The Man Who Counts Bodies in the Desert.

AuthorBritschgi, Christian
PositionQ & A

Over the last 24 years, during four presidential administrations, enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border has gotten much tougher. The miles of fencing grew; the number of guards exploded. While there's no evidence that "securitization" reduced illegal immigration--the number of border apprehensions of undocumented aliens did not fall dramatically until the Great Recession--it did succeed in forcing migrants to cross in less hospitable places. Pima County Chief Medical Examiner Gregory Hess says the result has been a spike in the number of people meeting lonely deaths in the deserts of Arizona. In 2000, his office began keeping detailed records of the human remains they received. In January, Reason's Christian Britschgi spoke with Hess about the specifics of his grim work.

Q: What made you start tracking these remains?

A: We just started to get more. It's really that simple. Back in the 1990s, we would average about 12 of these a year. We're talking about people that appear to have died in the active attempt of crossing into the United States without permission from the U.S. government--remains that we might find in a remote area that we believe to be a foreign national. We would examine the remains, issue a cause of death, and try to identify the person. Just by the nature of where we live and the environment we're in, sometimes that happens. But then we went from about 12 a year to 75, I think, in 2000. We averaged about 170 a year from 2002 to the end of 2013, and we had 154 last year.

Q: How do these remains find their way to your office?

A: About 50 percent are found by Border Patrol. They call whatever the local law enforcement agency is, based on where the remains are found. That local law enforcement agency will respond to the scene and do their own preliminary assessment, and then they'll call us.

Q: What do you look for when trying to determine whether this was just a lost hiker or an undocumented border crosser?

A: Property that might be with the remains, the condition of the remains, where the remains are found, whether someone is looking for a missing...

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