LATIF NASSER: Hey, it's Latif. This is our third episode of our trilogy about the US-Mexico border that we initially ran back in early 2018. The first episode was from the border community's perspective, second episode was from the government perspective. This episode's mostly from the migrant's perspective. At the end, we have an update looking at whether and the degree to which these issues from the Trump era are still around in the Biden era.

LATIF: And before we start, quick content warning: this episode includes graphic descriptions of human remains and may not be suitable for younger listeners.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

BRUCE ANDERSON: So we come back here where you see yet another case from early 2018.

LATIF: Oh and this—oh, what? What is—what are those hairs? Or what ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: That's dried muscle.

LATIF: Oh, that's muscle.

BRUCE ANDERSON: The closest I can—the closest thing I can say is the muscle dries out so it gets stringy and shredded.

LATIF: Okay, wait wait. Let's—actually, let's just start from the beginning. Okay, so—so we are in what room was this again?

BRUCE ANDERSON: We're in the special procedures room.

LATIF: Okay.

BRUCE ANDERSON: Of the Pima County Office of The Medical Examiner. And what we're looking at here is a case of mostly skeletal remains.

LATIF: So we have a—we have a skull. We have a few—we have some parts of the ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: The spine.

LATIF: ... the spine it looks like, and then just two ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: And all three—all three major bones of the lower limbs. So the two thigh bones, the femurs, and the two tibias and the two fibulae. We know it's a male. He's an adult.

LATIF: Okay.

BRUCE ANDERSON: 20 to 30 to 40-year-old migrant. He came in in late January/early February. And animals found him. Maybe 50 percent of his skeleton is missing. His upper limbs and his pelvis and most of his spine are missing, and his hands and feet are missing. We have evidence too that a vulture was feeding—was feeding on the person.

LATIF: I—I don't know if this is ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: That's a beetle. That's a domestic beetle.

LATIF: That's a beetle?

BRUCE ANDERSON: That's called a hide beetle. They're—they're found globally.

LATIF: Right.

BRUCE ANDERSON: And these hide beetles specialize in eating dried, hard tissue.

LATIF: So he's still—he's still eating?

BRUCE ANDERSON: Yeah, he is.

LATIF: Wow.

BRUCE ANDERSON: He was in the body bag. He and his colony would have been on the body.

LATIF: Wow.

BRUCE ANDERSON: In the body bag. And although we try to get most of them off during our exam, you can see there's lots of little crevices where a single bug could—could be.

LATIF: Wow. Oh, wow that's so—yeah, wow.

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we present the final episode of our Border Trilogy.

JAD: With producers Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte. And this is episode three.

ROBERT: Which we're calling, "What Remains."

LATIF: Yeah, okay. So just to catch everyone up ...

JAD: Here's Latif.

LATIF: The person I was just talking to, his name is Bruce Anderson. He's a forensic anthropologist at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Arizona, which is where when they find a body of an unidentified migrant in the Sonoran Desert, that's where they bring them. And Bruce had been working there, you know, on and off since the 1980s, but he told me that it was only in the early 2000s that he started seeing, you know, just more and more and more of these migrant bodies being brought in.

BRUCE ANDERSON: And we're just crushed by the weight of all the dead and all the missing person's reports. And, you know, it's like working a mass disaster when people are still dying and planes are still crashing around you. And you throw your hands up in the air sometimes and you just think, "When's it gonna stop?"

LATIF: And it hasn't stopped. The number of bodies found last year was in the same range as the year before. The number of people crossing did go down after Donald Trump's inauguration, but traffic has basically rebounded. So people are still coming through the desert. They're not being deterred, which made us wonder is deterrence, that fundamental idea behind our current border policy, is it even possible? Now in some ways that's a policy question, which we talked about in our last episode, but it's also a human question.

MATT KIELTY: Is Jason still there?

JASON DE LEÓN: I'm still here.

LATIF: And that's what led us back to the person who we started this whole journey with, the anthropologist Jason De León.

MATT: All right, can you hear Latif too?

JASON DE LEÓN: I sure can. Good morning.

LATIF: Oh, good morning!

JASON DE LEÓN: Fantastic.

LATIF: Well, I feel like maybe we should just start off where we left off, which is that you were gonna tell us the story of—of Maricela.

JASON DE LEÓN: Sure, um ...

JAD: When was this, by the way?

JASON DE LEÓN: This would have been June of 2012.

JAD: Okay.

JASON DE LEÓN: So we had been about two weeks into the pig experiment, and ...

LATIF: This is a series of experiments where Jason and his team—mostly students—looked at how pigs decomposed in the desert in order to understand how people decompose in the desert.

JASON DE LEÓN: And it wasn't until about two weeks into this experiment where we were out hiking one day with a group of about nine people.

LATIF: Down in southern Arizona.

JASON DE LEÓN: And so on this particular day, on this trail that I had hiked many, many times, a student had run ahead to—to check stuff out and was taking pictures of us as we were walking up this hill. He turns around and starts yelling at us. He says, "Hey, you gotta come up here. Something has happened." So I threw my backpack down, and I race up this hill. And by the time I get up there, I see that he's kind of staring at this body that's just laying face down in the—in the dirt on this—on this trail.

LATIF: Like a fully intact body.

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: A woman's body.

JASON DE LEÓN: You could tell it was a woman because she had long hair. You know, she's wearing camouflage clothes, stretch pants, women's running shoes on, she's got a scrunchie around her wrist. But the rest of it, I mean, her body was incredibly bloated. I mean, to the point where it looked like it was about to—to pop from all of the gasses that had built up inside of her body cavity. I didn't know what to do at this point. I mean, you know, the students start walking up. I mean, these are young students. We had someone in the group who was 18, 19.

LATIF: For some of the students, this is the first time they've seen a dead body. One of them was crying.

JASON DE LEÓN: I tell everyone, I say, "Hey, look. You gotta go sit down and give me a second here to figure out what—what it is we're gonna do here."

LATIF: So first he called the police.

JASON DE LEÓN: We did that, and then we kind of had a conversation like, are we gonna photograph this person? Are we gonna record any information? Is this—are we still doing research right now?

LATIF: And Jason decided yeah, we should—we should document this.

JASON DE LEÓN: You know, we took some notes down. Gray-to-green discoloration. About what she was wearing. Brown-to-black discoloration of arms and legs.

LATIF: Took some pictures of the body.

JASON DE LEÓN: Her fingers have started to curl. Her ankles are swollen to the point that her sneakers seem ready to pop off. There is a steady hissing of intestinal gasses. And then it just got to the point where I was like, "Okay, this is enough. I don't wanna do this anymore."

LATIF: And so they covered her with a blanket because Jason noticed the birds.

JASON DE LEÓN: Circling overhead.

LATIF: Four turkey vultures. And so at that point they just sort of sat down and waited.

JASON DE LEÓN: For the police to come. The sheriff.

LATIF: An hour went by. Two, three, four.

JASON DE LEÓN: Just waiting with the body.

LATIF: It was about five hours in that a sheriff and three border patrol agents show up, and they had hiked three miles to get to Jason with a stretcher. And so they bring the stretcher. The sheriff puts on gloves. He asks them a few questions like, did you guys put the blanket on there? And then they roll her into this white body bag. And as the authorities do that, Jason—because she was face down, Jason gets to see her face for the first time. And so he writes a paragraph in his book, and it's pretty gruesome but I'm gonna—I'm gonna read to you the paragraph that he writes about in his book. "As her body turns, I see what is left of her face. It is frightening and unrecognizable as human. The mouth is a gnarled purple and black hole that obscures the rest of her features."

JASON DE LEÓN: "I can't see her eyes because the mouth is too hard to look away from. The skin around the lips is stretched out of shape, as though it had been melted. Her nose is smashed in and pushed up. She died face down, and the flesh on the front side of her skull has softened and contorted to fit around the dirt and rocks beneath her. The scene is a pastiche of metallic gray and pea green. Whatever beauty and humanity that once existed in her face has been replaced by a stone-colored ghoul, stuck in mid scream. It's a look you can never get away from."

JASON DE LEÓN: After this thing had happened, and it really just shook me in a lot of different ways.

LATIF: Jason says he just couldn't shake the question: who was this woman? How did she end up face down in the desert? So that night ...

ROBIN REINEKE: I remember Jason calling me.

LATIF: ... Jason called a friend of his, a woman named Robin Reineke.

ROBIN REINEKE: Him being really clearly shaken and, you know, asking for advice.

LATIF: Robin actually runs this non-profit.

JASON DE LEÓN: In Tucson, called the ...

ROBIN REINEKE: Colibri Center for Human Rights.

JASON DE LEÓN: ... Colibri Center for Human Rights. And they do a lot of work with the missing and

with bodies that have been recovered.

LATIF: So Jason tells her ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Look, we—today, we had this thing. We found this person out here and ...

LATIF: "Could you help us ID her?" Now the thing is, Robin's office is actually in the medical examiner's office, so that means that just down the hall from Robin is the guy we met at the beginning, Bruce Anderson.

BRUCE ANDERSON: Probably a couple hundred people, or at least bones of a person are in here.

LATIF: So Bruce is working on the medical examiner's side, so anytime an unidentified migrant body comes in, Bruce tries to piece together who this person is, looking at ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: The dimensions and the shape of the skull, and ...

LATIF: ... markers.

BRUCE ANDERSON: ... the robustness of the bones, and ...

LATIF: Like, looking at the length of the bones or the density of the bones.

BRUCE ANDERSON: By the non-fusion of these separate bones.

LATIF: Looking at whether some bones in the body are fused together, which is something that happens right after puberty. Bruce can actually figure out approximately what age the person is, their sex, their weight, their height. And in the case of the woman that Jason found, her body was surprisingly in relatively good condition. So pretty quickly, they were able to determine, you know, she's probably in her 30s, she's 5'4". They were actually able to get fingerprints from her as well. Meanwhile on the other side, on Robin's side ...

LATIF: Wow. So each of these tabs is a person, is that right?

ROBIN REINEKE: Yeah.

LATIF: ... she's dealing with hundreds of missing persons reports.

ROBIN REINEKE: All day, every day.

LATIF: She spends her days taking calls, going through her voicemail.

ROBIN REINEKE: Which is full of relatives searching. "I'm looking for my uncle. He disappeared in 2010." Or, "I'm looking for my daughter. She crossed two weeks ago, we haven't heard from her."

LATIF: And she's also getting tips from different people, different aid organizations. And it's actually one of those calls that leads to a break in the case of the body that Jason found.

ROBIN REINEKE: Okay. So this was an email from me from 2012. "Hi, Jason. Just a quick update regarding the woman that your group found. The case number is 12-15-67, and as of yet she's not been identified."

LATIF: But Robin tells Jason that she got a call from an aid organization that had spoken to a guy who had crossed the desert with a big group of people around the same time and around the same area where Jason found the body.

ROBIN REINEKE: He said that he had recently left behind two fellow travelers who were in serious medical distress.

LATIF: He said one of them was an elderly man.

ROBIN REINEKE: 70 years old.

LATIF: And the other was a woman, maybe from Guatemala or Ecuador, late 30s, early 40s.

ROBIN REINEKE: "It isn't certain that this group is related to ML-12-15-67, but it's highly likely. I will contact Guatemalan and Ecuadorian consulates regarding new missing persons' cases."

LATIF: And eventually, using all the information that got gathered, Robin was able to determine that the body that Jason found, it's the body of a 31-year-old Ecuadorian woman named ...

ROBIN REINEKE: Maricela Ahguipolla.

LATIF: ... Maricela Ahguipolla. Robin gets in touch with Jason to tell him. Jason then asks her ...

JASON DE LEÓN: I would just—would appreciate if you could, you know, help me at all connect with this family.

JAD: That request would, oddly enough, lead Jason to New York City.

ROBERT: That story in just a moment.

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: We're back with the third installment of our Border Trilogy: What Remains.

LATIF: And when we left, Jason along with Robin from the Colibri Center, had managed to ID the body of the woman he found in the desert. And so now he was trying to get in touch with her family.

JASON DE LEÓN: I don't know. When people disappear, or when they die in the desert, I think that the families make up—you know, lots of stories run through people's heads, and so I was hoping that if I could find this person's family, I could at least say, "This is what it was like when we found her. This is what we think had happened."

LATIF: So Robin was eventually able to get Jason the contact information for ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Maricela's brother-in-law.

LATIF: Who we'll call Fernando.

JASON DE LEÓN: And I make the awkward phone call that says, "Hey, I'm the person that found Maricela in the desert, and I would like to come and see you if that's possible."

ROBERT: Turns out, Fernando actually lives in New York City, but he had spoken to Maricela just before she left. And when we heard his story, we decided okay, we better send reporter Tracie Hunte ...

TRACIE HUNTE: Okay.

ROBERT: ... to talk with him.

TRACIE: ¡Oh, hola!

FERNANDO: ¿Como está?

TRACIE: Hi!

TRACIE: Yeah, so I went to visit Fernando at his apartment in Queens.

[dog barks]

FERNANDO: Kimberly, please!

TRACIE: [laughs]

TRACIE: He lives there with his three dogs.

[dog barks]

TRACIE: Friendly guy. Little shorter than me, neatly dressed. He's got, you know, dark hair, longer on the top, shorter on the sides. And ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: ... when I got there, he—he pulled out a bunch of photos of Maricela.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: So this is their marriage, their wedding photo?

TRANSLATOR: Esa es del matrimonio de ellos? La foto?

FERNANDO: Si

TRACIE: Oh, okay.

TRACIE: She was his brother's wife.

TRACIE: Oh, they look so young. Were they 19 when they got married?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: So in this picture that Fernando's showing me, it's his brother and Maricela. They're in a church, and they're posing at the altar. She's in a white satin gown, her hair is long and dark and shiny, and she's got kind of like an oval-shaped face, and, you know, she looks beautiful. But even though it's her wedding day, the thing that struck me is that she's not smiling. Not even a little bit.

TRACIE: Is she—was she like—was she serious like that?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Yeah, actually that's part of the reason why my mother said she didn't like her as much in the beginning.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: She said, you know, she always has an angry face on, she looks like somebody who doesn't have a lot of friends.

TRACIE: And on top of that, Fernando said she also had a habit of getting his brother in trouble.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: You know, she would tell my brother to sneak out of the house to go see her.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Go out dancing, to parties without permission. You know, those kind of things.

TRACIE: But ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: ... Fernando says she eventually won the family over.

TRANSLATOR: She helped out at home. She treated my mom really well.

TRACIE: Especially his mother.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Actually, I think my mother loved her more than she loved us. [laughs]

TRACIE: So Maricela and Fernando's brother, they got married. They ended up having three kids—two boys and a girl. Maricela had a job in a factory that made counterfeit jeans—I think Levi's. And Fernando's brother, he would go around to different villages selling sodas. And they just couldn't really manage to make ends meet.

JASON DE LEÓN: They were living real rough at the time. I mean, going—when I went to the house and saw where they had lived ...

LATIF: So Jason, after he connected with Fernando, he actually ended up going down to Ecuador to meet Maricela's family.

JASON DE LEÓN: Before she had left, I mean they were living in a one room, plywood shack with a dirt floor and animals running through the house. And—you know, and she had told her relatives, she's like, "My kids are literally starving here."

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: At the time, I wasn't able to help out as much financially because I was also helping build a house for my parents where they were also going to go live. And so I wasn't able to support them as much or help out with things like school.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: And so, you know, what she really wanted to do, you know, in order to, like, send her kids to school and all that, she really wanted them to have what she never had.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Because she never had anything. So that was really the pressure that she was under.

TRACIE: So Fernando says in 2012, he called home ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: One time when I called home, my mom said that she wanted to talk to me, so I said okay.

TRACIE: Maricela got on the phone.

TRANSLATOR: And she told me that she wanted to come here.

TRACIE: She told him that she and his brother, they wanted to follow in his footsteps. That if they could come to New York like he had, they could make money, send it back home and help out their kids. That that was the only way. And immediately Fernando was like ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Absolutely not. No.

TRACIE: So Fernando told her no because he didn't want her to go through the same thing he went through 10 years before.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: 2001, he was 17 years old, about to turn 18. And his aunt was about to go to New York, and she convinced him and his parents that if he went to New York he'd be able to get a job, make more money and support his family from there.

TRANSLATOR: To have a better life, to have the things we needed.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: So my father thought about it and gave his permission, but he told me not to stay here too long.

TRACIE: And so he used his grandfather's land as collateral and took out a loan for $12,000.

ROBERT: $12,000?

JAD: Wow!

TRACIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: And do you know what the interest rate was on the loan?

TRACIE: Ten percent.

ROBERT: Ten percent.

TRACIE: Yeah. So one thing that a lot of people have talked about is the fact that prevention through deterrence, it professionalized the human smuggling business because not only did these migrants need, you know, guidance from all these South and Central American countries, they also need guidance through the desert. So now you have this smuggling business that's more expensive and also more dangerous.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Yeah, so the coyote told us that 15 days maximum to get here.

TRACIE: Fernando says he and his aunt took a bus from Ecuador to Peru, and then from Peru they flew to Panama.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: Got on another bus.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: And then somewhere in Costa Rica ...

TRANSLATOR: I remember the path being really mountainous. There was a river, all that.

TRACIE: ... this bus pulls over, and the coyote who was with them at that point just said ...

TRANSLATOR: "Okay, you have to get off here."

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: When we got out, they took our luggage and they threw them on the ground towards the river. And they said, "You have to cross the river, and someone will find you there and signal to that person."

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: And we were left there like that, with my aunt saying, "Hold on, that wasn't the deal. The deal was to take us all the way to Mexico in cars." But from that point, when we started crossing mountains on foot ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: ... that's when horrible things started to happen.

TRACIE: From that point on they were packed into the trunks of taxis, hidden in basements, chicken coops and huts.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Totally filled with rats.

TRACIE: And three months into this journey—a journey that was supposed to take just 15 days—somewhere in Mexico, Fernando says that he and his aunt are taken to this rundown hacienda, this just sprawling ranch house. Inside the ranch house ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: There were more than 250 people there from all over the world: Chinese, Central Americans, from every country, from all over South America.

TRACIE: There's all these rooms filled with people, and Fernando actually says that there were all these armed guards all over the place. Nobody was allowed to leave.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: And so we were ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: ... penned in there for about a month.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: And while he was there ...

TRANSLATOR: This part I didn't tell Jason, what happened to me there ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: ... I was abused sexually.

TRACIE: Fernando says that he was sitting outside the hacienda one day with his aunt when a group of men approached him and told him that he had to go inside with them. And he said no, that he was fine sitting there, you know, outside.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: My aunt begged—begged them not to hurt me, to please not abuse me, or do anything to me, and they said, no, don't worry, that they only wanted to ask some questions inside. But that wasn't what they wanted.

TRACIE: They told Fernando, look, you can come with us now, or you can come with us later after we beat up your aunt. So finally, Fernando relented and went with them. And when they got inside the hacienda, they went into a room.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: And ...

TRANSLATOR: Once we were inside, they raped me. Three times.

TRACIE: How many of them were there?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Like, six.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: After that I wanted—I just wanted to die.

TRACIE: After a couple of weeks, Fernando and his aunt finally got out of this hacienda and they start their trek into the desert. Fernando thinks that he went through the same desert that Maricela would try to cross 10 years later. He's actually caught by the Border Patrol and held for about a month before he manages to bail himself out of detention and make his way to New York. And Fernando says he shared all of this with Maricela except his own rape, but he did tell her that migrants do get raped, that he's seen it happen, that he knows it happens.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Even when I told her all of that, she said none of that would happen to her. She knew how to defend herself and, you know, if she had to she would hit people.

TRACIE: And then he told her you might have to go without food or sleep outside. But ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: She said that didn't matter. That all that mattered was getting here because the kids are the ones that matter most.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Any sacrifice made is worth it for your kids.

TRACIE: And then he doesn't talk to her anymore, that's actually the last phone call they ever have, because he thinks that if he cuts her off, maybe she'll just give up. But she goes to one of her brothers, and her brother says that he would only pay for her to go, but he's not gonna pay for her husband to go.

TRACIE: When you found out that she was gonna come by herself, did you try to tell your brother, "Look, she—you shouldn't let her come here by herself?" Come at all, I should say?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Yeah. Yeah I called, but my brother said that there wasn't another option, and that he wanted to go first, but her brother had put the condition that she go first, and because they didn't have another option she said she would go.

TRACIE: In May of 2012, Maricela left Ecuador. About three weeks later, right before she walked into the desert, Maricela sent her family a message on Facebook. She told them, "I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I am going for my family. God willing, I will get there."

TRACIE: When did you finally hear what actually happened to her?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Someone called me and told me they were from the consulate. And I said "Okay, finally, she's been found!" And then they told me ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Maricela was dead, and they didn't know what day exactly she died but that she'd been dead for about a month.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

JASON DE LEÓN: It was just really difficult wondering if I'm gonna do more damage than—than good by going to meet these folks.

LATIF: Eight months after Maricela's death, Jason came to New York to meet Fernando. And he brought with him the pictures of Maricela's body that he took when he found her in the desert.

JASON DE LEÓN: You know, he was like, just "Right now, show me the photos." And I was just dancing around that for—for over an hour.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Jason warned that the photos were really upsetting, there were so many like that, but I said that it's okay to show them to me.

JASON DE LEÓN: I give him this book of photos that I've printed out. And it's got pictures of this shrine that we built for her in the desert. It's got pictures of my students who were there. And then eventually, it's just pictures of, like, the back of her head so it's her hair, it's some of the clothing, it's her hand.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: I saw all the photos, and the truth is that it tore me to pieces to see or imagine everything she had to endure in the desert. She tried to keep going, dragging herself.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Jason brought me photos of how she was found, and her body outstretched, trying to keep going.

TRACIE: Before Maricela's body was sent back to Ecuador, Fernando decided they should have it sent to New York first.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: When I talked to my family, I said, you know, her dream was really to arrive here, and so I thought at least we can fulfill that dream with her body.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: To be able to have a wake for her here.

TRACIE: They held a wake at a funeral home in Queens. Almost a hundred family members and friends came to celebrate Maricela's life. They were told to keep the coffin shut. The next day, her body went back to Ecuador. Fernando had to stay in New York because he knows if he were to go back to Ecuador, it would just be way too hard to try to come back to the United States. He says that, you know, right now he's just trying to fulfill a promise.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: The promise that I made to Maricela's body when it arrived here that I was going to look after her children. I was going to try to give them what she had wanted for them.

TRACIE: When you think about that conversation, do you think that there's anything you could've said that would've made her stay?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: I told her what could happen along the way.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: I thought that would be a way of deterring her.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: No.

LATIF: And it's worth pointing out, you know, I mean, more generally, prevention through deterrence as a strategy, it hasn't deterred people from coming to the US either. The annual budget for the Border Patrol is roughly $3.5-billion bigger than it was in 1990. We have about five times as many Border Patrol agents, and yet the number of people, immigrants, living here undocumented has more than tripled during that time, from 3.5 million to about 11 million. And more people are coming every year, every day. And more people are dying along the way.

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah, let's just do it here.

LATIF: About a year after Maricela died, Jason got a call from her family again.

JASON DE LEÓN: Do you want—do you want Maverick or Iceman? You have to name the drones.

ROBIN REINEKE: You guys are Top Gun fans?

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: Another family member had disappeared in pretty much the same place Maricela did.

ROBIN REINEKE: So which is this?

JASON DE LEÓN: I think that's Maverick.

ROBIN REINEKE: That's Maverick?

JASON DE LEÓN: I'm going back to the Arizona desert basically because Maricela has a—had a cousin who—a 15-year-old cousin named Jose Tacuri who disappeared almost one year to the day that she died. I was able to kind of triangulate based on interviews of people who he was with, and with information from—from various folks, where we think he went missing. I mean, I told his mom that I would not stop looking, and it took me a couple years to figure out a way to—to do that, but right now it's—we'll go back and we'll use these drones and see what we can come up with.

TRACIE: And you know better than anyone what happens to bodies in the desert now, I think. I mean, why are you still looking for him? Or why— you know, yeah, as callous as that question sounds, I guess.

JASON DE LEÓN: For me, part of it is I just don't know what else to do. You feel so hopeless. I told his mom, like, I won't—I won't stop looking for him. I'll do whatever I can, whatever little thing that I can do. And if I can't find him, well maybe I'll find somebody else.

[drone whirs]

JASON DE LEÓN: It's getting mad at me now, so we will ...

ROBIN REINEKE: What was that?

JASON DE LEÓN: It's getting mad at me 'cause it's running out of batteries. I'll do one more, one more run.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: The immigration issue poses real problems and challenges, and as always provides great opportunities for the American people.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: We will build a great wall along the Southern ...]

JAD: We're gonna take a short break now, but when we get back we're gonna discuss the many things that have happened since we first produced this series—what's changed, what hasn't changed, so stay tuned for that.

LATIF: Nancy, can you hear me?

NANCY: I can.

LATIF: Oh, great. Okay. Okay.

LATIF: Whose mom, Nancy, happened to be sitting in on the interview, and who I chatted with while we sorted out some tech issues.

LATIF: Okay, your daughter can't hear me but I can tell you your daughter's awesome.

NANCY: Oh, thank you.

LATIF: She's doing such vital reporting. It's so important, and so ...

LATIF: Anyways, so ...

LATIF: I'm not gonna tell any of that stuff to you because it'll just go to your head, you know?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Please don't. Yeah, I'll turn red and crawl under the table.

LATIF: [laughs]

LATIF: Caitlin is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: And I tend to write about immigration.

LATIF: If you've done any amount of reading about the border, you probably know about Caitlin's work. She won a Pulitzer for her investigation into the Trump policy of family separation at the border. We had actually called her up when we made the original Border Trilogy, and so to update it, we decided to call her back.

LATIF: Welcome back. Thank you so much for doing this. And basically what I want is a sort of a snapshot of what is going on now. So how many people are showing up to the southern border, and how does that compare to years past?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: A lot are showing up. So if you recall, at the beginning of the Biden administration, border crossings really shot up. They were going up and up and upm and then in June of this year, border crossings went down. And so the thinking at the time and the argument the Biden administration was making at the time was "We fixed it."

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: The bans that we've put into place have worked, our deterrence strategies are effective, border crossings are going down. They started holding press conferences. You started seeing news articles published saying and quoting Biden administration officials saying that they were doing a great job of mitigating border crossings and, you know, things were headed in the right direction. And I'm sitting there thinking, "Well, what are all these people gonna say when the numbers go back up again?"

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Because this is just what happens on the border: numbers flare, numbers go down, numbers flare, numbers go down. And sometimes it's because of weather, sometimes it's because of a political situation unfolding abroad. Sometimes it's because a smuggling network was able to sell a particularly good, you know, package deal to a bunch of people at any given time. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Then in August of this year, 232,972 people crossed the border. That was an increase of almost 100,000 from just a couple of months earlier.

LATIF: Wow!

CAITLIN DICKERSON: And having followed this for years, if those ebbs and flows ever coincide with changes in enforcement policy, a lot of times people who work in the Border Patrol or for DHS, its parent agency, will say, "Well look, our policy is working." Or they'll say, "Well, you know, we ended this policy and look, see what happened: numbers went up." You know, if you zoom in and you're only looking on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis, you can make these totally inaccurate arguments and draw causal links that are not not scientifically sound.

LATIF: Right. And just sort of allowing for seasonal ebbs and flows, in general, for example, over the last five years is the baseline moving up or is it sort of just the same year after year?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: It's really hard to talk about a baseline because it is hard to do a kind of objective count.

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: I think you can say in general the American immigration system is kind of like the stock market. So if you look at a line graph of the growth of the stock market over the years, when you zoom in and you look at the five years at a time, you see a lot of turbulence and a lot of up and down, but when you zoom out you see a very clear upward trajectory.

LATIF: Got it. Got it.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Right now, Venezuela is sending huge, huge numbers of people to the United States on top of the large flows of people coming in from Central America. Even numbers of people crossing into the United States from Mexico has increased, and that's not just because people coming from Afghanistan, from Ukraine. Each time there's a new international crisis, it brings some people to the United States, sometimes a lot of people to the United States.

LATIF: Okay, so—so you've kind of given me this portrait of the numbers spiking and cresting and—but generally going up, And maybe also, can you just talk about like where are we with deterrence as a strategy?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So what's going on now is that the Biden administration continues to reach for the same deterrent tools that have been in use for decades despite being very expensive and carrying with them huge casualties.

LATIF: Hmm. So I wanted to kind of cycle through four specific deterrents to see sort of what is the status of them and if they're at all working, or quote-unquote "working." But okay, the four things I wanted to talk to you about were: the desert and the migrants going through the desert, one is the wall, one is Operation Lone Star in Texas, and one is family separation.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Yeah, I think those are good categories.

LATIF: Okay, great. So let's just start with the desert, which is the majority of what this series that we're updating is about. What is happening in the desert? Are migrants still dying, and do you know about the numbers there?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Migrants continue to be pushed into the desert in order to try to get access to the United States, particularly as other enforcement strategies like walls, like more boots on the ground from Border Patrol agents have pushed people to try to find new routes into the country. And at the same time, as you well know, the world is getting hotter; the last two summers have been the highest on record in the world, and so deaths are unsurprisingly increasing because of that.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So last year, 568 people were found dead in the desert between Mexico ...

LATIF: So just to show our sources real quick, that's the number that Border Patrol reported for fiscal year 2021. Since then, the New York Times and others have reported that Border Patrol's number for fiscal year 2022 is even higher—853 deaths.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: That's the largest number that we have recorded, and it's also probably an undercount, a really serious undercount.

LATIF: I know that the Biden administration made a little bit of news. They were putting up all these rescue beacons in the middle of the desert to try to curb some of these migrant deaths—like a button that you'd push if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere. Has that done anything, do you know?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So initiatives like that are a little bit odd in that if you're in the right place at the right time, you might be saved by the same institution that's pushing you into the desert in the first place.

LATIF: Right.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: And so yes, every year the tactical units of the Border Patrol, the search and rescue will point to rescues that have taken place. Sometimes they'll release annual statistics or they'll send out a press release of a particularly harrowing scenario that they're very proud of, often including women and children who they've saved. And from their individual perspective that's true. It's only when you zoom out and point out that maybe these people didn't ever need to be in the desert in the first place that the whole system doesn't really make sense.

LATIF: Right.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: And so the Biden administration is really kind of trying to have it both ways by pointing to efforts it's making to try to save more people while also doubling down on deterrent strategies that put them in harm's way in the first place.

LATIF: Well, that's a great segue to the second deterrent we were gonna talk about, which is the wall, and the fact that the Biden administration is resuming construction of a part of the wall. Can you explain what is happening?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Yeah, so the Trump administration had a huge border wall project that was disputed all four years. But what it came down to was 450 miles of wall that was built. You know, $11-billion of taxpayer money. And then kind of tools put down as soon as President Biden was set to take office because of a moratorium that he called on border wall construction. Biden was saying, you know, not a single additional foot of wall will be built. He said he didn't believe that the wall was effective. But he's had run-ins with a Congress that does, and so a couple of times now, Republicans have forced Democrats to agree to put money toward a border wall in fights they were having over the budget and keeping the government running. And the Biden administration says that it's tried to reprogram these funds, tried to avoid spending them on a border wall but hasn't been able to, and so some additional wall is being built now.

LATIF: To jump in quick, what Caitlin says is true, the administration's decision feels like more than just inertia. Current Homeland Security Secretary Ajejandro Mayorkas wrote of quote, "An acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers in the vicinity of the border in order to prevent unlawful entries." Also, the Biden administration actively waived 26 federal laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, Endangered Species Act in order to allow and expedite the construction. It does feel like on some level, the administration made a choice to build 20 more miles of border wall.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: We're talking about 30-foot-high steel structures that were supposed to be a new and improved technology, except again they haven't worked. I mean, as soon as this new type of wall debuted, smuggling organizations started cutting through it. And not only were they cutting through it, they were using regular power tools to cut through it.

LATIF: Wow.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: They were building ladders with scrap wood and rope and foisting people over the wall, foisting drugs over the wall. Although it remains true that most illegal drugs that make their way into the United States come through legal ports of entry, and so, you know, what it amounts to is $140-million of additional funds being put toward a border wall that we know isn't going to do much at all. And I think few people will say in and of itself, you know, a wall is gonna fix the immigration system, but what you hear again and again from the Border Patrol is just this sense of overwhelm.

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: "We'll take anything. We'll take what we can get."

LATIF: Feels like we're doing something.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: It feels—it feels like doing something.

LATIF: Hmm. All right, let's move on to the next deterrent. What is Operation Lone Star in Texas?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So Operation Lone Star is Governor Greg Abbott in Texas's effort to take border enforcement into his own hands, and try to use state law, state resources and state law enforcement—Texas state troopers and Texas National Guard to try to combat migration. It also involves efforts to arrest people on trespassing charges for violating Texas law.

LATIF: And it seems of apiece with the sort of deterrence mindset, is that right?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Absolutely. Everything that I just described is considered to be a deterrent measure.

LATIF: Jumping in again, after we talked to Caitlin we also talked to another reporter, Todd Miller, who has written multiple books about the border as well as a weekly post for the Border Chronicle. He told us that Texas has spent over $4.5-billion—billion with a 'B'—on this operation. And from his visits to the border, he told us what it looks like: razor wire everywhere, floating barriers with chainsaw blades in the Rio Grande, National Guard jeeps and troops all side by side. He said it was eerily reminiscent of the operation we covered in our second episode, Operation Hold the Line.

LATIF: What we've heard and read from Caitlin and Todd and many others is that this giant project has had basically negligible effect on migration.

LATIF: All right. Let's move on to the next deterrent, which I know you have written about most, which is family separation. The series we made was actually before that became a big story in 2018. Can you just briefly tell us what happened?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So the idea was to take kids away from their parents if they attempt to cross the border together as punishment, as a way to make border crossing into the United States so painful that people would stop doing it. And so that, of course, happened thousands of times during the Trump administration.

LATIF: What is the status now of family separation? Have all of those families that were separated in 2017-2018, have they all been reunited or no?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: No.

LATIF: No.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: No. I mean, there are still hundreds of families according to the federal books.

LATIF: Hundreds!

CAITLIN DICKERSON: That have not been reunited.

LATIF: Wow!

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So there are no more kids in the custody of Health and Human Services, which is where separated children went initially. All have been released to sponsors. But some sponsors are family friends or extended relatives who parents may not have approved of their children going to in the first place, and there is an unknown number of sponsors—this hasn't been made explicitly clear by the Biden administration—who were part of a foster care system who had no relationship to the child. By now, children may have been adopted by families they had no connection to. So this is why it gets really tricky to try to trace family separations, and many of those parents, the government just doesn't even know where they are.

LATIF: Wow!

CAITLIN DICKERSON: So family separation was a deterrent strategy that did not work, and we have really good evidence of this. The largest number of border crossings that occurred under the Trump administration was the year following family separations, so the harshest deterrent measure we've ever used, which what does that tell us? Obviously not that people were excited about getting their kids taken away, and so they decided to come to the United States for that reason. Of course not. What it tells us is that the factors that were pushing people into the United States in the first place and that were drawing them here from within the country, you know, our demand for their presence and for their labor, were just more powerful. When I talk to individuals who have worked on these efforts to track down parents and try to help reunite families, I've been told that they'll ask, right? So, you know, would you have come to the United States if you knew this was going to happen?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: And of course on the one hand this was the most painful thing they've ever experienced in their lives, but on the other, many people will tell you, "Well, I was gonna die or my child was gonna die, and so yes, I would have come anyway."

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: We just have 25-plus years of data to show us that deterrence, it's just not working.

LATIF: Right.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: All of the push factors that bring people to the United States in the first place remain the same or worse than they were under the Trump administration. All of the draws in the United States: our dependence on the labor of immigrants, the way in which our country continues to absorb people as it always has, all those things are exactly the same. What needs to happen is a process of coming up with new border policies that really once and for all gets rid of this idea of the gospel of deterrence. I don't know who first said that, but I hear it all the time.

LATIF: The gospel of deterrence?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: The gospel of deterrence. You know, there are too many people in Washington politics right now who are just in too deep on deterrence, and there's a lot of fear within both parties of trying anything new.

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: One thing that I will say that's different under the Biden administration—I've been hearing this since the President took office—is that there is now open conversations, certainly within the aspects of the White House that focus on border issues, open conversations about how deterrence doesn't work.

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: And so what's more frustrating? You know, a Trump administration where there was kind of a top-to-bottom belief in deterrent strategies in the face of evidence that they weren't working, or is it more frustrating to know that in the White House there are people who are openly talking about how what our government is doing is totally ineffective, and then they're doing it anyway. I don't know.

LATIF: Right. This is a very, very depressing picture, and I wonder, do you see anything hopeful going on? Anything solution-oriented? Something around the corner here?

CAITLIN DICKERSON: I do think that there's some hope. I don't think that it's around the corner, I think it's further off than that. The hope actually lies in people who are gonna be willing to take the political risk to start fresh. So acknowledging that the United States needs immigrants, the United States wants immigrants, and alloting visas in a way that allowed for people who wanted to come to work here to do so legally even if they're not wealthy or very highly educated, which is the only way of entering the country that exists now. And so it just takes somebody who's willing to risk what that might mean for their own career.

LATIF: The primary architect of the deterrence strategy, the initial person even before Doris Meisner was Silvestre Reyes, who is this, you know, Border Patrol sector chief who is like, "I'm gonna shake things up. I'm gonna try a totally different thing." And it feels like that's what we need. We need that energy. We need somebody to say, "Okay, I'm tired of doing this the way that we've always been doing it. That is clearly not working. We need to do a new thing." And the thing that he did was Operation Hold the Line, but, like, we need the new version of that.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Exactly. You know, it's interesting to trace the history in Congress of how national origins quotas were eliminated from the American immigration law, you know, race-based quotas that we had in place from the 1920s until the 1950s. And that was a very long fight, and there were certain people in Congress who were just willing to stick with it and stick their necks out to say, you know, that this immigration system just doesn't comport with American values. So, you know, it may come from Congress, it may come from the White House, it probably won't come from within the ranks of DHS, but I completely agree with you that it just takes somebody who's willing to be bold enough to propose something different, and who can do it in a way that doesn't alienate everybody else, because that's the key.

LATIF: Hmm.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: Yeah.

LATIF: But you're not—you're not seeing that yet.

CAITLIN DICKERSON: No. No. But that said, politics is funny. With immigration reform specifically, I, as a reporter who's been looking at this story off and on since, you know, 2012, have been left at the altar many times, there have been many times when it seemed like immigration reform was very close to becoming a reality and then it didn't. But sometimes politics surprises you and there isn't this really long on-ramp, it's just simply the right person in the right place at the right time who has enough leverage to push something over. Because again, it's not like we're talking about things that we don't know to be true. Once you learn all of this, you can't unlearn it, you can't unsee it, and so once you realize how much it doesn't make sense, moving on wouldn't quite feel right either.

LATIF: This episode was reported by Tracie Hunte and me, Latif Nasser. It was produced by Matt Kielty and Tracie Hunte. Jason De León's book, which inspired this series, is called The Land of Open Graves. Special thanks to our interpreter Allison Corbet, and for giving voice to Fernando in English, Carlo Alban and Carlo's manager Ted Brunsen. Thanks also to Hayden Stewart, Raul Ras-Pastrana, Paulina Alonso-Chavez, and ambassador Jacob Prado from the government of Mexico, and to the staff at the Pima County medical examiner's office and the Colibri Center for Human Rights.

LATIF: My name's Latif Nasser. Thank you for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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