After El Paso joined Abbott’s border crackdown, the number of dead migrants in the New Mexico desert surged

Editor’s note: This story includes images of skeletal human remains found by volunteers in the desert.

This article is co-published and co-reported with the Source New Mexico, an independent, nonprofit newsroom and affiliate of States Newsroom.

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 closure

Holeman, 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 border

In 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-mile Texas-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 repeating

Adam 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 these operations led to more deaths in rural areas of the border.

“One unintended consequence of this enforcement posture and the shift in migration patterns has been an increase in the number of migrant deaths each year; on average 200 migrants died each year in the early 1990s, compared with 472 migrant deaths in 2005,” the report said.

Meissner, who is now a senior fellow and director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the nonpartisan think tank Migration Policy Institute, has said she regrets this strategy because of the increase in migrant deaths.

“The Border Patrol expected that there would be crossings in areas that were more dangerous. They didn’t expect that it would be in the numbers that ultimately materialized. Migrants are in desperate circumstances, they make desperate choices,” she said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times.

It’s nearly impossible to determine how many people have died trekking through the desert. In part because bodies will deteriorate over time if they’re not found. Congress requires Border Patrol to collect data on how many migrants have died. But the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the Border Patrol “has not collected and recorded, or reported to Congress, complete data on migrant deaths.”

Bryce Peterson, a volunteer and researcher with No More Deaths, an Arizona search group, said such groups have taken on the responsibility of collecting data because the federal government isn’t doing its job.

“Things like the El Paso sector migrant death database are really filling in for what should be a government function, but government has failed miserably at it,” he said.

New Mexico response

As deaths continued to increase year after year, New Mexico’s border counties and state agencies have been unprepared for the task of finding and collecting migrants’ bodies — or unwilling to tackle it.

New Mexico’s 180-mile border with Mexico is rural Chihuahuan desert, and the rough terrain should be a deterrent for many, said Michael Brown, a Luna County Sheriff captain, who has found migrant bodies. But with the border crackdown in Texas, Brown said his state needs to prepare itself because he expects more immigrants crossing through.

“The [New Mexico] governor is going to have to come to the realization that this is something that potentially could happen,” he said. “The federal government is going to have to realize that they’ve created a vacuum. They’re going to have to deal with this eventually themselves.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said State Police perform more than 100 humanitarian rescues each summer in response to reports, demonstrating her office’s commitment to preserving life “regardless of circumstances.”

But the governor’s office did not address questions about whether officials have a plan to search for, identify and repatriate remains when local or federal officials won’t.

More than one in four bodies found in New Mexico since 2021 is unidentified, according to an Tribune and Source analysis. In Texas, just under 7% of the people found in that period are unidentified.

Lujan Grisham’s office did not respond to a question about why that might be, though a spokesperson said that sites where bodies are discovered are often potential crime scenes. As a result, proper investigative protocols must be followed before repatriation can occur.

In Texas, counties spend an average of $13,100 per case to collect, investigate and bury remains, according to a May 2020 University of Texas report. Though, some border counties have taken shortcuts to reduce that cost, such as not ordering an autopsy or DNA test, the report says.

In New Mexico, the medical investigator’s office said it has not tracked migrant deaths in the past because the number of bodies was so low. But with the recent increase in remains being found, the state will need to address the issue soon by hiring more medical investigators to avoid a backlog that would delay the identification process, according to a research article by New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator.

New Mexico Sen. Crystal Diamond, R-Elephant Butte, who sponsored a failed bill in the last legislative session that would have appropriated state funds to help with humanitarian efforts, said border counties in the state need help addressing the large increase in deaths at the border.

“I think what people don’t want to talk about is the cost of the humanitarian efforts, and it is the counties bearing that weight,” she said.

McGinnis Porter, the governor’s spokesperson, said in a statement that another challenge is that migration patterns are complex and ever-changing, “driven by multiple factors, with cartels and human trafficking organizations choosing routes and drop-off locations that change frequently.”

“Any loss of life is a tragedy, and our hearts go out to the families of those who have died crossing into New Mexico,” McGinnis Porter added.

Meanwhile, Doña Ana County, which is immediately west of El Paso, has 10 field deputy medical investigators — the most of any county in New Mexico — but “they may be overwhelmed by the increased numbers of deaths,” a medical investigators’ research article says.

Carpenter and Holeman say that they’ve called the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office to report remains they’ve found. But her office has told them they don’t have deputies to respond, they said.

Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart has said that bodies found in her jurisdiction are not her priority. She has also dismissed Carpenter and Holeman’s efforts, saying she believes they are spreading misinformation and planting bones. She has also suggested the volunteers are discovering prehistoric bones.

Stewart’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

“I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know how long they’ve been there. I don’t know if they’ve been planted there,” she told KTSM, a local TV station. “If [the volunteers] are not going to stand by until we arrive, because [they] are too busy roaming the desert looking for I don’t know what, we’re not going to take these very seriously.”

A haunting encounter

Longtime rancher Nancy Clopton is still haunted by the sight of a dead woman she found on her property years ago.

Clopton was tending to the water tank for her cattle in the New Mexico desert 100 miles west of El Paso. Temperatures in that stretch of desert near Hachita hit 110 degrees that week in 2021.

She walked along the curved edge of the 50,000-gallon steel tank and was startled to see a person, dressed in camo, seated on its concrete skirt. She couldn’t quite make out the person’s face, but she guessed she was looking at a young woman.

“I yelled at her several times and got fairly close, maybe from here to that fence,” she said in a recent interview near her ranch, pointing about 20 feet away. “She wasn’t responding in any way, and I didn’t feel comfortable going up and actually touching her or trying to do something. Because to me, it was fairly obvious that she was dead.”

Clopton rushed inside and told her husband about the body and then called a contact at the Border Patrol.

Soon after she led the agent to the water tank, a parade of border patrol agents, state troopers and medical examiners arrived. They interviewed her and collected the woman’s remains.

In the days following, an agent told her the woman was from Mexico, but that’s all she ever learned about the woman, whom she still thinks about regularly.

After authorities left, Clopton was unsure what to do with the woman’s belongings and what she described as possible biohazards left behind. A crime scene cleanup company in El Paso told her it would cost up to $6,000 to clean the area.

So she felt she had no choice but to take drastic action, she said. “My husband took a bucket with five gallons of gasoline in it, and he lit it on fire,” she said of the woman’s final resting place.

Ranchers who raise cattle near the border wall said there is no protocol for who to call when they find a person’s body, and they pointed to Clopton’s experience as an example of how ranchers are left on their own to deal with the humanitarian crisis. They also echoed calls for better cell and radio tower infrastructure in the area.

The woman Clopton found is Gabriela Ortiz Moreno, according to the autopsy report. She was 30 years old, from Mexico. Among her belongings was a notebook, jewelry and a pack of cookies. Whether her family ever learned of her passing is unclear. A spokesperson for the Mexican Consulate said that the information is confidential.

Investigative summaries also suggest she was seeking shade at the water tank, because “No rain or any type of cloud covering was available to the decedent,” an investigating officer wrote.

“It’s terribly sad that people would be that desperate to come and that ill-prepared,” Clopton said. “They really don’t understand at all what they’re facing. This is the Chihuahuan Desert.”

Justin Hamel contributed reporting to this story.

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