FALFURRIAS, Texas -- Volunteer researchers have uncovered mass graves in a South Texas cemetery that they believe contain the bodies of immigrants who died crossing into the U.S. illegally, according to reports Saturday.
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., provided more details about a new detention center for illegal aliens that was announced Friday.
The discovery at Sacred Heart Burial Park in Falfurrias came in the past two weeks as Baylor University anthropologist Lori Baker and Krista Latham, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Indianapolis, and their students worked as part of a multiyear effort to identify illegal immigrants who've died in the area near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Teams unearthed remains in trash bags, shopping bags, body bags or without a container at all. In one burial, bones of three bodies were inside one body bag. In another, at least five people in body bags and smaller plastic bags were piled on top of one another. Skulls also were found in biohazard bags placed between coffins.
The bodies were buried between 2005 and 2009, Baker estimated.
Researchers said some remains were found under small, temporary grave markers bearing the name of local funeral home Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams.
Baker said that when the researchers discussed the matter with the funeral home before the excavation, they were told that Sacred Heart Burial Park didn't have maps or lists to help figure out where the bodies were buried or to whom they belonged. When they asked for the materials they used for the burials, they were shown fiberboard coffins.
"But we are yet to find any burials using those," Baker said.
Brooks and Jim Hogg county officials said they pay the funeral home to handle bodies recovered in the remote parts of South Texas, an area that's often deadly for illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America who set out on foot through ranch lands amid sweltering temperatures to avoid a nearby U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint.
More than 300 people died crossing through Brooks County alone between 2011 to 2013 -- representing more than 50 percent of the deaths in Texas' sprawling Rio Grande Valley.
Brooks County Chief Deputy Benny Martinez said the funeral home charges $450 to handle each body. County Judge Raul Ramirez said it has been handling such remains for at least 16 years.
Martinez said he's meeting with Brooks County commissioners Tuesday in Austin, Texas, to discuss what happened with the graves.
"I'm trying to get a grasp as to why that occurred," he said.
He doesn't foresee any criminal charges for the funeral home.
"We have always been under budget constraints," Martinez said. "Maybe there was no money to facilitate burying the bodies."
The funeral home referred questions to its parent company, Houston-based Service Corp. International.
"No matter if this is one of our client families we serve on a traditional basis or a migrant family's loved one we're serving, and we don't have any identification of the loved one ... our policy to treat the decedent with care, to treat them just like we would treat anyone else," Service Corp. International spokesman Jessica McDunn told the newspaper.
McDunn said the funeral home has "certain records related to these burials, but this does not amount to confirmation that Howard-Williams was involved in depositing the remains in the manner the researchers described."
The funeral home would not give the newspaper access to those records.
Still, Latham called the discovery appalling. Baker said bodies that were not already skeletonized before burial were found in varying states of decomposition.
"To me, it's just as shocking as the mass grave that you would picture in your head, and it's just as disrespectful," Latham said.
Farther west in New Mexico, Pearce said Friday that a new detention facility planned for his state would be for only illegal alien families, not unaccompanied minors.
He said an area of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia could house families, but the facility was not equipped to handle parentless children.
"We don't have the day care facilities we need to take care of children there," Pearce said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Friday that the 700-bed family detention facility would likely be the first of several new facilities that will be open to house aliens caught crossing the border illegally. A surge of aliens from Central America have been apprehended crossing the border in recent weeks.
Pearce said Border Patrol stations continue to be overwhelmed by the number of aliens.
"There has been a flood of people at the border, and they are holding them at the border in Border Patrol stations," Pearce said. "But they aren't able to get any work done, so the government is looking for places to put them."
The Artesia training center is home to the Border Patrol's training academy, which includes dormitories. But the dorms would remain separate from where families would stay, Pearce said.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press and by Maya Srikrishnan and Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times.
A Section on 06/22/2014