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Fridge fills up in Arizona desert season of death Frank Jack Daniel / Reuters | May 24 2006 So many illegal immigrants die of desert heat on the U.S.-Mexico border that an Arizona morgue has had to buy a refrigerated trailer to store its bodies, and it is building room for more. As temperatures begin to soar toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius), Bruce Parks, the head of the medical examiner's office in Tucson, worries that tighter security on the border may mean a gruesome toll this summer. The U.S. Senate on Monday backed plans by President Bush to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to the border, which illegal immigrants say will force them to take more dangerous routes into the United States. Lawmakers have also approved building 370 miles of new high-security border fences, which may also push immigrants to seek more-remote border crossings, such as desolate areas of the Sonora desert which straddles the border. "If they shut down some of these other areas, people will likely keep coming across in places where there aren't fences," said Parks. "Supposedly, that's the reason why they are coming through this area, because they shut down San Diego and El Paso," he said, referring to border fences at those two cities. Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol found 463 dead bodies of immigrants in the southwestern United States, a 42.5 percent jump over 2004. Close to half of those were found in Arizona, most killed by heat stroke, a lingering death which Mexican official Berta Alicia de la Rosa described as "like slowly cooking your body and your brain." HORRIBLE DEATHS "When we find them their skin is like cardboard - often they have torn off their clothes or buried themselves in the sand to escape the heat," said De la Rosa, who works for a Mexican government agency that tries to cut migrant deaths. The number of people dying in the desert has leaped so much in the past few years that in 2005 Parks rented a refrigerated trailer to store the corpses. His office has since bought a trailer, of the type used to transport chilled food, that can hold up to 60 bodies and is building a new cool room so the morgue can take up to 300 corpses, almost double the current capacity. It takes so long to identify the bodies, often no more than skeletons when they arrive, that the morgue's shelves are still stacked with remains brought to Parks last summer. "The number goes up every year, and although I wish otherwise, I don't see the trend reversing," he said. Seventy percent of the bodies are eventually identified and sent home, mostly to Mexico. The rest are buried in unmarked graves after a year in storage. Every day, De la Rosa's team from the Grupo Beta government welfare body drives out into the arid scrubland in bright orange pickups to try to persuade people planning to cross to the United States to think again, or at least be fully aware of the risks they are taking. A few hours road trip south from Tucson, immigrants in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta vowed to keep crossing the line, even if that means walking further into the desert or getting into debt with people smugglers. "We'll do the impossible, I'd cross heaven and earth to arrive there with my family," said Maria Nunez, 56, who was caught by the U.S. Border Patrol after she snuck under the high metal fence that divides Agua Prieta from Douglas, Arizona. Talking at a migrant hostel, Nunez shook
with fear as she described how her four children were now in the United
States, being transported by smugglers to meet up with her eldest daughter
in Atlanta. ---------------------------------------------------
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