30 8.23.20
a man’s, on the southern slope of a hill about
three miles outside Sells, Ariz., known to locals
with long memories as Bird Nest Hill. The man
was face down, his head near a rocky outcrop-
ping, his legs stretching downhill. He lay with his
left hand clenched beneath his chest, his right
beneath his cheek, among tufts of buff el grass and
creo sote. So inconspicuously did he blend into
the landscape, a passer- by might have overlooked
him. The agent might have, too, if not for the
bright red waistband on the man’s underwear.
Then there was the hair. Thick, dark, spiky, the
hair looked fashioned, somehow, almost stylish,
after all this time in the Sonoran Desert — surely
weeks, the agent fi gured, and possibly months.
Beyond the dead man the desert sprawled hyp-
notically. Hills, basins, hills, basins, dusted with
monsoon greenery but without a drop of water or
a stitch of shade in sight. It was a clear morning,
and a golden glow came off the desert. The agent
could have gazed deep into Mexico, but he didn’t
linger. The sun was pulsing, the humidity envelop-
ing. At 10 a.m. on Aug. 28 last year, the temperature
outside Sells was nearing 100 degrees.
There were no telling possessions on the man,
no hunting rifl e or camping pack, but there was
one signifi cant feature: his clothing. He wore
a hooded jacket printed with real-tree camou-
fl age and matching pant covers. His shoes were
encased in carpet- soled bootees made to hide
footprints. This was someone who had wanted
not to be seen.
The Border Patrol apprehends migrants who
cross the border unlawfully. The dead are not in
its purview. When agents fi nd corpses or human
remains near the border, as they often do, they
contact local law enforcement. In this case, the
agent was patrolling on the lands of the Toho-
no O’odham Nation, and the tribal police had
jurisdiction. The agent called the department’s
headquarters in Sells and relayed the body’s GPS
coordinates. A Tohono O’odham detective went
out. Roads are scarce on the reservation, and he
drove with a four-wheel all- terrain vehicle in tow.
The Tohono O’odham government does not
have a full-time medical examiner, so once
the detective retrieved the body, he called the
medical examiner’s offi ce in Pima County, Ariz.,
which borders the reservation. Under state law,
unidentifi ed corpses do not require autopsies
unless foul play is suspected, but the Pima med-
ical examiner makes a point of looking into the
cases of bodies it suspects belong to migrants.
An investigator from that offi ce, a tall, hefty,
bearded man with a utility vest and a badge on
his hip, drove the 60 miles from Tucson, the
county seat, to Sells.
The dead man was still on the rear cargo shelf
of the A.T.V. at the headquarters when the investi-
gator arrived. The scent fi lled the parking lot. The
Tohono O’odham detective, a tall, clean- shaven
man wearing a black cap, cargo pants and a pistol
on his hip, gave the investigator the GPS coordi-
nates and scene photographs.
‘‘Did you check the scene?’’ the investigator
asked.
‘‘Yes,’’ the detective said, with little evident
conviction.
At the medical examiner’s offi ce in Tucson,
the dead man was taken to the autopsy the-
ater. There, two technicians and a pathologist
in aprons, hair covers and face masks began
moving about him with dolorous expertise and
talking to one another in sentence fragments.
One climbed a rolling ladder to photograph the
body from above as another removed the cloth-
ing and probed the hems, felt the inner panels
and inspected the belt and the tags and the labels.
Migrants often travel with no identifi cation or
fake identifi cation, but they can secret away
genuine documents or phone numbers in their
clothing. The technician didn’t fi nd any of thosethings, though from the pants he pulled a nearly
empty wallet and a pocket- size Gideon Bible with
a blue plastic cover. The photographer fetched
an infrared camera and through the viewfi nder
inspected the man’s limbs and torso, looking for
tattoos. ‘‘My gut feeling is this guy doesn’t have
any,’’ he said. He couldn’t say why, exactly. ‘‘It’s
just my sense.’’He was right. His sense came of long expe-
rience. He had inspected more U.B.C.s, as the
medical examiner calls them — undocumented
border crossers — than he could count. The man
on Bird Nest Hill was U.B.C. No. 104 for the year,
and it was only September. In the mid-1990s, the
federal government introduced a policy of push-
ing undocumented migrants away from border
cities and into increasingly remote locations.
The policy persisted, and as it did, more peo-
ple died. According to the Border Patrol, just
under 8,000 migrants have turned up dead on
the Southern border since 1998. The real num-
ber is probably much higher, but even going
by the Border Patrol’s estimates, that is a rate
of about one migrant death per day, every day
of the last 22 years.
Slightly less than half of those deaths occur in
southern Arizona, most in the Sonoran Desert.
Almost all the bodies found there end up at
the medical examiner’s offi ce in Tucson. This
fact has become widely known beyond the city,
and every day the offi ce receives calls about the
missing from desperate families and foreign
consulates.
The desert reduces its victims with barba-
rous celerity, and few of them are identifi able by
outward appearance. The man on Bird Nest Hill
was nearly mummifi ed, his muscles and organs
autolyzed and leached out, his eye sockets full
of mud and insect carapaces. On the autop-
sy report, his weight was 38 pounds. That was
heavier than many. Often only bones turn up.
Done with the examination, the pathologist
and technicians leaned in to look at the man’s
hands. Could the fi ngers be printed? ‘‘We can
take them off ,’’ a technician said, holding a
scalpel apprehensively, ‘‘but I don’t know how
well they’ll print.’’ Nevertheless, she severed
both hands below the thumbs, placed them in
a clear plastic bucket and poured in sodium
hydroxide to rehydrate the skin. In a few days,
she would see if the patterns of his fi ngertip
pads had re- emerged.
They inspected the wallet. In it were two
bank notes from the Bank of Guatemala and a
national identifi cation card issued by the Repub-
lic of Guatemala. The morgue staff knew the ID
couldn’t be conclusive, even if it was genuine;
there were too many fake or stolen IDs in the
desert for that. A fi ngerprint match would be,
if the country he was from maintained reliable
fi ngerprint records of its citizens. Guatemala
did. And it wouldn’t be surprising if that was his
home, they knew: Of the 153 migrants whose
journeys ended in the medical examiner’s offi ce
last year, nearly half of those identifi ed so far,
the single largest group, were Guatemalan.
The black-and-white portrait on the ID
showed a young man with broad cheeks, a wide
jaw, arched eyebrows and a high quiff of thick
dark hair. According to the birth date, he had
recently turned 23.Th is article was written with the support of the Pulit-
zer Center on Crisis Reporting.
THE UNITED
STATES
BORDER
PATROL AGENT
FOUND
THE BODY,