The most perilous part of the journey for many migrants seeking to enter the United States from central America comes not when they are on their way to the Texas border, but once they have passed it.

Falfurrias, with a population about 5,000, is 75 miles north of the border along Interstate 69-C, the main gateway to central Texas. Situated amid ranch land and an hour’s drive from the nearest big city, it might be a relatively uneventful place – were it not for its detention centre and the immigration checkpoint about 15 miles south.

Smugglers drive the immigrants near the checkpoint then let them out, to find their way around it on foot through a thorny terrain of private ranches in temperatures that often exceed 100F in summer. Some get lost and fall ill and here their journeys end, dying somewhere in the mostly-shadeless expanse of nearly 1,000 square miles that makes up Brooks County.

Despite a dramatic rise in the number of unaccompanied children trying to cross the Rio Grande river into Texas, the overall number of US border patrol apprehensions – one indicator of the flow of illegal immigration – is vastly down compared with the figures from a decade ago.

But the number of migrants found dead on ranches north of the Texas border appears to have risen in recent years. Last year 87 bodies were discovered, and 129 in 2012. Many are still unidentified.

This month, for the second successive year, scientists and students from Baylor University and the University of Indianapolis spent days exhuming the remains of unidentified migrants from a cemetery in Falfurrias. They found mass graves with remains in rubbish bags, shopping bags, or even not in containers at all, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.



In one case, a single body bag contained the bones of three people.

“To me it’s just as shocking as the mass grave that you would picture in your head, and it’s just as disrespectful,” Dr Krista Latham, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Indianapolis, told the Caller-Times.

Eddie Canales, an activist with the South Texas Human Rights Center, believes the deaths are in part a consequence of the US government’s push to tighten up the border, which he says has led migrants to attempt riskier paths in their efforts to evade detection and encouraged them to pay smugglers who often have links to criminal gangs.

Canales is working with local ranchers to place 20 water stations in about a dozen locations, hoping migrants will come across them and be able to avoid the deadly consequences of severe dehydration.

“More people are getting lost,” he told the Guardian. “Migration is down but the deaths are increasing.

“Because of the policy to apprehend as many as you can, you’re forcing people to cross into areas that are very dangerous … we’re letting migrants support the cartel business of smuggling.”