To Go Missing in Brooks County: In search and in doubt of best practices to care for the dead

For the last five years, Soto has been conducting an ethnographic field project based in Brooks County, Texas—the epicenter of a region that has, in recent years, been the site for the highest rates of undocumented border crossing fatalities in the United States.

Having researched the topic of death investigations on behalf of undocumented migrants for over a decade, she has come to understand Brooks as a significant and dynamic site where the ideal of forensic investigation as humanitarian care has developed in potentially transformative ways with national and international implications.

Brooks has much to offer as a case study because the extreme circumstances and numbers of migrant fatalities have compelled necessary and fraught trial and error. Brooks also fits into a wider context where the United States’ standards of death investigation and care have been widely critiqued as inadequate from a biomedical perspective.

Practically, this means that those working in the county often pursue a version of best practices not through formal channels, but through improvisation and informal relationships. This wider context of border mass casualty demonstrates the need for major forensic reforms across the United States, but also an opportunity — perhaps, modeled by Brooks County — to shape these reforms so that deaths can be formally recognized as more than a medical event and for standardizing postmortem care through a humanistic and social lens.