Rob O'Dell, Daniel González and Jill Castellano

azcentral.com | The Desert Sun | USA TODAY NETWORK

Across sandy Texas scrubland, along swift-moving California canals, in searing Arizona deserts and within remote New Mexico canyons, the bodies of hundreds of immigrants who died illegally crossing the southwestern border with Mexico are found each year.

Border Patrol agents encounter some of the dead, and count them in the agency's annual report that constitutes the only official reckoning of the death toll.

But an investigation by the USA TODAY NETWORK has found many migrant deaths are never accounted for — including when bodies are discovered by sheriff’s deputies, police, ranchers, hikers and humanitarian groups.

Illegal crossings along the southwestern border have claimed 7,209 lives over the past 20 years, according to official Border Patrol statistics, but the actual number is far higher.

A USA TODAY NETWORK investigation found federal authorities largely fail to count border crossers when their remains are recovered by local authorities, and even local counts are often incomplete.

Network reporters spent nine months attempting to build the most complete count ever of border-crosser deaths in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas from 2012 to 2016, to reveal how many are missed. That effort found many more deaths than the Border Patrol's official number. In three of those states, the USA TODAY NETWORK found anywhere from 25 percent to nearly 300 percent more migrant deaths over five years.

But a complete accounting proved elusive. Why? Because many local authorities responsible for investigating deaths on or near the border don’t track border-crosser deaths.

Information on migrant deaths in Texas is incomplete or unavailable in many counties, so the true number is even higher than the USA TODAY NETWORK's count. What’s more, the investigation found no central governmental, academic or non-profit entity that tracks all border deaths, beyond those encountered by the Border Patrol.

In an attempt to count all migrant deaths since 2012, the network requested information from more than 35 medical examiners, counties, sheriff's offices and justices of the peace.

This under-reporting occurs in each of the four states that border Mexico. But it is acute in Texas, where a spike in immigrants without documentation and families fleeing poverty and violence in Central America has caused border-crosser deaths to soar in recent years. In Brooks County, Texas, the bodies of unidentified border crossers were, until a few years ago,buried in mass graves. Some other Texas counties continue to bury unknown migrants in unmarked graves.

MORE:Migrants, and the wall that won't stop them

What is clear is this: Hundreds of border deaths involving migrants were not included in official Border Patrol statistics over the past five years, from 2012 to 2016. In New Mexico, for example, the number of migrant deaths found by the network was nearly four times higher than the official count, while in California there were 60 percent more deaths than the Border Patrol reported. In Arizona, the number of deaths found by the USA TODAY NETWORK was 25 percent higher for the five-year period, but some years it was 100 percent higher.

The lack of a full accounting of border deaths diminishes the full impact of the humanitarian crisis.

The Border Patrol’s lack of effort or interest in determining the actual number of dead migrants, and where the deaths occur, deprives policymakers of information that could save lives,through enforcement efforts or changes to immigration laws.

Some Americans may not care about preserving the lives of people who are breaking immigration laws. But the lack of an accurate count deprives the country of another opportunity.When border crossers are found dead, that means they were not caught by agents while they were alive. Information about those crossings could more accurately prioritize where to add enforcement, and where to begin building President Donald Trump’s planned border wall.

The investigation comes after the network's report "The Wall" revealed earlier in 2017 that a full border wall would come at a cost never previously explored. In Texas, which currently has only about 60 miles of border fencing, a full border wall could disrupt about 5,000 parcels of mostly private property. Even as wall prototypes are being built, no cost-benefit analysis has been made public to reveal how many crossers a wall would stop, and at what price.

The border death data reveals yet another gap in the country's information about border security.

Immigrant advocates say past policy has raised to the death toll by pushing migrants,some aided by smugglers who profit off them,to cross some of the most inhospitable terrain in the United States.

“A hallmark of civilized society is that, death statistics you keep track of with the intent to decrease those deaths or take policy measures to help whatever the issue is,” said Gregory Hess, chief medical examiner of the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. His office counts the deaths of border crossers in Arizona and publicly reports the data.

Robin Reineke, an anthropologist and co-founder of the Tucson-based Colibri Center for Human Rights, said “vigorous ignorance” of the lives lost lets public officials avoid addressing the issue.

“I’m disturbed by the fact that this massive loss of life on the border has been going on for nearly 20 years … and we still don’t have a conclusive count, and we haven’t really invested the resources in getting anywhere,” said Reineke, whose non-profit helps identify the remains of migrants who die while illegally crossing the southwestern border.

The remains of border crossers that go unreported are less likely to be identified, and therefore less likely to be returned to their relatives.

“Politics aside, these (people) are somebody’s family. ... That family will never know what happened to their loved one,” said Kate Spradley, founder of Operation Identification, a Texas non-profit that locates and identifies migrant remains so they can be returned to their families.

TEXAS DEATHS

OFFICIAL COUNT: 1,080

USA TODAY NETWORK COUNT: 935

At 4:13 p.m. on Christmas Eve 2015, Justice of the Peace Mary Ann Luedecke was called out to investigate the death of a migrant.

A rancher checking water supplies for his cattle had found the body, a young male lying face up in a brown pasture about 20 yards from a ranch road in rural Jeff Davis County.

The diamond-shaped county in west Texas has a population of about 54,000 people and touches the Mexican border at only one point.

The border crosser had been wearing a hooded baseball jacket, two pairs of jeans, several pairs of socks, and a black belt with a rooster imprinted on a square metal belt buckle, according to records obtained by the USA TODAY NETWORK through a records request.

There was no identification with the body, but Luedecke did find a 100 quetzal bill in his pocket, suggesting the boy was from Guatemala. “That is why he was affectionately called the Guatemalan kid,” Luedecke said in an interview.

An autopsy determined the boy was between 12 and 15 years old and that he had died of hypothermia. He was buried in a pauper’s grave and remains unidentified.

As thousands of migrants have fled violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in recent years, Texas has become a main entry point for illegal immigrants from Central America.

SPECIAL REPORT:Pipeline of children: A border crisis

The deaths in south Texas are a “slowly accumulating mass disaster,” said Spradley, who is also an associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University.

Texas is also the single biggest obstacle to a conclusive count of migrant border-crossers' deaths. The state is a fragmented mess of overlapping rules and responsibilities, where finding the bodies requires navigating a system of poor and rural towns and counties, along with justices of the peace.

Many of these jurisdictions don't track migrant deaths. Some have buried remains in shallow graves with other crossers, or unmarked pauper’s graves. Some do not collect DNA samples, as required by state law, or do not conduct autopsies to determine a cause of death.

Spradley called the state’s tracking of border deaths “like a Third World country.”

The USA TODAY NETWORK found fewer deaths than the Border Patrol because information on migrant death in Texas was incomplete or unavailable.For example, Cameron County, a major border county that includes Brownsville, said it had no available data on any migrants deaths. Neighboring Hidalgo County averages 50 migrants deaths a year.

But the official numbers from the Border Patrol don't always add up, either.

The network found that in some areas, the number of dead migrants reported by the Border Patrol was impossibly low. In fiscal year 2012, for example,the Border Patrol counted 144 deaths in its Rio Grande Valley Sector, which covers south Texas, including Brooks County. But by Brooks County's own count, 129 migrants died there in 2012. And the same sector includes the high-traffic areas surrounding Brownsville and McAllen, where dozens of migrants are found dead each year.

Brooks County is a 70-mile hike from the border. But the distance hasn't prevented it from becoming a killing field for migrants who've made their way from Central America, through Mexico and into the United States. On average, 80 migrants have died there every year since 2012.

The hilly terrain is covered with loose coastal sand, gnarled live oaks, spindly mesquite trees, thickets and tall grass.

Migrants use massive power lines to guide themselves through Texas ranchlands while skirting a nearby Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias.

"People make it across and are driven north towards the checkpoints," Spradley said. "One of the major checkpoints is in Falfurrias. And they’re told to walk around the checkpoints and they will be picked up on the other side."

The trek across ranches, often in triple-digit heat, can take three to four days for migrants who have been held in stash houses and haven’t been properly fed or hydrated for days before their journey.

The migrants have no knowledge of the terrain and the physical and navigational challenges it presents.

“As harsh as the terrain is in Arizona, you have mountains that can guide you north,” Spradley said. “In Texas, it is so flat … you have scrub brush and trees everywhere, there’s nothing to orient you. And then when Border Patrol come up, they are told to scatter. ... They get lost. They can walk around on the same two-mile track for three days and then will just die of dehydration and exposure.”

Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez’s heavy cowboy boots kicked up fine, white sand with every step as he walked through a ranch near the Falfurrias Border Patrol checkpoint.

Martinez said he has seen dead migrants within 50 feet of a road, too disoriented or delirious to realize how close they were to help.

Martinez points to debris that shows migrants have been there recently. There are water bottles that smell as if they were recently spray-painted black or green, to hide the reflection. There’s the jacket, either a woman's or a small man's, underwear and hundreds of footprints in the white sand pointing west under the towering powerlines.

“There’s definitely traffic out here,” Martinez said. “This is the most trash I’ve seen. There has got to be a trail close by.”

The owner of the ranch has built wooden ladders into his fence line and attached rebar to poles to form steps to protect the fence from being trampled by the hundreds of migrants who cross the property.

For California, most of Arizona and New Mexico, the USA TODAY NETWORK was able to obtain data on deaths that included names, age, gender, race, nationality, condition of the body and the GPS coordinates of where the body was found. But for most counties in Texas, the only "data" was the number of the deaths that year. Some counties, like Cameron County, and some justices of the peace can't or won’t even produce a number.

When asked for more detailed information on border crossers, officials in some Texas counties said it would cost thousands of dollars.

Cameron County wanted more than $2,500 for detailed information.

Dr. Corinne Stern, the medical examiner for Webb County, which takes in bodies from 10 counties, said officials there would have to pull all autopsy reports and enter data by hand. The county charges $25 per autopsy report, plus fees for research time, which a lawyer estimated would cost more than $5,000.

“So how much do you want to spend for your story?” Stern asked. “I don’t have the staff to pull that.”

Texas law requires that migrants' remains receive an autopsy or anthropological exam, have a DNA sample taken, and receive a death certificate. If the remains are buried, the law mandates that the location of the body and all records relating to it must be kept for no less than 10 years.

“The laws are not adhered to, but nobody seems to care,” Spradley said.

Out of the seven counties studied by the Forensic Border Coalition for an upcoming technical research paper, six did not fully follow the law, Spradley said.

Webb County's Stern said there are counties or justices of the peace who don’t even send their border crossers for an autopsy as required by law.

“It’s an expense," Stern said. "Especially for these smaller counties, autopsies are their single-biggest expense."

On top of that, some counties allow the remains of migrants to be buried in unmarked graves. Without a marked grave and a DNA sample, the dead can never be properly identified, Spradley said.

Starr County sends unidentified remains to a funeral home that tries to identify them and, if unsuccessful, buries them in unmarked graves.

Cameron County buries its unidentified bodies in a cemetery in another county without marking their location.

Recently there was a DNA match for one of the 35 people buried in the cemetery, Spradley said. “Which one do you exhume in a cemetery of 35 people? You don’t know because you didn’t write it down. So you can’t do anything.”

Even when graves are marked, the markers are often temporary and they degrade or are lost over time. “Our biggest problem is trying to find where people are buried because nobody writes that down and it's all based on memory,” she said.

Brooks County for several years contracted with a funeral home that buried multiple migrants in the same grave or body bag, sparking outrage and protests over what critics called mass graves. Some migrants were buried in milk crates, trash bags, burlap sacks and red biohazard bags. As many as five migrants were found in a single grave.

Spradley helped exhume some of those bodies using ground-penetrating radar to find the remains.

That work continues in Brooks County and elsewhere in south Texas, with the Forensic Border Coalition mapping cemeteries and documenting how many migrants die per year and where they are buried. Spradley exhumed and identified 13 bodies in Starr County this year and plans more in South Texas next year.

Bodies that are not fully skeletonized when they are exhumed are put in Texas State’s body decomposition facility. The open-air enclosure, where the remains decompose in body bags, has a chain-link cover to keep out vultures. Once most of the flesh has decomposed, the remains are placed in industrial vats to soften any remaining tissue so it can be removed.

Boxes holding more than 220 skeletons line a room in the lab. Another storage facility houses more. “We have many years of exhumations in front of us,” Spradley said.

“Dying in New Mexico or Arizona is preferable to Texas. You have a much better chance of being identified," she said.

NEW MEXICO DEATHS

OFFICIAL COUNT (INCLUDES EL PASO): 6

USA TODAY NETWORK COUNT: 23

The day Lynette Resendiz’s brother-in-law called, he’d been lost for four days and feared for his life.

He had crossed the border planning to join them in North Carolina, where he would find work.

“He was in a ravine. … He could see lights in the distance and he was going to try to make it to the lights,” Resendiz said.

The battery on his cellphone was low and so he was going to turn it off and wait for nightfall, when he would head to a ranch and drink water set out for the cattle, she said.

They urged him to call 911.

“He said, ‘I don’t care if immigration gets me. I don’t want to die out here,’ ” she said. “That was the last we heard from him.”

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Resendiz immediately set out to find her brother-in-law, not knowing his location. She traveled through Texas and New Mexico to Arizona, looking everywhere he might have crossed. She called the Mexican consulate for information.

“I just wanted to get him, period,” Resendiz said. “Either alive, or if he had passed away, I wanted to find him so he wasn’t out there alone.”

Border Patrol agents found his body, at the bottom of Indian Peak Canyon in Hidalgo County, in the bootheel of New Mexico.

Records from the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator show that Victor Manuel Resendiz Resendiz was found July 19, 2015. Border crossers who had been captured told the agents of a body in the canyon and said they had taken his shirt, shoes and “drug backpack.”

Months after the frantic phone call from her brother-in-law, Lynette Resendiz was contacted by the Mexican consulate telling her that his body had been found. The remains were sent to her in North Carolina months later in a box with ashes and pieces of bones coming out of it.

“It was disrespectful,” she said. “They did it like they didn’t care.”

Because his body was found by Border Patrol, Victor Manuel Resendiz Resendiz likely appeared in the federal government’s official count. But many more in New Mexico go uncounted because state officials don't track whether people who died were border crossers, even though the state collects information that would reveal it.

The Border Patrol estimates during the past five fiscal years six migrants died in its El Paso Sector, which covers all of New Mexico plus the area around El Paso.

But the USA TODAY NETWORK’s review of data from the New Mexico Medical Investigator, found at least 23 migrant deaths during the same period just in New Mexico.

Even in an area with few border crossings — attributable to its remoteness in New Mexico and border fencing near El Paso — the more-accurate number of deaths was nearly four times higher than the number reported by the Border Patrol. And that's only the bodies that were found.

The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator fought the network’s attempts to review death records for its count. Only after the USA TODAY NETWORK filed a complaint with the state's attorney general, accusing the medical investigator of violating New Mexico public records law, were the records made available.

The Office of the Medical Investigator rebuffed requests to speak on the record about its handling of border deaths.

Medical examiners in other border states said it's not difficult to identify the bodies of border crossers.

Sgt. Eric Frazier, supervising deputy coroner in the Imperial County (California) Coroner's Office, said location, circumstances and items found with a body can establish that it's a migrant.

Hess, the Pima County Medical Examiner, said staff members in his office base their assumptions on similar evidence.

“About 96-97 percent of the time, our initial assumption turns out to be correct,” he said. “At least for us that hasn’t posed a great challenge.”

ARIZONA DEATHS

OFFICIAL COUNT: 636

USA TODAY NETWORK COUNT: 795

A horseback rider made a grisly discovery in September in the desert near Cowlick Village on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation: skeletal remains.

The only items with the bones were a pair of sneakers and shoe covers made of carpet.

The slip-on covers, used to help conceal tracks from Border Patrol agents, appear to have been purchased in Mexico before crossing the border.

“It hides their distinctive shoe tread. The Border Patrol calls them sneaky-feet,” said Hess, who studied the skeletal remains at his office in Tucson. "Strong evidence that this is a foreign national.”

Other clues that identify border crossers are camouflage clothing, religious items, foreign currency, backpacks, and black water bottles, which are used because they don’t reflect light.

The shoe covers and a few other hints were all Hess needed to classify Case 2186 as a migrant death. The John Doe, estimated to be between 16 and 20 years old, appeared to have died three to six months before he was discovered, Hess said.

“We don’t have any known missing persons reports from tribal members that are missing that are consistent with these remains,” Hess said. “It’s likely the remains of someone who was traveling through the desert and died at that location."

Pima County has for nearly two decades set the standard for local government reporting on migrant deaths, since officials first took note of the rising body count.

“We received so many of these remains, people started asking question about it,” Hess said.

Tucson began to count crossers in 2000 and has refined its system. Pima County makes the data public and partners with organizations such as the Colibri Center for Human Rights, which collects DNA and other information needed to help find missing migrants from families who might be reluctant to provide such information to government authorities. The center has offices inside the medical examiner's office.

Hess said other areas seeing increases in migrants deaths could do the same.

But even when local governments, like Arizona’s Pima County and California’s Imperial County, put in the effort to account for the deaths of border crossers, it isn’t necessarily reflected in the Border Patrol’s official figures. Because Case 2186 was discovered by a tribal member, it would not have shown up in the Border Patrol’s count.

Still, there are gaps in Arizona's counting as well, in Yuma County and on the Barry Goldwater Air Force bombing range.

Yuma County doesn't track migrant deaths because "they are all treated like any other case," said Alfonso Zavala, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

Meanwhile, the bombing range is off-limits to humanitarian groups that search for missing migrants and often find as many bodies as the Border Patrol.

San Diego-based Aguilas del Desierto, which conducts searches in California and Arizona, recovered 12 remains during two searches in May and June on the Goldwater bombing range.

The remains were found within a five-mile radius, indicating there may be many more bodies out there, said Jose Genis, a trained emergency medical technician who volunteers with the group. But after the 12 remains were found, Air Force officials, citing safety concerns and regulations, stopped allowing the group to search, Genis said.

CALIFORNIA DEATHS

OFFICIAL COUNT: 63

USA TODAY NETWORK COUNT: 102

On Dec. 20, 2016, a dead migrant was found with an unusual item for the middle of a desert: a bright-orange life jacket.

The Asian man had drowned in the All-American Canal, an 80-mile waterway that runs parallel along the U.S.-Mexico border carrying Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley.

The canal has a deceptively swift current and the man likely understood the danger, hence the life jacket.

Even with “DANGER” signs sporadically placed along the canal, at least 38 crossers have drowned there since 2010. Five crossers, including the man found in December 2016, have yet to be identified.

Authorities have little to go on to identify the man. Investigators believe he was between 30 and 50 years old, but couldn’t narrow it down more than that.

One thing was clear: He was a crosser. He wore a brown button-up shirt with the letters “CFE,” which stand for Comisión Federal de Electricidad, Mexico’s electric company. He was layered in two brown sweaters and khaki pants, and his blue shoes were covered in mud.

With no more leads, authorities entered the man’s information in the database of National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, hoping that someday someone will recognize him.

Imperial County meticulously tracks unidentified migrants and, at the request of the USA TODAY NETWORK, it assembled a list of all migrants who died in the county. San Diego County also systematically tracks migrants who die there, although there were only 27 who died between 2012 and 2016, data from the medical examiner’s office there shows.

Drowning in the All-American Canal was the most common way for migrants to die in Imperial County from 2012 through 2016, as 33 percent of the 78 migrants who died there drowned. Including other irrigation canals in Imperial County increases the percentage of migrants who drowned there to 45 percent.

Frazier, the supervising deputy coroner, said it is the current that makes the All-American Canal so deadly. It flows at nearly 6 mph, is very deep and has steep sides that make it difficult to escape.

“From what I have heard from family members is that it looks very deceiving, the current. I, of course, never tried it myself,” Frazier said. “If you have a group of nine who cross over and one of them he drowns, sometimes we speak with the ones who made it and that has been relayed many times. They thought that they can make it.”

Understanding where and how migrants die can reveal surprising patterns and lead to policy changes that save lives. Border Patrol and the states of New Mexico and Texas could analyze data there to better deploy resources to catch more migrants and save lives.

A 2006 U.S. Government Accountability Office report said the Border Patrol needed to improve its methods to accurately record deaths. The GAO report said migrant deaths were undercounted and accurate numbers would allow the Border Patrol to improve planning and its allocation of resources.

The Imperial County Irrigation District spent more than $1 million installing lifesaving buoys and bilingual warning signs.

Even with those measures, the deaths haven’t stopped. If they make it past the canal, crossers face rugged terrain and harsh weather.

“A lot of these people have been, they’ve probably been traveling for a while … and they’re probably dehydrated,” Frazier said. “The trip is more physically demanding than what they thought. They might have one water bottle, but that’s just not gonna cut it especially in the hotter months. The terrain is really brutal, too.”

Frazier said the best way to curb illegal crossings is to make community service announcements in Mexico.

“The coyotes who are bringing them here, they’re lying to them,” Frazier said. “They’re telling them that they’re gonna get here quickly and that it’s not harmful, dangerous, and they’re extorting most of these people and getting thousands of dollars probably per person. And the average citizen doesn’t really know the dangers.”

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David Perez Romero had already been caught twice by the Border Patrol when he called his 30-year-old sister Norma Perez in Northern California in November 2015. He told her he was going to try and cross illegally again near Jacumba Hot Springs, a town in Imperial County off Interstate 8 close to Mexico.

“I don’t think I am going to have as bad luck as before,” Perez recalled her 22-year-old brother telling her. “I am sure I am going to be able to cross.”

She hasn’t heard from him since. Perez said it is painful not knowing what happened to him for more than two years.

“He could be one of those cases where the body has been found, but not identified.” she said.

Pull the slider on the map to see the border deaths for each year.

A MISSION FOR BORDER PATROL

The Border Patrol, which is responsible for preventing illegal immigration, drug smuggling and terrorism along the borders between official ports of entry, is best situated to document migrant deaths.

But the Border Patrol only records the deaths of migrants encountered by its agents, or cases where it has been called to assist other agencies in recovering bodies.

“In the last couple years there has been a big divergence in the number of undocumented border crossers that we have examined ... and what they report,” said Hess of Pima County, noting the problem has grown worse over the past four years.

Border Patrol counted only about half the number of border deaths that Pima County examined in fiscal year 2016, he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that includes the Border Patrol, responded in a statement that border-death statistics reported annually to Congress since 2008 are not intended to be comprehensive.

"CBP has been clear about the limitations and scope of the data and information we provide about deaths related to illegal cross border activity. Our reporting of deaths reflects what agents can verify," the statement said. "The Border Patrol doesn’t include data from local authorities because there is no universal method or requirement for collecting border death data that can be verified."

The Border Patrol said it also tries to prevent migrant deaths. Agents rescued 3,221 people in fiscal year 2017, more than twice as many as the year before. Rescue data is used to help determine where to deploy personnel, equipment, technology and infrastructure to stop illegal border crossings as quickly as possible.

"Migrants place themselves at risk by attempting to cross illegally into the U.S. either by swimming through the Rio Grande River, or walking long hours and sometimes for days in rugged terrain in extreme temperatures without enough water and food," the statement said.

The Border Patrol recently created a program intended to help relatives locate missing migrants by sharing information with foreign governments, local and state authorities, and humanitarian groups.

The program was started in the Tucson Sector in 2015, expanded to the Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley sectors in Texas in 2016 and is now being rolled out to all sectors along the southwestern border.

"At the end of the day, we just want people to find their loved ones. We don’t want anybody to die at the border," said Carlos Diaz, the Border Patrol's spokesman.

Reineke of the Colibri Center for Human Rights said the Border Patrol’s published numbers are “completely meaningless.”

They also highlight the failure of the agency’s 20-year strategy of “prevention through deterrence” — using security and fencing in cities while leaving the most inhospitable sections of the border as a geographic deterrent to illegal entry.

“You can’t call any strategy successful when it has led to the deaths of thousands of people,” she said.

One of those deaths was 41-year-old Alberto Apodaca Machado, who was found under a mesquite bush not far from the Mexico border by cowboys working cattle in Hildalgo County in New Mexico's bootheel. His death likely was not counted as a border crosser because he wasn't found by Border Patrol and because New Mexico doesn't track border deaths.

The USA TODAY NETWORK independently verified Apodaca Machado was a border crosser through a cousin, J. Apodaca, who lives in New Mexico and asked that his first name not be published.

After hearing his cousin was missing, he started his own search, calling 20 to 30 departments and entities. Apodaca managed to track down two migrants who were with his cousin, who had been caught by the Border Patrol and were being held in separate jails.

In phone calls from jail, they told Apodaca they had planned to follow a mountain range north to Interstate 10, a seven-day walk, but ran out of food and water. To survive, they drank their urine. But Alberto was sick, and wanted to reach a road in hopes of lighting a fire and being rescued by the Border Patrol. The other migrants left him behind.

Apodaca doubts he ever would have learned his cousin’s body was found if he hadn’t initiated his own search. After Apodaca received word that the body of his cousin had been found, he called his cousin’s mother in Mexico to deliver the news.

"I just wanted to get straight to the point,” he said. “Basically, she just crumbled on the phone.”

Spradley said something must be done to accurately count and identify the migrants who die crossing into the United States and fall through the cracks, like Apodaca Machado could have.

Not doing so is like letting them disappear twice, she said.

“Everyone wants to talk about border security or immigration reform, but nobody ever talks about the death toll,” she said. “Maybe it’s because they don’t want to, they don’t think about it, they’re not aware of it. Or maybe it’s purposeful because if it is tracked we will have to do something about it.”

Corpus Christi Caller-Times reporter Beatriz Alvarado and Arizona Republic reporter Rafael Carranza contributed to this article.