Of Compadres & Cadavers
I was vacationing in Ruidoso, New Mexico, recently when two friends took our boat out on the Rio Grande. They set sail on a beautiful Sunday morning in Mission, Texas, to cruise in peace, birdwatch and wave at families fishing, picnicking, and enjoying what is still a vibrant, recreational venue on the Mexico side of the river. This is something we typically do four to five times a week; so, no one expected anything out of the ordinary.
That all changed when my friend called saying, “We found a body in the river. What should we do?”
This has never happened to us. The most outrageous thing we’ve ever seen on the Rio Grande is a gaggle of GOP members of Congress taking selfies with the machine guns mounted on the Texas Highway Department’s flotilla.
I texted my friend the number to U.S. Border Patrol’s Tactical Operations Center, or “the TOC,” as it is called. This is a local outpost from which resources are deployed in the Rio Grande Valley, when incidents are reported. I explained they needed to call it in because they were there (and I was not), and they could provide critical information to help authorities retrieve the remains of the deceased.
A few minutes later, I received a text message: “Border Patrol said they had no boats today, but they would send the helicopter.”
Immediately, I dialed my friend. “What did they tell you?” I asked.
He repeated, as if I was stupid, “Border Patrol said they did not have anyone patrolling the river by boat today but would send the helicopter.” He added, “And we found a second body.”
As a child of the borderlands and someone familiar with Border Patrol’s policies and proclivities, I was alarmed by this response for several reasons. First, why would the Border Patrol agent answering calls at the TOC share this sensitive information indiscriminately with a stranger on the phone? It seemed to me as though this would be a violation of his security clearance, not to mention common sense. Second, the helicopter cannot retrieve remains, but it can blow them over to the Mexico side of the river where the U.S. has no jurisdiction or obligation. Finally, if U.S. Border Patrol’s mission and operations are fundamental to national security, as they claim, how come no one is patrolling the river, (which is the international border) in the midst of what the agency and the media are calling “an unprecedented immigration crisis?”
This is when I dialed Sam Bustamante, the interim Patrol Agent in Charge (PAIC) of the USBP McAllen Station.
“Excuse me, sir, I hate to bother you on a Sunday morning, but…” I said as I told him what had happened just minutes earlier.
He confirmed, the agency had no boats in the area due to “scheduling conflicts,” and offered, “We’re waiting on the Coast Guard to provide additional coverage.”
I asked, “What about Texas Department of Public Safety?”
Bustamante responded, “Yeah, I guess I could call the Sheriff’s Office. They have a boat.”
“And Mission Police and Fire has the dive team, so they must have a boat, too,” I answered.
And here, again, the bells in my head were clanging.
The abundance of palm trees in South Texas is outnumbered only by the excess of police. It’s one of the first things visitors to the area notice. What was once the United States’ de-militarized zone (DMZ) is now fully militarized, with federal, state, county and municipal law enforcement presence everywhere; and they have all the tools of the trade, from hi-tech drones, aerostat blimps and RAID towers, to humvees and horses.
At this point in my surreal Sunday, both the TOC and the PAIC have admitted no one is “guarding the house,” so to speak, because an agency charged with national security could not manage staffing and scheduling to ensure human resources were properly deployed in fulfillment of their mission. What if the man who called the TOC had been a cartel operative, instead of a wildlife photographer?
Last but not least, retrieval of the dead is law enforcement’s duty — and recovery of corpses from the border is, literally, the responsibility of U.S. Border Patrol, with assistance from local authorities.
Then Bustamante said, “Hey, can you tell me whether the bodies were on the north side of the river or the south side of it?” In other words, do we really need to respond to this? How about we just send the helicopter and make it their problem, not ours?
At this point, I am disgusted, but not at all surprised. I’ve been dealing with U.S. Border Patrol as part of my job for almost a decade now. I must confess that this type of conduct is what I have come to expect from them. Sometimes it’s carelessness or simply incompetence. Other times it’s corruption, cruelty, dereliction of duty. After all, this is the agency whose personnel refer to the living and the dead as “tonks,” for the sound a person’s head makes when hit by a flashlight or the ground. They refer to those who drown as “floaters,” degrading and dehumanizing them in one descriptive word, as the agent on the TOC line did.
This is also an agency actively working to “legitimize” people disappearing, whether they are immigrants who perish in the river or the desert, or citizens who get snatched off the street and thrown in the back of an unmarked van during a peaceful protest in Portland.
In February, No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization based in Tucson, Arizona, published, “Left to Die: Border Patrol, Search & Rescue and the Crisis of Disappearance,” along with La Coalición de Derechos Humanos (The Human Rights Coalition). In this third installment of a series titled, “Disappeared: How US Border Enforcement Agencies are Fueling a Missing Person’s Crisis,” they report:
“By looking at emergency calls received by the Coalición de Derechos Humanos 24-hour Missing Migrant Crisis Line, we find that Border Patrol did not conduct a confirmed search or rescue mobilization in 63% of cases.”
This provides context for our Sunday morning in Mission, Texas, doesn’t it? Border Patrol’s cavalier response to our call for help is not an anomaly, but agency-sanctioned inaction, perhaps even protocol.
As my friends docked, Mission FD arrived to launch their boat. Although the GPS coordinates had been provided by text to Interim PAIC Bustamante, they had not been forwarded to the firemen, who admitted they didn’t know where to look for the deceased. In fact, they hadn’t been told there were two bodies.
Later that day, Brian Hastings, USBP Chief of the RGV Sector released the following statement:
“On Sunday morning, McAllen Border Patrol Station agents responded to a report of two deceased individuals in the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. Local law enforcement agencies were called to retrieve the bodies who they subsequently pronounced deceased. This situation is a grim reminder of the danger of making the trek through Mexico and crossing the border through irregular means.”
Here we go again! The U.S. Border Patrol barely responded to this incident, but appears happy to use it for self-promotion.
At this point, NOTHING was known about the two men whose bodies were retrieved. Were they immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. “through irregular means,” or two men whose fishing trip ended tragically? Were they victims of cartel violence, executed and dumped in the river? All are equally conceivable and feasible.
And let’s not forget to conclude by blaming the victims of this convenient, cautionary tale — a classic technique of abusive individuals and systems that refuse to acknowledge or take responsibility for the harm they cause…
What we do know is these men were someone’s sons. They may have been brothers, husbands, fathers, too, but their loved ones will never hear from them, again.
We know their bodies were transported to the county morgue, where autopsies will be conducted to determine their cause of death.
We know more will drown, die and possibly, disappear, as Congress reprehensibly refuses to enact policies that facilitate safe and humane immigration for laborers, refugees and asylum-seekers.
And now we know that 63% of the time a migrant is in crisis or goes missing, Border Patrol won’t bother to mobilize a search, rescue or recovery.