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We need to know what we're dealing with. Why is it important for the general public to know how many people die from mumps or rubella or heart disease or diabetes? We need a lot more attention brought to the number of deaths that occur. A hallmark of civilized society is that death statistics keep track of with the intent to either decrease those deaths or take policy measures to help with whatever the issue is. Nobody seems to really want to do anything about migrant deaths. Every year the federal government reports how many people die crossing the border. But those numbers are wrong, by up to 300 percent. We went to every border state to try to figure out for the first time how many people are really dying. So we're here in New Mexico looking at death records. New Mexico is a little bit different than Arizona and California in that they don't identify border crossers who die while crossing the border. What we needed to do is request all of their death records and then come here and find out for ourselves which of these deaths were undocumented border crossers. Case number 2013-02387. Those are going to be over here. As you're seeing, it was a little fellow, just about dried up. This one. And there were Mexican coins with the body; fingerprints were obtained but remain unmatched at the time of this report. About 420 cases out of thousands we flagged and said that could be a border death right there. These are all deaths since 2010. What we've done with each of those 450 is go through, check the death records and autopsy reports to search for the telltale markers of if you were a border crosser, which is: found in a rural area, found with a backpack, water bottle, found with a Mexican ID card, Mexican coins or cash or rosaries. We stack all those things together to determine for ourselves who was a migrant crossing the border and who wasn't. We're finding that a lot of them aren't, but there certainly are a few dozen that are those border deaths. Why doesn't anyone care? People ask us questions about it and we want to be able to provide accurate information so they can keep reasonable statistics on the rates of different kinds of deaths in the community. Unlike New Mexico, Arizona and California deaths are tracked at the county level. Both states have done relatively well at tracking the number of border deaths. In Arizona, that has been done by the Pima County Medical Examiner, who processes and identifies migrant deaths for much of the southern part of the state. It wasn't really on anyone's radar until about the year 2000, so in the 1990s, we would average about 12 of these types of remains a year. In 2002, we had 146 of these remains. This office, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, has done an extraordinary job documenting each and every bone found in the desert and making those numbers publicly available. We started to keep better track of this group of people as a separate category. It actually took us some time to get our arms around the issue. On the federal level, the only tracking done of these types of deaths for the entire U.S.-Mexico border is done by the border patrol. I take the Border Patrol figures with a grain of salt. If a Border Patrol agent finds a deceased individual and they believe it to be an undocumented border crosser, they have an incident report recorded for finding those remains, but it's not an accurate estimation on the total number of these types of deaths because they only find about, well, at least in the Tucson sector, about 50 percent of these remains. Those other remains are typically reported to a local agency, who may not give that information to Border Patrol. In many jurisdictions, they don't track migrants separately from other remains. Sadly, in other regions along the U.S.-Mexico border, there are problems when it comes to simply arriving at a conclusive count for how many migrants have lost their lives in the attempt to cross. This is hard to walk on. This is not a piece of cake. They have to work their way in because of the concealment. Do you see how thick it is? There's a footprint here. Candy. Jacket. Small one. I can smell the spray paint on it. They'll definitely keep coming, right? So you know that the traffic is still here. They haven't quit. You'd have to walk 70 miles from the border to reach Brooks County. Still, the sheriff's office here has recovered an average of nearly 80 bodies a year they suspect are migrants since 2012. I'm estimating because of the terrain, the way it is, for every one we're recovering, we're probably missing five, because that's how bad the terrain is, so I know there's a lot more out there. It's as if their deaths didn't even happen. Before 2014, many of those unidentified remains were eventually brought here, to unmarked graves in Sacred Heart cemetery in Brooks County. It is one specific area where you have multiple people buried. You have them buried at different depths, they're pretty shallow; they're not six feet deep. Under Texas law, unidentified bodies must have an autopsy and a DNA sample taken. Spradley said many counties have failed to comply with that law for years. She is exhuming bodies from cemeteries for DNA identification, but she knows some will never be found. And we keep those out at our decomposition facility until we can bring them here because we don't have cold storage, so we bring them in here, clean them, analyze them. These are somebody's family that has traveled to another country and they've died and they've just been buried and it's as if they never existed. Finding the number of border crossers who have died is impossible because there are nearly two dozen counties near the border. All with different policies on how they track the dead. This problem is central to Texas as we are completely decentralized. The important people that need this information is the law enforcement and Border Patrol because they're the ones who need to know where they're coming in and how to better protect the border and how to better protect themselves. Dr. Stern handles remains for 11 counties near the border. She says suspected border crossers take up 40 percent of her time. I asked Dr. Stern for a list of the migrants who died, with their names, nationality and GPS coordinates, like we had received from other states. I don't have the staff to pull that. That is not something we put in our typical reports. If the law tells me I have to do it obviously we're going to do it but there's no statute that tells me I need to keep weight and height and all these in a report, so reporters can have it. Numbers are numbers, just figuring out where they're coming in isn't going to save these people's lives. This is a matter of education, this is a matter of educating people on the other side of the border. The vast majority of these, 99 percent, are accidental deaths. And by definition, an accident is preventable. They have a slowly accumulating mass disaster that happens every day. They have so many deaths that exhaust the county resources, which is a definition of a mass disaster, but they're not given special funding that you would get if a plane crashed. One exhumed body at a time, Spradley and her team are trying to identify migrants, in the hopes that one day, they can be returned to their loved ones. If we'd know the actual numbers, then we could go appeal to senators to do something about this. On a global level to bring awareness to how many people really are dying along the border because it's so much more than we think it is.