IN DOUGLAS, ARIZ., in the shadow of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, a cemetery stretches across the desert. Between the orderly rows of gravestones, I notice clusters of cement blocks lodged in the sand with the same word etched into their flat surfaces: Unidentified. “Unidentified Female,” “Unidentified Male,” carved into the center of the tablet, along with a date: “Found Aug. 9, 2004.” “Found Dec. 31, 2005.” “Found Jan. 18, 2009.” “Found Feb. 12, 2009.”
A Mennonite activist whispers over my shoulder, explaining that the date marks when the remains were found in the borderland wilderness—a corpse in decomposition, a skeleton bleached in the sun, perhaps only a skull or a set of teeth.
A few of the older grave markers have “Unknown” instead of “Unidentified.” Immig-rant advocates petitioned for the change to “Unidentified” because while they do not know the story of the human remains found in the desert, they do know that each person had a family, every one of them was a parent’s child, someone’s friend. The gravestones remember people who are beloved, known and loved by friends and family now desperate for information, longing for an explanation, waiting for a phone call, searching official lists for the name of their loved one. Every unidentified life was known.
But their deaths were premeditated: The architects of the U.S. war against migration have built a deadly environment. According to its 1994 national strategy report, the U.S. Border Patrol outlined a plan to redirect migrants into the most dangerous regions of the borderlands: a “shift in flow,” with the results that “illegal traffic will be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain.”
And they have succeeded. According to the Tucson-based organizations Coalición de Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths, in “the last two decades, the remains of at least 7,000 people have been recovered in the United States borderlands.”
“The government chose to funnel people through the desert areas, and it created a killing field,” Isabel Garcia, co-chair of Derechos Humanos, told the Sierra Club.
Blood cries out
In the early chapters of the book of Genesis, Cain kills his brother, Abel, and leaves him to rot in the wilderness, far beyond the gates of the garden of Eden. Cain returns to normal life as if his brother’s disappearance will go unnoticed, as if the world will forget Abel. But God keeps vigil and confronts Cain. “Where is your brother?” God asks. “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain responds, masking his culpability. “Listen,” God says, “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:8-10).
This story haunts me as I walk through the borderlands, wondering about lost siblings, listening for their blood crying out from the sand—sisters and brothers, my people from beyond the border who didn’t make it, my kindred from across the Americas who got killed before I could welcome them as neighbors. All the deaths here in the desert wilderness are like that first murder. Immigration policies and border enforcement strategies have deafened citizens to the blood. The U.S. is like Cain.
Through an interlocking system of fences and walls and surveillance outposts, the U.S. has made the terrain part of a lethal deterrence strategy—a border-enforcement plan calculated for the maximum number of deaths in a tactical war in the desert. Francisco Cantú, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent, outlined this sinister design. “Our policy of prevention through deterrence—pushing those crossing out from the heavily patrolled urban areas to the remote areas of the desert—serves to weaponize the landscape,” he said in a 2018 interview with Vox. “That’s why people are dying in the desert.”
U.S. agents scavenge the borderlands, hunting for water outposts set up by humanitarian organizations. When they discover these oases—covered by mesquite and palo- verde trees, hidden among the creosote bushes—Border Patrol personnel gouge the canisters, emptying the water into the sand.
“It’s true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth,” Cantú wrote in his recent book, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, “that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.” Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths found that, from 2012 to 2015, “at least 3,586 gallon jugs of water were destroyed in an approximately 800-square-mile desert corridor near Arivaca, Arizona.”
Anonymous killers
A whole landscape of anonymous skeletons and mass graves, countless lives lost and untold horrors—the product of enforcement mechanisms that conceal personal responsibility for the onslaught in the borderlands. Indirect murder. Killing without pulling a trigger.
In Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, Kelly Lytle Hernández tracks how officials have included the environment’s weaponization in their enforcement plans as a way to absolve border agents from blame. In the 1950s, “immigration law-enforcement techniques shifted responsibility for the number of deaths associated with undocumented immigration to migrants themselves.”
With the erection of border fencing and the consolidation of agents in urban centers, U.S. enforcement strategists deputized the landscape as their murderous ally. Agents kept their hands clean while heatstroke and dehydration did their dirty work. They washed from their hands the blood of the corpses they found in the deserts: “The Border Patrol had relocated the danger of immigration law enforcement to the natural landscape of the borderlands,” Hernández notes. “Migrants battled deserts and rivers rather than men with guns.”
U.S. agents didn’t need to give an account for the deaths. No one had to claim responsibility. “When bodies shriveled in the desert or washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande, no one could be named in the death of the migrants,” Hernández writes. “Fingerprints could not be dusted from the sand, and the rapids left no tracks to be followed.” They converted the stark beauty of sand and rivers and mountains into “a system of violence without perpetrators”—anonymous killers, murderers shielding themselves from liability behind reams of internal memos. “As a county coroner declared over the dead bodies of five migrants who had attempted to cross through the Imperial Valley desert, ‘No marks of violence were found [on] any of the five bodies.’”
The death toll has mounted over the decades, and U.S. officials defended the strategy. As Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, remarked in 2000, “We did believe geography would be an ally.” She meant accomplice—nature as an accessory to crimes against migrants.
Earth speaks
At the cemetery, I add my body to a huddle of pastors and humanitarian workers gathered for a prayer service. We stand in a circle among the graves and join our voices in a petition for God to comfort all who yearn for the return of their lost ones. “We light this candle as a sign,” we say in unison as the votive passes from hand to hand, “that we hold in our memory the lives of our sisters and brothers who have died in the desert.” With the candle now placed in the center, flickering on the sand, we sing our hope:
Peace is flowing like a river,
flowing out of you and me,
flowing out into the desert,
setting all the captives free.
The lyrics focus my gaze on the wall beyond the cemetery, the barricade at the border, and I beg the sky for monsoon storms to rend the heavens with apocalyptic rains—a primordial deluge, flash floods gushing through arroyos, pounding against the metal barrier, bending steel and devouring concrete with a fierce torrent of destruction.
In 2011, Brady McCombs of the Arizona Daily Star reported that a “40-foot stretch of mesh border fence east of Lukeville in Southwestern Arizona was knocked over Sunday by rainwater rushing through a wash.” The water cleansed the landscape. The environment ravaged the blockages at the border. The earth reminded the government of ancient passageways. Nature flows against the violence built into the wilderness. I sing my prayer for peace flowing like a river—but peace as a cataclysmic flood, a disaster for U.S. Border Patrol’s brutal regime, setting all the migrants free.
A summons
After offering prayers in the cemetery, our group joins the weekly vigil at the port of entry, the main border crossing where local residents remember the bodies in the desert, the lives killed by the weaponized environment. As we march along the road leading from the Mexican border into the U.S., we line the sidewalk with crosses—each cross with the name of a person found in Cochise County, Ariz.
I carry several in my hands and memorize them before I place the crosses on the street, leaning each one upright against the curb: Juan Tovar Hernández, Rosalía Ana Lilia Ramos Reyes, Isaias Sanchez Mayo, Lucina López de Olmos. The others have a phrase instead of a name: “No identificado,” “No identificada.” We take turns calling out the words on the crosses. After one person shouts a name, the rest of us respond by crying out, “¡Presente!”—declaring that we will not forget them, that we will remind the world of their deaths.
When the person beside me calls out a name, “Araceli Estrada Lopez y niño,” my mind invents the scene in the desert. A flash of horror trembles my body as I imagine a mother and her child, their remains in decomposition. “Presente,” I waver, my eyes swimming in tears as the cross is laid on the ground.
Our memorial vigil concludes near the border wall, all of us in a circle, each hand holding another. A pastor from the local community steps into the center and shouts into the night, “¡Jesucristo, presente!” He shouts it four times, facing east, then north, then west, then south, a summons for the divine redemption of a godforsaken land.
Hostile Environment
In the journey from Central and South America and Mexico into the U.S., thousands of migrants have died from causes ranging from dehydration to drowning. Here’s how the numbers add up.
4 days
The shortest time it takes migrants to cross the Arivaca corridor, an 800-square-mile desert area in Arizona near the border. For some migrants, the trek takes a week to nearly a month.
93 degrees
The average high temperature near the Arivaca corridor during the summer months. Temperatures top 100 degrees on 19 percent of summer days.
3,586 gallons
The amount of water vandalized by the U.S. Border Patrol in the Arivaca corridor from 2012 to 2015.
2 gallons
The maximum amount of water most migrants can carry. Medical professionals recommend people drink 1.3 to 3.1 gallons of water a day, depending on the conditions.
7,505
The official number of deaths of assumed migrants on the southwest border reported by U.S. Border Patrol between fiscal years 1998 and 2018. (Some Border Patrol annual estimates undercounted deaths by as much as 43 percent.)
40
The approximate percentage of bodies found in the desert that cannot be identified.
123
The number of women and children who have died on their journey to the U.S.-Mexico border since 2014.
—Compiled by Will Young
Isaac S. Villegas is pastor of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship and president of the governing board of the North Carolina Council of Churches.
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