In a rural county some 70 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the sheriff’s office spends more than 85% of its time on border-related issues, Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez told The Epoch Times.
Sometimes Sheriff Martinez’s office receives calls from unlawful migrants who are lost, dehydrated, or injured as they walk on private ranchland to avoid a nearby Border Patrol highway checkpoint.
Other times, Martinez’s office receives calls to recover dead bodies.
So far this year, the Brooks County Sheriff’s Office has recovered 79 bodies. Last year, the sheriff’s office recovered 119 bodies, which was a record high. In 2020, 34 bodies were recovered.
Martinez estimates that for every body his office finds within Brooks County’s 944-square miles, another 5 to 10 are never recovered.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of mothers over the telephone, or they’ve been here in my office, crying for their loved ones that have been lost for 10, 15 years,” Martinez said.
“Our terrain is real sandy. We’re about 100 foot above sea level. So once that sand starts going over that body, and that body starts getting torn apart by the feral hog, by the coyote … the only time it’s recovered is when they’re moving cattle and they turn the soil over… [and] a skull would pop up, or something. Body parts would pop up. That’s how we’re going to find out that something laid there for a while. I mean, what is compassionate about that?”
Most body recoveries happen during the summer, with people dying from a combination of dehydration and hyperthermia.
Water is scarce, one can get lost easily, and human smugglers will not hesitate to leave behind unlawful migrants who are too slow or injured, according to Martinez.
Most often, the bodies found in Brooks County are males between the ages of 19 and 40 from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.
However, only about 30 percent of the bodies found have identification, as someone has already stripped them of all their possessions, according to deputy Don White, who volunteers on his own time to search for bodies.
The unlawful migrants attempting to evade Border Patrol are known as “gotaways.”
Border agents record at least 40,000 gotaways each month along the southwest border, according to data obtained by The Epoch Times.
“These people have records; they have criminal records,” Martinez said. “We have our own criminals here; we don’t need to add to that. So the fact is, we need to know who they are. And they [federal government] just don’t want to do that. They just want to let everyone in. We can’t do that.”
“The fact is that the border is not secure. And [there’s] the national security issue of all these aggravated offenders that are filtering through this brush.”
Ranchers in Brooks County have also reported fences destroyed, tractors stolen, and land burned allegedly by unlawful migrants.
“We’ve had roughly over 50,000 acres burned because of these immigrants that get lost or whatever. They create fire so they can get noticed, so we go find them,” Martinez said.
He said the unlawful migrants often come from countries that receive aid from the U.S.
“Different countries are being provided funding from the United States. So why are we not holding them accountable for the funding they’re getting?” he said.
“I’m held accountable. Every single law enforcement entity that gets funding from the federal government is held accountable.”
No official government data is available that shows the number of unlawful migrant deaths along the southern border in the last two years, as the Biden administration has paused the long-standing policy of releasing those numbers.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) disclosed the number of migrant deaths along the southern border from fiscal 1998 to fiscal 2020, but no figures have been posted since the Biden administration took over the agency.
The most recent CBP data showed 247 unlawful migrants died near the border during fiscal 2020, while 300 died in fiscal 2019. Some reports suggest the number of deaths for the fiscal year 2022 is close to 800.
