Identifying the Undocumented

Wednesday, 29 April 2009 00:00

Thousands of undocumented migrants cross the border into the United States every year, but what happens to those who don't make it in alive?

Bruce Anderson, professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona and forensic anthropologist for the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, is working to identify the undocumented bodies found along the Tucson sector of the border.

In a lecture at the University of Arizona, on April 28, Anderson discussed the efforts of his office to assign names to all of the “John Does” and give closure to families who are missing loved ones.

“It doesn't matter to anybody in our office that these people are foreign nationals or Americans,” Anderson said. “They're people. And they're people who have “John Doe” or “Jane Doe' on their tag. So we expend the effort to change that […] to something more appropriate.”

The Pima County Medical Examiner's Office handles all of the deaths in the Tucson sector of the border.

Anderson said that out of the 1,200 suspected undocumented migrant bodies they have found over the last eight years, 800 have been identified and about 400 are still unidentified.

He said it is a “shame” that his office is only able to identify 75 percent of foreign migrants because they identify 99.5 percent of all U.S. citizen deaths. Still, they have one of the highest levels of undocumented identification in the country.

"We're proud of what we're doing, but there is room to be better,” Anderson said. "Its not for lack of trying. We do everything we can to identify these people. Its not like, ‘They're not Americans, forget about them.'"

Anderson said U.S. Border Patrol policies have made it harder to cross in California and Texas, so now more migrants come through Arizona in the Tucson sector.

Between 1985 and 1998, the Examiner's Office averaged 19 undocumented deaths per year, Anderson said. Since then, that number has increased to more than 150 deaths each year, maxing out in 2007 with 218 deaths, he said. Last year, in 2008, there were 169 deaths, he added.

July 2005, "Was the most horrendous month we've had,” Anderson said, with 69 deaths in that month alone.

The examiner's office uses a variety of elements to profile bodies when they get them, such as, identification media, cultural accoutrements, personal effects as well as the geographical location where the body is found.

He said clothing, backpacks, love letters, pictures and religious scapulars are items commonly found on the bodies.

These elements are just hints, and do not lead to a positive identification of the individual. However, they can help determine if the body is of a U.S. citizen or an undocumented migrant.

“We use them as leads; we use them as clues,” Anderson said.

The examiner's office attempts to build a biological profile that can lead to a positive identification.

“It's my job to figure out, usually from bones, what this person really looked like in life,” he said.

Some people are circumstantially identified by family members; others are positively identified by things such as dental records.

Anderson said though they cannot use “personal effects” to identify bodies, they can use them in the national database to try to find people who are missing.

He encouraged members of the community to help solve identified cases by logging on to the U.S. Department of Justice's Web site, NamUS.

The site allows visitors to browse and search both missing and unidentified decedent records in the hopes of identifying bodies. Many of the personal effects Anderson's office finds are photographed and put online so family and friends can help identify them.

“You can imagine the condition of the clothes of some of these decomposed bodies,” he said. “We wash them, we dry them, we take pictures of them.”

The worst case scenario is that if the bodies are still unidentified within a year, the Examiner's Office will have to hand the bodies over to the Pima County Public Fiduciary for either burial or cremation.

“I think everybody on this issue realizes that we're brothers, we're sisters, we're husbands or wives, we're children, we're fathers. If this were to happen to us, God forbid, we'd want every jurisdiction possible doing everything they could to try to identify that person,” Anderson said.

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