Mass graves. Recently. In America.
by digby
Before Americans condemn people across the globe for burying their ugly secrets in mass graves, perhaps they ought to contemplate this horror:
The discovery of mass graves of unidentified immigrants in a Brooks County cemetery comes as Texas embarks on a new effort to beef up border security, a move some experts say will do nothing to stop deaths, or will cause even more deaths.
Records show deaths continued in Brooks County last year despite a state-backed security surge.
The University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute has tracked immigrant deaths for years, showing that border enforcement surges have correlated with spikes in deaths as immigrants sought more remote, and therefore more dangerous, pathways north. Despite a doubling of Border Patrol staffing in its Southwest sectors since 2005, Brooks County recovered a record number of immigrant bodies in 2012.
In the first two weeks of June, researchers with the Reuniting Families project, working to identify remains of hundreds of immigrants buried in the cemetery in Falfurrias, discovered that between 2005 and 2012, many were buried in mass graves — unceremoniously deposited in body bags, trash bags or no container at all.
I wish I believed that everyone in this country finds this to be a horrifying act that shows our disregard for these people as fellow human beings at least deserving of basic decency. But I don’t.
In fact, if you read the articles about this from the local press they seem to be much more concerned about the federal government failing to seal the borders like the Berlin Wall than they are about the horror of desperate people dying in the desert and then being tossed into mass graves like animals. I guess they figure these faceless, nameless people deserved what they got.
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