#border stories

Kristian Hernandez is a reporter for The Monitor covering crime and immigration. He’s originally from El Paso, TX, but he’s been living in McAllen for two years. In that time, he’s twice discovered the bodies of people who had crossed the border illegally. Both times, sources informed him that there was a dead body, and gave him a description of where to look. And, both times, Hernandez says he informed law enforcement agents, who did not go out to search for the bodies.

So he did. 

And in both cases, Hernandez found them, and called law enforcement to pick them up. Since then, he says, Border Patrol has launched the “Missing Migrant” initiative in the Rio Grande Valley – to recover and identify the bodies of migrants who entered the country illegally. 

But Hernandez says the experience forever changed how he sees the border and the attitude some here have toward migrant deaths. “There’s very little… compassion when it comes to understanding that these migrants are people just like you and I,” he says. “They’re someone’s mother, someone’s father, someone’s brother or sister. And I think, maybe because all of this that’s been surrounding the talk about the border, I think it’s pushed people to think that way, or feel that way… [to feel] so separated from that reality that these are human beings and that their death is the same as anyone’s death.“ 

- Ravenna, Samantha & Lulu

Along the Rio Grande river in Roma Texas, Border Patrol discovers the artifacts of unathorized immigration: a pair of children’s plastic shoes, a toothbrush, a baby bottle, socks. In this part of the Rio Grande Valley, Central Americans fleeing violence have overtaken Mexicans as the largest demographic coming into the country illegally. One mother, travelling with her teenage son, began to cry as she detailed how the gangs in her native El Salvador were trying to recruit her son. She was detained by border patrol agents on a dirt road running parallel to the river. She says she will never go back to El Salvador.

- Lulu

José rose before the sun, when the sea was still breathing in its sleep.Maria lay on her side, one arm curved protectively around Josué, whose small chest fluttered like a bird beneath her hand. José stood for a moment in the doorway, watching them. The child’s mouth opened and closed as if he were already practicing a language he did not yet know. Maria stirred.“You’ll be back before dark,” she…