate resources for humanitarian and law enforcement efforts,” her spokesperson Jodi McGinnis Porter said in an email.Giving families closureHoleman, 67, started volunteering with a search and rescue group in 2018 named Aguilas del Desierto — which is Spanish for “the Desert Eagles.” Holeman, a retired Marine veteran, said that as part of his military experience, he saw other countries returning dead American soldiers back to their families. He recognized the U.S. government doesn’t provide the same benefit to the families of migrants, so he wanted to help fill this gap.He and Carpenter, 60, chose the New Mexico-Mexico border because it’s an area where groups in California, Arizona and Texas don’t come to regularly.They named the group Battalion Search and Rescue, named for St. Patrick’s Battalion, an Irish immigrant military unit that defected from the U.S. to fight with the Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico War. Once a month, a group of self-trained volunteers scours the desert for lost and missing migrants. The goal is to help save lives when they can, but for those who can’t be saved, they hope to provide closure for families who want to be reunited with their loved ones and given an opportunity for a proper burial.“We’re just trying to fill a gap where the government is falling short,” Holeman said.Among those whom the group has helped reunite with family is Ada Guadalupe López Montoya of El Salvador, who died at the age of 33 last year. The last time her family heard from her, López Montoya was in Ciudad Juárez, preparing to cross the border into El Paso — her second attempt to enter the United States. When she stopped responding to her family, they called the Armadillos Search and Rescue, a San Diego-based humanitarian group.Cesar Ortigoza, 51, who co-founded that rescue group, called Holeman in New Mexico to ask if their group had found López Montoya, who had been reported missing since July 2023. Holeman searched his records and found that he had come across her passport, located next to human remains in September.Two months later, Ortigoza flew to El Paso, drove to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and hiked 3 miles to the site. He called the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office to report that the remains may belong to López Montoya, whose family had been searching for her for over a year. The Sheriff’s Office sent officials from the New Mexico Office of Medical Investigator, who arrived about eight hours later to recover the remains.“As an immigrant myself, it’s important that families know what happened to their loved ones,” Ortigoza said.Countless other families are still waiting for news of relatives who have disappeared while crossing the border. Some turn to Facebook, creating groups titled “Desaparecí cruzando la frontera,” Spanish for “I disappeared crossing the border,” with fliers depicting loved ones. Among them is 41-year-old Laura Tavares Vazquez of Guanajuato, Mexico. For nearly three years, her family has repeatedly posted a flyer with the coordinates of where she was last seen near Santa Teresa. Tavares Vazquez, who left her children behind, had called a relative from the desert to tell her she wouldn’t make it, the family wrote in a post. She felt weak and had an unbearable thirst that kept her from walking. A group she was hiking with through the desert left her behind on June 11, 2022. “That’s when our nightmare began,” the family wrote on Facebook. “It’s such a hopeless feeling not knowing what happened to her, where she is, if she’s okay, who has her and why, or where did they leave her behind.”A relative, through a family spokesperson, declined to be interviewed, explaining that over the years, people have attempted to extort the family — offering to find Tavares Vazquez if the family pays an undisclosed amount of money.Texas’ militarized borderIn March 2021, Abbott announced Operation Lone Star, a military mission to deter immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande illegally. As part of this multibillion-dollar mission, Abbott sent hundreds of National Guard soldiers and state troopers to different parts of the 1,200-mileTexas-Mexico border. At the end of fiscal year 2022, six months after the state border mission began, Border Patrol reported finding 651 bodies along the Texas-Mexico border, more than triple the total from just three years prior.Maverick County, home to Eagle Pass, quickly saw an increase in migrant bodies washing up onto the American side of the Rio Grande. In summer 2023, Abbott deployed a 1,000-foot barrier there, made up of buoys to block migrants from crossing the river. That same summer, Mexican authorities reported a migrant had been found dead — stuck to one of the floating orange spheres. The number of migrant bodies discovered on the riverbank of the Rio Grande in Maverick County jumped from 51 in 2021 to 132 the following year, according to data compiled by Stephanie Leutert, the director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin and a former State Department official under Biden.El Paso, a binational Democratic stronghold, resisted for more than a year issuing a disaster declaration that would have resulted in joining Operation Lone Star, in part because officials disagreed with Abbott’s military approach. That changed toward the end of 2022, when thousands of migrants crossed the border from Juárez into El Paso, forcing the county and city to scramble to find enough shelter space for those sleeping on the streets after Border Patrol processed and released them.Texas border cities and counties were incentivized to join the border because they would get state funding and other resources. By joining Operation Lone Star, then-El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser hoped to get state-sponsored buses to transport migrants out of the city and take the pressure off the overflowing shelters.Abbott quickly sent state police and National Guard soldiers to El Paso and rolled out miles of concertina wire on the banks of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Juárez. The soldiers also began firing pepper balls, a chemical irritant, at migrants to deter them from crossing the river.Sophia Genovese, an attorney with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, said last fall she represented a man in his 30s who was deported to Mexico and later crossed the Rio Grande from Juárez into El Paso. She said the man, who had grown up in Tennessee, tried to explain to soldiers that he was seeking asylum and wanted to surrender to Border Patrol agents. The soldiers, Genovese said, shot him with rubber bullets. He was eventually able to get past soldiers and turn himself into Border Patrol, Genovese said.“We’re really concerned. We’ve had clients in the past who enter through the El Paso port of entry, or near the El Paso port of entry, who are being subjected to really intense violence by the National Guard,” she said. “Texas is very keen on participating in those enforcement operations. We’re going to see more loss of life.”Leeser declined to comment. El Paso City Council member Josh Acevedo, who has opposed the city’s participation in Operation Lone Star, said the effects of the border mission in this area should serve as an example that this type of enforcement causes more harm than good. He said Abbott should collaborate with New Mexico in preventing these deaths. “But how do you get the governor of Texas, who is full of theatrics and lacks solutions, to be collaborative?” he said.History repeatingAdam Isacson, a regional security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, said smugglers take advantage of such clampdowns on the American side, making promises to vulnerable people, who are desperate to enter the U.S., that they can guide them around the blockades for a fee.“The use of New Mexico in particular, really seems to have increased when Operation Lone Star put more people on the line, and it was just harder to turn yourself in the El Paso city limits,” he said. The trend has repeated itself for decades across the southwest border under Democratic and Republican administrations.“The prediction is that with traditional entry and smuggling routes disrupted, illegal traffic will be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement,” according to a Border Patrol plan from 1994 signed off by Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.In 1993, El Paso Sector Border Patrol Chief Silvestre Reyes launched Operation Hold the Line, which at the time used a novel approach to deter illegal immigration in the popular crossing point: a visible blockade of Border Patrol agents spaced along the border with Juárez. The approach sent apprehensions plummeting by 76% by the end of fiscal year 1994 in the sector. The Clinton administration decided to try it in the San Diego sector, which at the time accounted for 42% of apprehensions along the southern border. But the new vigilance in San Diego and El Paso quickly shifted the migrant flows to the Tucson sector in Arizona, which saw apprehensions increase by nearly 600% between 1992 and 2004, according to Border Patrol data. Migrants increasingly looked for other places to cross, and that often led them through remote terrain where they could easily run out of water and die of dehydration.A 2009 congressional report found that the