‘Europe has their oceans where the refugees disappear. We’ve got our deserts…we’re witnessing and documenting mass death that’s being suppressed and normalized.’
Editor’s note: The People’s Tribune recently interviewed James Holeman and Abbey Carpenter of Battalion Search and Rescue. They organize volunteers to search the deserts in southern Arizona and southern New Mexico in the hopes of either rescuing living migrants in trouble in the desert, or of finding and helping to repatriate the remains of those who have died attempting to cross. The US government’s cruel “prevention through deterrence” policy, which relies on hostile terrain to deter migration, has had the effect of killing many migrants. According to Customs and Border Protection data, at least 8,000 people died from various causes trying to cross the deserts of the US-Mexico border states between 1998 and 2020. These are recorded migrant deaths – observers estimate that the total number, including unrecorded deaths, is far higher. The number of recorded deaths includes hundreds of people who have died trying to cross through southern New Mexico. In cases where the gender can be determined, the majority of the deceased found in southern New Mexico in recent years have been women.
Bob Lee: Tell me a little about Battalion Search and Rescue how it got started.
James Holeman: I started volunteering down on the border in 2018, with the Eagles, the Águilas del Desierto. They would come over to Ajo [Arizona] and search, and I worked with them for a couple years, and then I kind of wanted to see more people get involved. And I was in Arizona, so I felt I could get more Arizona people. So in 2020, I started the battalion and I did get a lot of Arizona folks going. And then in ’23, I came over here to New Mexico. I had no idea what was going on over here. It was very unknown, but it just happened to coincide with a real drastic uptick in fatalities, west of El Paso in the Sunland Park and Santa Teresa area of New Mexico. And I met Abbey in ’23 over here, and we started working together, and we’re partners now in work and in life. We go back and forth and do this work seasonally in Arizona in the winter, but year-round in New Mexico.
BL: And what motivated you personally to start searching?
JH: My interest was pretty simple when I started. I was retiring early from a small business I had in Flagstaff, and I just wanted to stay active. I volunteered a lot in different places I lived – Chicago, Hawaii, Arizona – and I read about these guys that came over from California to Arizona and did the search work, and it seemed interesting, and it didn’t require a bunch of training. I wanted to stay active. So it was quite simple to start. I found I really had a good knack for it, I guess – I have a degree in geography, I was in the military briefly, and I do like the outdoors and I like to do remote hiking. I like to get out to those farther places. And that was one of the cornerstones of the battalion, I wanted to reach these places that were farther, deeper in the desert, which we have.
Abbey Carpenter: When I met James, we were volunteering to make food bags for asylum seekers who were traveling from New Mexico to their support homes around the country. So that’s how we met. And I was drawn to his work because I used to teach English as a second language, and almost a hundred percent of my students were undocumented. I have a real soft spot in my heart for them, and I could speak Spanish, and I love nature, and I learned from James that nobody was doing this type of work. And so I thought, wow, I want to do this with him. We started together in September of 2023.
BL: And over the years since you started the battalion, how many sites with human remains do you think you’ve found?
AC: During that time, we have found, probably, 43 sites with human remains in New Mexico. And then at the same time, because we search in Arizona in the winter months, we’ve found probably 60 sites [in Arizona]. I haven’t totaled it up. I’ve got a spreadsheet – unfortunately, I have to track this on spreadsheets – but, you know, it’s around a hundred sites with human remains. And James and his group had also found remains before, from when he started in 2020 to when we started in ’23, but I don’t have those totals without hunting for them.
BL: Tell me about the special search project that you did in early June in southern New Mexico, the Not Forgotten Project.
JH: We normally meet up once a month. The majority of the volunteers are women. And I think it’s pretty significant that it’s often women like Abbey leading mostly women, and we find mostly women, you know, in the desert there, west of El Paso. It’s a very unique situation with 55% of the deaths there having been identified as women. Normally along the border, it’s 15 to 18%. So it’s very significant. It’s very uninvestigated and under-investigated. So we normally go once a month and we recognized that the deaths really spiked in ’23 and ’24 and crossings are down, we believe.
So it’s kind of this race against time. There’s a lot of development happening in this area of Santa Teresa and Sunland Park [New Mexico]. They’re very, very prosperous communities. They’re building these big solar fields, and they’re building a massive data center – Project Jupiter – Larry Ellison from Oracle is behind that one. And so these big chunks of the desert are just going away, and we can’t get them, as well as this National Defense Area, this NDA. It’s expanded in New Mexico, several miles away from the border, so we lost that area too.
So there’s that, as well as the remains deteriorate, and they slowly disappear, sometimes not slowly. So we wanted to crank it up. We wanted to get out there and see what we could find. We’ve had a few different projects. We have these Jesuits that come work with us once a year, once in Arizona, and recently in New Mexico. And with them, we usually do a few days in a row. But this was unique for our volunteers and for us. And it was really effective. We use one of these hiking apps. It’s called Gaia. And we track our routes so that when we come back, we can see where we were, and then we can move over and cover new ground. No one is searching there – 300 recorded deaths with nobody even looking, doing like dedicated searches, except for us. So, we have to get out there, we feel, while we can, and while they’re still there.
BL: And when you say 300 recorded deaths, where does that number come from?
JH: Arizona has had their migrant mortality map for several decades. Humane Borders runs that. New Mexico just got one about two years ago, in the winter of ’24. Another group, No More Deaths, they compiled and continue to compile the data from law enforcement, from the medical investigator in Albuquerque that’s connected to the School of Medicine at the University of New Mexico, and propagate this map for New Mexico, for the El Paso Sector, they call it, which is all of New Mexico’s border with Mexico as well as the first couple counties in Texas. If you look at that map, the vast majority of the fatalities are just west of El Paso in this one particular county called Doña Ana County.
Las Cruces is the county hub there. The majority of them have certainly been found by Border Patrol, we believe just from patrolling probably, or pursuing people. They don’t have any dedicated humanitarian search efforts. It’s a very concentrated area. It’s quite striking, like five by 10 miles, and it is just loaded. In Arizona, I’m kind of an anthropologist now, almost, with migrant crossings and artifacts. In Arizona, the routes and the crossing culture is very ingrained. They’ve been doing it for decades. They have stores and little shops along the border where they [migrants] buy all this gear – camouflage [clothing] and black water bottles, and those shoes, those booties with the shag carpet on the bottom. None of that exists over by El Paso, in this area. It’s like a very new, immature route. It appears that they cross a lot of women there. We have encountered people in the desert, on our side of the border, by the wall, women, men, and they are just in street clothes. They’re probably told that, ‘Oh, it’s just a short walk,’ you know, as these coyotes will do. There’s no camo, there’s no black water bottles. They use chunks of foam and they’ll tie that to their shoes sometimes, like the carpet shoes in Arizona, but very different, very new and evolving. So the 300 number is from that map. A hundred have been identified as male, and over 130 now identified as women. Their average age is 29. The youngest were a couple of 16-year-old girls. And then there’s about a hundred that are unidentified – they don’t know their gender. And that’s just in that one county [Doña Ana].
BL: And so, in the effort in early June, you found sites with human remains?
JH: Yes, three separate sites containing human remains. We had 18 volunteers total. We searched six days in a row, 37 miles total. The teams ranged from like five to 10 people per day. We had a book reading and book signing event. We had a faith gathering in the desert at one of the places where Alvaro Enciso had placed crosses. We had some Georgetown students present. They were in town with a religious group. The site – it was a 20-year-old woman from Guatemala – and it had turned out, it wasn’t planned, but she was found two years ago to the day we had the gathering. She was found June 7, 2024. It’s hard to come up with the right term, but it was very successful. We explored some new areas. We covered some new ground, had some new volunteers join us.
AC: We had the Sisters of Assumption. We had some Franciscan nuns. We had that group of students there from Georgetown High School, a preparatory high school. We had a Jesuit prep school. And lots of regular volunteers were there.
JH: We had a female Episcopal priest leading the service. We wanted it to be a women-led service at the site of a deceased young woman, with these amazing women volunteers. I mean it’s mostly women that do this work and show up.
BL: Is there any helpful response from state or local authorities, in terms of trying to prevent people from dying in that area of New Mexico as they cross through there?
JH: No, I can’t think of any. I mean, they [the federal government] continue to militarize the border, you know? We watch all this tech coming in. We actually photograph it and report the locations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because they have this map of border surveillance that they add to and maintain. I don’t know, maybe to them [New Mexico authorities] it’s like such a new phenomenon, you know, because five or seven years ago, the deaths were single digits in this corridor. But in ’23 and ’24, they approached 200, much like Arizona, they came up to that level.
They’ve placed some of these emergency beacons out there. There are some local groups that have organized water drop work, but really, the response has been civilian-based and humanitarian groups. It’s shocking to me that they [authorities] watched the deaths skyrocket and really did nothing. You know, there were no public briefings, there were no search efforts, there were no preventative measures. And with this distinction of [the dead] being mostly women – I mean, a couple of state representatives from New Mexico got together and got a Truth Commission passed for this Epstein Ranch south of Santa Fe. You know, they got several million dollars. They have subpoena power, they just issued their first like dozen or 14 subpoenas. The DOJ, the FBI, they’re up there with ground-penetrating radar and all this [looking for bodies], and five hours south, or a 20-minute flight away, you actually have bodies. You know, those are perceived bodies [near Santa Fe], but none found. And down here you have actual bodies, you have 300. And the majority of the identified ones are women. And this is a historic trafficking area, right across from Juarez, which has a long history of femicide.
[We had asked the Truth Commission] to expand the scope of their investigation. But all we get is crickets. I think it opens up too many questions about our border policies, the prevention through deterrence, the militarization.
I’m grateful that there is a heightened awareness of immigration and ICE and detention centers. This is all connected. But it seems that border deaths have been successfully normalized in our country and it’s kind of a dirty secret, you know, that nobody talks about. Especially with the women….Our government entities are not doing the due diligence. They’re not providing the same amount of investigation and processing that they would if they [the deceased] were white, plain and simple. But you don’t even hear about these women. Media just turns a blind eye. They are part of the normalization.
AC: Of the hundred or so sites with remains that I’ve participated in, only three have had ID, and I can tell you their names, where they’re from, their ages, so they hold special significance for me. But in this state, New Mexico, I’m not sure if they have made their way home. Because there’s no follow-up by the Office of the Medical Investigator or the deputy to let us know that they’ve collected the remains or that they’ve been repatriated. And also on the migrant mortality map of New Mexico, the people that get the data from the Office of the Medical Investigator and they populate that, they’ve chosen not to put the names on that map. That’s their choice, and I understand their thinking. So we can’t really tell if these folks that we have found with ID, if they have been even identified by name. We always go back [to these sites] and we have found additional remains a short way away. Did they connect those remains with the person whose ID they found at one spot and 50 yards away are more remains? All those are questions that we don’t have answers to.
JH: We’re regular people, you know? We don’t get any training, we’re all figuring this out on our own, and if anything, instead of assistance, we get resistance. The sheriff [of Doña Ana County] said we could have planted the bones out there – in print. You know, like, how insane.
BL: Have you ever had occasion to have contact with the families of the deceased after you find someone’s remains?
JH: Our work is kind of over when we find them. In general, we have no contact with the families. Now, that being said, I am talking more with our volunteers about making connections with some of these women of the disappeared and women of Juarez.
BL: Is there anything you wanted to add?
JH: I think the biggest thing is this situation with women in this area. I mean, we know how people die up and down the border all the time, all year round. Most of them are never found, as we know. On the border, the deserts are our ocean. Europe has their oceans where the refugees disappear. We’ve got our deserts, and they’re pushed into these deep, deep, remote places where they just disappear, and strategically – I call it death by design, with this prevention through deterrence policy and militarization. And you combine that with rhetoric and dehumanizing language. You know what we do in times of war to a supposed enemy – we dehumanize them, we come up with rhetoric, we reduce them to less than human so that we can kill a whole bunch of them and then celebrate it, right? And that’s what we’re doing to these folks – calling them rapists and murderers and saying they eat cats and dogs. We don’t find guns and weapons in the desert, where we work, we find Bibles and love notes and little prayer cards and little kids’ homework and candy and Chiclets and baby carriers. The women are the last ones to leave, they say, they’re the last ones to leave their families, their culture, their language. Things have to be really bad for them to go. And this – I think it will come out, it’s going to take a little while. I used to just do the search work and then report it and be done with it, but now we have to follow up, we have to advocate, and now we’re like historians because we’re witnessing and documenting mass death that’s being suppressed and normalized.
[Editor’s note: The People’s Tribune sent emails to the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator and to the sheriff of Doña Ana County seeking their comments on this story, but the emails were not answered by the time this story was posted. We will update the article if we receive any comment from state authorities.]
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
