Thread: Scores of unnamed entrants lie here

Published: 09.22.2006

Scores of unnamed entrants lie here
By Stephanie Innes
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Holtville, Calif., resident Joe Marini talks about a local cemetary where hundreds of bodies of unknown illegal entrants who died crossing into the U.S. are buried.

Launch video
"For every new agent and every new mile of fence the smugglers come up with their creative and deadly responses."
Claudia Smith
Border activist
Editor's note: The Arizona Daily Star will publish a four-day investigative report beginning Sunday that examines the feasibility of sealing the U.S.-Mexican border. Look for stories and photos in the Star this week of the places and people our team of journalists discovered during their nearly 2,000-mile journey along the border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.
HOLTVILLE, Calif. — Among the 3,099 people known to have died while illegally crossing the southern border into the United States since 1998 is a group of John and Jane Does whose final resting place is a muddy field here.
The paupers' graveyard behind Holtville's Terrace Park Cemetery is operated by Imperial County and now has more than 350 white crosses, most of them for unidentified illegal entrants who died while trying to cross from Mexico into California by foot. Some drowned. Some perished in triple-digit heat. Others died from unknown causes — their bodies were bones by the time they were found.
Holtville is in the U.S. Border Patrol's El Centro Sector, an area in the Imperial Valley of Southern California that has experienced an increase in illegal-entrant traffic and deaths since the late 1990s.
Included in the tally of 3,099 dead are 489 people who died in the El Centro Sector while trying to illegally cross into California from Mexico, most of them on foot.
The message on the crosses, erected above county-issued concrete slabs, is a simple one — "No Olvidado," which means "not forgotten."
The surge in deaths began after 1994, when border security tightened in the San Diego Sector and illegal-entrant traffic moved eastward into the desert and mountain areas near Calexico, Calif., which is part of the El Centro Sector. Holtville is an agricultural community about 12 miles northeast of Calexico.
Trying to seal the border, whether it's with 700 miles or 2,000 miles of fence, will push more illegal entrants into the most brutally harsh terrain, where building walls and patrolling roads is all but impossible, said Claudia Smith , director of the California's Rural Legal Assistance Foundation's Border Project. Rough desert areas east of Calexico that have hot temperatures, rocky hillsides and giant boulders could become the sites of many more deaths in the future, Smith warned.
"For every new Border Patrol agent and every new mile of fence, like it or not, the smugglers come up with their creative and not to mention deadly responses by taking migrants through even more remote areas where the possibility of being rescued is virtually nil," she said.
Smith's group helps the Imperial County Coroner's Office, which shoulders the cost of burying the dead entrants, by aiding in the identification of bodies so they can be sent back to Mexico. For the bodies that remain in the United States, Smith's group decorates the Holtville graves and returns each November on the Mexican Day of the Dead.
Sixty-one-year-old Joe Marini, who lives beside the cemetery, has lived in Holtville for 50 years and says it has become more commonplace for illegal entrants to die of heat exhaustion in recent years.
"The U.S. Border Patrol is trying to save lives. A lot of them (illegal entrants) die deaths that to me are senseless," said Marini, the owner of a lawn-service company who helps tend the graves when he has time.
"Personally, I think it's not going to stop. There are always going to be people who want to get out of Mexico. The problem is that a lot of them don't realize how bad it is. When they go across the desert they are asking for nothing but trouble."

Holtville, Calif., resident Joe Marini talks about a local cemetary where hundreds of bodies of unknown illegal entrants who died crossing into the U.S. are buried.

Launch video
"For every new agent and every new mile of fence the smugglers come up with their creative and deadly responses."
Claudia Smith
Border activist

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/147836

The message on the crosses, erected above county-issued concrete slabs, is a simple one — "No Olvidado," which means "not forgotten."

Although I am sorry that folk have died...the reality is that they were breaking the law, on their own responsibility.

The message on the crosses should be "Learn...stay home".