16-03-2025
Inquiry into unrecovered remains was guided by story of Salvadoran migrant
There is no right way to react to a human hip bone lying in the desert.
My reaction, when I saw that flash of white in the soil a few feet from my boots, was a sharp inhale.
That moment — that breath — is where 'Dead in the Desert' really began for me. It came during a visit to a remote stretch of desert near Santa Teresa in December with members of an Arizona-based organization that searches for migrant remains.
James Holeman, one of the leaders of the group, had reached out to The New Mexican a few months earlier, urging us in a September email to look into a shocking problem the group had discovered: unrecovered bodies in the New Mexico borderlands and little action to address them by state and local authorities.
Holeman followed up about a week later with photos from a recent search, including one showing a Salvadoran identification card for Ada Guadalupe López Montoya; the ID was discovered near human remains. Here was a face, a name, someone whose story had been documented by Holeman's Battalion Search and Rescue and in Facebook posts by another humanitarian group, Armadillos Ni Un Migrante Menos, based in California.
López Montoya — and her belongings found in the desert — served as our guide in this story. Parts of her story became the story.
'It's reasserting that this was a human being with a story, with a family,' New Mexican reporter André Salkin said. 'It's not just a set of bones, and it's not just a nameless dead person in the desert with no tie to this world.'
Salkin and I started piecing together 'Dead in the Desert' — conducting interviews with search and rescue volunteers and humanitarian aid workers; questioning the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, state Department of Justice and Doña Ana County Sheriff's Office; and sifting through sheriff's office reports and other records.
It was particularly difficult to get a response from Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart. Though her perspective was essential to this story — we wanted to ensure she had an opportunity to respond to Battalion Search and Rescue's accusations her agency had not properly responded to reports of human remains — the county staff declined my requests for an interview or information, stating Stewart was 'not available' or 'doesn't have any information to share at this time.'
Stewart later responded promptly to questions emailed directly to her, making accusations of her own against Battalion.
Members of Battalion Search and Rescue led us in December to several sites with human remains near Santa Teresa, including the location where searchers found López Montoya's ID card. Photographer Michael G. Seamans joined us on the trip, and he returned to the area a few more times in the months afterward to document the group's searches in photos and video.
What we saw at these desert sites was troubling. Battalion members pointed to shards of what they believe were vertebrae, jaw bones, skulls lying in the dirt.
Many of the photos that accompany this report are graphic; they show human skulls and bones. These photographs were published as documentation of the realities behind this report, not for shock value.
As Seamans said, they're 'visual evidence.'
'Hard evidence of what's being found is necessary, I think, to jolt people into action. I think there's a power to a picture,' he said.
This isn't a comprehensive report on issues at the border. Rather, our goal is to bring to light what Holeman calls 'an open graveyard' — where human remains, considered sacred in almost every culture worldwide, have been woefully neglected, and to provide some answers on why migrants like López Montoya choose to leave their home countries and encounter the sometimes-deadly conditions they find upon their arrival in the U.S.
'What started as, for us, reporting on … an insular story ended up becoming kind of a pathway into much larger questions around federal policy, around what women are experiencing in the process of migration,' Salkin said.
None of that is to say these photographs are easy to look at, these descriptions easy to read. This project will leave a lasting imprint on us, the reporters and photographer who pieced it together.
'You expect to see the normal stuff — like a cow carcass or an animal carcass or, you know, things that belong in nature — not human remains, partially clothed,' Seamans said.
He added, 'It kind of sucks the wind out of you at first because you're not expecting to see that.'
