[ad_1]
The Trump administration’s flagship project has prompted some migrants to cross into exceptionally no-go areas where no walls exist, such as remote stretches around Culberson County.
Sheriff Carrillo, who has served for 21 years, said he was trying to avoid all political skirmishes around immigration.
“I have a job to do,” said the sheriff, who grew up in El Paso, in an interview conducted entirely in Spanish, the hybrid language prevalent along much of the border. He worked in the Texas oil fields before oil prices fell in the 1980s.
“I thought to myself that I needed something that was going to be there,” he said, “like law enforcement or funeral work.”
Now, as the death toll rises, Sheriff Carrillo finds out he’s doing a bit of both.
Most of the migrants come from three Central American countries, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, although the sheriff also recently found the bodies of Ecuadorians and Mexicans.
Unlike those seeking asylum in other places, those making the stealth trip to this part of West Texas are what law enforcement officials along the border call “Title 42.” , in reference to a Trump-era policy that allows authorities to carry out rapid evictions during the Coronavirus pandemic. While President Biden has vowed for months to lift Title 42, he recently announced that he is preserving it as Delta’s contagious variant is sending cases skyrocketing across the country.
After being sent to Mexico, many migrants simply try their luck again, sometimes in unusually remote places in the Chihuahuan Desert. More than 200,000 migrants were detained along the border in July, a 13% increase from the previous month and the second highest number on record, according to border patrol figures. Of those arrested last month, 27% had already been detained.
Migrant deaths, a gruesome reality for decades, are increasing across the border.
In Arizona, the remains of 127 migrants were found in the first half of this year, up from 96 in the same period of 2020, according to Humane Borders, a human rights group that documents the deaths using the data. from the Pima County office. Medical examiner in Tucson.
In the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas, 69 bodies of migrants were found from October to July, up from 57 during the same period a year earlier, according to border patrol figures. The agency’s Del Rio area in Texas jumped even further, from 34 to 71 corps.
In Sheriff Carrillo’s border part, some die of heatstroke or dehydration, left behind by smugglers guiding groups of border workers.
But as the Sheriff explained, there are many ways to die in the wilderness.
In one case, at the end of July, he received a call around 3 a.m. An Ecuadorian migrant was killed by an eighteen-wheeled vehicle as she attempted to cross Interstate 10 near Van Horn County headquarters.
Only teeth and a few body parts were recovered, he said, examining photos of the gruesome accident. “No quedó mas nada”, he added. There was nothing else left.
In another grim case, Sheriff Carrillo was called to the site of an empty water tank on a cattle ranch, where he found a migrant who had hanged himself from a mesquite.
“He came all this way just to find the tank empty,” the sheriff said. “What would have been going on in his head at that point?” “
Such questions seemed to haunt Sheriff Carrillo as he stared at the stack of manila envelopes on his desk. Each envelope, he said, contained details of a migrant who died in his county this year.
Culberson County, like other backcountry counties in Texas, cannot afford its own medical examiner. The sheriff’s department therefore takes the bodies to El Paso, about 160 miles to the west, where authorities charge about $ 3,500 for each autopsy.
At the same time, Sheriff Carrillo’s prison is so full of smugglers that he has had to start refusing those handed to him by state soldiers or National Guard personnel who are part of the crackdown on Mr. Abbott’s immigration.
“When someone shows up with a criminal, I don’t take them,” Sheriff Carrillo said. “There is no more space to sleep.
Refusing criminals is not what Sheriff Carrillo had in mind when he joined the police. He projects an image of law and order, reinforced by photos on his shelf with Texas Republicans like Mr. Abbott and Rick Perry, the former energy secretary and former governor.
But Sheriff Carrillo, a Democrat from a predominantly Hispanic county worn by President Biden in the 2020 election, is also known for taking positions that can make him something of an outlier.
In 2017, Sheriff Carrillo was criticized by Tories when President Donald J. Trump concluded that a border patrol officer was murdered after he was found with a head wound along a stretch of the Interstate 10.
“They had this account that ‘bad men’ crossed the border and attacked our law enforcement, and that is not what happened,” said the sheriff, citing evidence that the officer had fallen to the bottom of a culvert.
After FBI agents interviewed more than 650 people and found no evidence of homicide, the pressure on the sheriff eased. He was named this year to the board of directors of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, a distinction in an organization where Hispanics, on the verge of becoming the state’s largest ethnic group, remain gravely under-represented.
Sheriff Carrillo said many of his counterparts, especially those in counties inside Texas, were curious about what the border looked like these days. He said he tried not to water down his answers.
“All these bodies deserve an investigation,” said the sheriff, calling the dead migrants “esta pobre gente inocente” – poor innocent people.
Still, Sheriff Carrillo admitted that the growing death toll plagued small departments like his, and that facing so many deaths caused him to consider retiring.
Her phone keeps ringing with calls about the bodies. One week, it is a breeder who checks his water pipes, the next it is bighorn sheep hunters who spot a corpse.
“I am no longer a young man,” he said. “I didn’t know we were going to be bombarded by this crisis. “
The sheriff said he knew his goal of holding smugglers accountable remained elusive. In the meantime, he hopes to offer the families of deceased migrants some form of closure.
Many of the remains do not have identification, so he posts details of some of the cases on his personal Facebook page. He was contacted by people from all over Latin America, desperate to learn about their loved ones.
In one case, a woman in California asked if he had encountered the body of her brother, who had an owl tattoo on his leg and often wore a Chicago White Sox cap. Using this information, the sheriff was able to confirm that the remains of a migrant found in June were those of a 28-year-old man from the Mexican state of Veracruz – the woman’s brother.
“We were able to bring the body back to the family,” the sheriff said. “At least we could do it for them. “
On Sheriff Carrillo’s desk, near the manila envelopes with information about the bodies he carries on the department’s new stretcher, is another pile of documents: appeals for help from American consulates. central to find migrants who disappeared when crossing the border.
“These people are out there somewhere,” he said. “I hope that one day we will find them.
[ad_2]
Source link