Lost in the System: Unidentified Bodies on the Border

Over the past decade, thousands of people have died in the desert borderlands of the US. As has been demonstrated repeatedly, the deaths are a result of the US border enforcement policies that have made border crossings much more dangerous than they were before the era of border militarization. In 2009, the US Department of Justice launched the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), an online relational database designed to match missing person reports with records for unidentified decedents found throughout the country. Although NamUs is enormously useful, it relies on local jurisdictions to enter their own records for unidentified remains, and many medico-legal offices still do not use the system. In the summer of 2012, the PCOME became the first non-police entity authorized to enter missing person reports into NamUs. The PCOME has taken DNA samples from all the unidentified decedents discovered over the past decade.