'An open graveyard': Skeletal remains lie unrecovered in New Mexico's borderlands

The blue rosary marked a spot in the desert where searchers found an identification card. It spelled out a woman’s name in thick black letters: Ada Guadalupe López Montoya, 33, born in El Salvador.

A team of volunteers from Arizona-based Battalion Search and Rescue, which combs the borderlands of Arizona and New Mexico for lost and missing migrants as well as human remains, found bones nearby.

Nearly two months later, many of the bones were still there.

It’s a troublingly common occurrence, said James Holeman, 59, a Silver City resident and one of the leaders of Battalion Search and Rescue, which organizes monthly searches. In just over a year, the organization found more than two dozen such sites in the Southern New Mexico desert — enough to make Holeman call the area “an open graveyard” — and reported them to the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office.

The remains, believed to be those of migrants, would be among hundreds of migrant deaths logged in the El Paso region since 2008, including more than 300 in Doña Ana County. It’s an area that has seen at least a hundred migrant deaths annually in recent years, according to humanitarian aid groups and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Bryce Peterson, a volunteer with the nonprofit No More Deaths who helps gather data used to map migrant deaths in the region — a total of 599 since 2008 and 176 in fiscal year 2024 alone — calls it the deadliest stretch of the southern U.S. border.

His group’s El Paso Sector Migrant Death Database logged more than 80 sets of skeletal remains between 2008 and 2024, including dozens in Doña Ana, Luna and Hidalgo counties.

Battalion Search and Rescue doesn’t directly report its findings to No More Deaths’ database, Holeman said, though its reports to OMI could be included in the source data.

Holeman believes “there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more out there yet undiscovered.”

He and other searchers say the local sheriff’s office and the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator haven’t done enough to collect, catalog and — to the extent possible — identify the remains they have discovered so far. They are deeply troubled by what they see as inaction by authorities to properly address the scattered human remains and raise concerns about whether the lives lost — those of migrants — are considered a low priority by state and local officials.

“Is there a distinction here between these bones and … Santa Fe bones?” Holeman wondered.

Chris Ramirez, an OMI spokesperson, wrote in an email that field investigators and transport teams “do their very best” to properly collect and convey remains to Albuquerque for postmortem medical examinations. But, he noted, the rugged, remote landscape and abundant wildlife pose challenges for the agency.

Meanwhile, Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart, in an email to The New Mexican, acknowledged tension between her office and Battalion searchers.

She takes issue with the group’s methods, saying it “has not been cooperative or very forthcoming with information” and has contributed to the “contamination of these sites.”

“Battalion SAR is not a highly trained, reputable group,” Stewart wrote.

She also accused Battalion Search and Rescue of planting human remains in the Doña Ana County desert.

“Frankly, we don’t know if a bone or bones have been brought from other locations and photographed after being deposited randomly,” she wrote.

A journey ends in tragedy

For Holeman, López Montoya’s identification card was the latest in a string of grim discoveries.

But it ultimately prompted OMI to collect some of the remains at the site, which the searchers believe may have been hers.

After López Montoya went missing, her loved ones reached out to Armadillos Ni Un Migrante Menos, a California-based humanitarian organization that amplifies families’ searches for missing loved ones online and searches for migrants’ remains.

Missing persons posters are a regular sight on the Armadillos’ Facebook page, as are photos and videos depicting human remains. Spectators cheer on the group from the comments section and express support for families, offering written condolences and prayer emojis.

Armadillos posted a missing person flyer on Facebook featuring López Montoya in July 2023.

Battalion Search and Rescue — which had found the site containing her identification, a cellphone and other personal items, along with a set of human remains in August 2024 — had learned of Armadillos’ effort and saw the post about the missing Salvadoran woman.

“I heard about this missing persons thing,” Holeman said. He reached out to Cesar Ortigoza, the Armadillos’ leader, and provided information about the Santa Teresa discovery. “I said, ‘This is your woman,’ you know. … We found this two months ago. September, October, November. They didn’t pick it up. It’s still out there.”

Ortigoza, 51, of San Diego was determined to ensure authorities properly responded to the report of human remains that could be López Montoya’s; he booked a Nov. 15 flight to El Paso.

He arrived at the Southern New Mexico site outside El Paso on Nov. 16 and notified OMI again about the remains, and waited for investigators to arrive.

“We were gonna stay there until [OMI] came over and picked them up. So that’s what we did,” Ortigoza said, adding they showed up a few hours later.

It took most of the day, he said, for the team to recover most of the site’s remains.

Ortigoza livestreamed a video of the operation on the Armadillos’ Facebook page, something the group commonly does.

He left the blue rosary in López Montoya’s memory.

Her family tuned in to the live video and reacted with disbelief at López Montoya’s personal effects, such as a pair of pants draped over a mesquite shrub.

“What did you do to get those — those belongings and put them there to make a video?” they asked Ortigoza on the live video.

“[They] said that we had planted this — the evidence,” he said.

The New Mexican had hoped to contact López Montoya’s family members, but Ortigoza said they objected to the release of their information.

López Montoya initially had no intention of crossing the border through New Mexico’s desert corridor, Ortigoza said. The family’s Facebook post, written in Spanish, noted she had planned to cross the border at Ciudad Juárez and go to El Paso.

This was at least her second attempt to enter the U.S. — though her reasons for embarking on the journeys remain unclear.

Documents from the First Court of Judgment in Santa Ana, El Salvador, allege she was the victim of human trafficking in 2012, when she and a person suspected of being a “coyote” were stopped while trying to cross into Guatemala, with a final destination of the U.S.

Her family had paid the alleged coyote, or border guide, to help her make the journey. Still, he initially faced a criminal charge of trafficking.

The case ultimately was dismissed due to lack of evidence; López Montoya might have refused to testify, fearing she would become the target of criminal gangs in El Salvador for identifying the man.

Her trek from El Salvador likely wasn’t an easy one. Evidence suggests she was a victim of extortion along the way: Her family received a call saying she would be killed if they didn’t transfer money, Ortigoza said.

Migrants — particularly women — are often targeted for extortion, sexual violence and other crimes, said Gabriela Romero, an attorney with Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción, a Ciudad Juárez-based organization that provides migrants with free legal representation.

Romero said criminal groups have found profit potential in the extortion of migrants’ families — especially relatives in the U.S. — making threats of torture, sexual violence and death of their loved one.

As many as 6 in 10 migrant women face extortion in Mexico, said Miriam González Sánchez, a spokesperson for El Instituto para las Mujeres en la Migración, a Mexico-based organization that advocates for migrant women.

Sexual violence, too, is on the rise against migrants, Romero said.

Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit that provides international crisis medical care, documented such a rise in a February 2024 report. Its teams in the border cities of Matamoros and Reynosa found a 70% increase in sexual assault consultations in the last three months of 2023 compared to the three months prior. January 2024’s caseload was higher than in any month in 2023, the report said.

But so few crimes against women end in a conviction, González Sánchez said. “If you add the layer of being a migrant, it becomes a complete lack of access to justice for migrant women” in Mexico.

Slow to collect ‘field of remains’

Battalion Search and Rescue maintains a binder of paperwork documenting each of its finds, noting the discovery date, GPS coordinates and descriptions of the remains. Volunteers mark each of the deaths they encounter with ribbons, affixing the pink strips to nearby foliage.

Most searches lead the group to the same sight: an open expanse of desert floor with what the volunteers believe are human bones and personal items strewn about by scavenging and predatory wildlife.

It’s not unusual to find a “field of remains,” said Abbey Carpenter, a Battalion Search and Rescue leader and Holeman’s partner.

“You don’t always find the whole body. It depends on the birds, the animals, the time,” she said.

One particular field of remains was discovered in late August within a network of dirt roads, about 10 minutes by car from a Santa Teresa truck stop and a few miles as the bird flies from where López Montoya’s belongings were found.

Here, a hip bone. There, a scapula and clavicle. A dozen feet away, shards of vertebrae. And at the center of it all, a skull, missing its front teeth.

The searchers affixed pink ribbons to shrubs near many of the bones before reporting the remains — and their GPS coordinates — to the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office.

The remains were still there in February.

Searches on Sept. 21 and 22 yielded several finds: “about 10-12 rib bones in the area, jaw bone, other assorted bone fragments” in just one of the discoveries, according to the organization’s reports, as well as hygiene items, women’s clothing and a pair of small Nike tennis shoes.

While most members of Battalion Search and Rescue aren’t trained forensic experts, the search team does have a forensic anthropologist on staff to better help identify the age and gender of a set of remains.

The expert also helps determine if remains belong to a person rather than an animal — though some skulls and desiccated anatomy are unmistakably human.

The group kept a list of the eight cases it reported to the sheriff’s office between late August and late October, but they don’t believe the agency responded to most, if not all, of them.

In February, Battalion filed a complaint against the sheriff’s office with the New Mexico Department of Justice, citing the agency’s lack of action.

“By not responding to our calls for service, DASO has created a dangerous public safety situation,” the group wrote in the complaint.

Lauren Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, wrote in an email to The New Mexican the agency has been in contact with the sheriff’s office about the complaint and has determined it has “a process in place” to handle requests in a way that balances “the integrity of potential crime scenes and the consideration of possible archaeological remains.”

She added, “We remain aware of the situation and encourage continued communication among all parties to facilitate the identification of these remains.”

The searchers contend, however, the agency isn’t following a state law that details processes for people — including civilians — to report human remains and outlines how investigators must respond to the reports, with speedy action required from all parties.

In the case of a death with an unknown cause, the law requires “anyone who becomes aware of the death” to report it immediately.

Once notified of a death, state medical investigators are required, “without delay,” to “view and take legal custody of the body.”

“This is a crime scene, and this is their job — and they’re trained for it,” Carpenter said. “When we can go back and find a femur, that’s not a little bone. And so, just to sort of brush it off with, ‘Oh, it’s just part of the desert.’ That’s not good enough. They’re professionals. This is their job. They’re trained. They’re paid for this.”

‘Treated as potential homicides’

Stewart, the Doña Ana County sheriff, initially declined a request for an interview about Battalion Search and Rescue’s allegations and human bones lying in the sand within her jurisdiction.

But she later defended her agency, writing in an email her deputies follow a response process for reports of remains, one that includes detectives and crime scene technicians as well as state OMI personnel.

Her office receives reports of skeletal human remains from U.S. Border Patrol agents and, less frequently, civilians, she wrote.

“Many times, the remains recovered are not complete skeletons and may be only partial remains such as ribs, leg or arm bones, skull, or only fragments of such bones. Either way the process remains the same,” Stewart wrote.

She added, “All human remains are treated as potential homicides until further investigation deems them otherwise.”

The New Mexican requested copies of the office’s reports pertaining to skeletal human remains found outside Santa Teresa from Aug. 30 through Oct. 20, 2024.

In response, the agency provided a single “unattended death” report from Sept. 23, 2024. The report and its supplements show a deputy, a detective and crime scene technicians, as well as OMI officials, responded to the reported remains, finding at least four bones — including “a partial pelvis and backbone” that were “verified to be of human origin.”

Stewart voiced concerns about Battalion Search and Rescue’s tactics, writing, “the circumstances of how and when they came upon them are questionable at best.”

The group does not immediately report remains to law enforcement, she argued, instead placing “small marking flags” — the pink ribbons — and reporting the coordinates later via email. She also wrote the searchers do not provide adequate information for initial reports or guide deputies to the sites.

Carpenter pushed back against the sheriff’s accusations, arguing the organization provides sufficient information — including GPS coordinates and nearby roadways — to lead deputies to sites containing remains.

“I shouldn’t have to wait at the site and guide them in,” she said. “This is their jurisdiction, not mine.”

At times, Stewart added, Battalion Search and Rescue has sent photographs of “their own feet next to the bones,” which she wrote amounts to contamination of the sites.

The sheriff also expressed dissatisfaction with the reports from Battalion, writing that some “yielded nothing more than a few bones such as a femur and ribs or fragments of a lower jawbone.”

Holeman dismissed the claims. “ She’s just grabbing at straws,” he said of Stewart. “She said so many insane things, right? She said that she talked to the [Bureau of Land Management], and these sites are prehistoric — they have braces on their teeth and they have IDs and clothing.”

Carpenter noted it’s unlikely many of the remains she and her team have found will ever be identified — but that doesn’t mean documenting their existence and reporting their remains to authorities is meaningless.

“We’re going to know that this happened on U.S. soil,” she said. “Another person died — and this person has been counted.”

‘Out of respect for the decedent’

At times, Holeman said, Battalion Search and Rescue returns to a reported site of human remains to find rubber gloves — indicating a visit from New Mexico medical investigators.

The trouble is, investigators don’t always pick up all the remains, he said.

At the site where López Montoya’s belongings were found, for instance, he said, OMI left behind both unrecovered bones and medical investigators’ rubber gloves in December.

The OMI’s Ramirez did not respond to The New Mexican‘s requests for information on the agency’s investigation into the remains found near López Montoya’s ID card.

However, unlike Stewart, Ramirez expressed an interest in working more effectively with groups like Battalion and acknowledged difficulties investigators face when responding to reports of scattered remains in remote areas, where they have seen an increasing number of deaths.

The agency is working to identify technology that would allow such volunteer search organizations to report accurate data about the location of possible human remains, Ramirez wrote in an email.

“OMI works diligently to collect all known pieces of human remains, both for a complete and thorough medical examination, and out of respect for the decedent and their family,” he wrote.

Rugged terrain like that of the state’s border with Mexico — where Ramirez said the office has seen a “significant increase” in deaths in the past two years — can pose unique challenges.

“The field investigator and transport team do their very best, following certain protocols that they have trained on, to ensure all parts of a decedent are properly collected,” Ramirez wrote.

But, he added, “This geography of New Mexico is extremely rugged, sandy, filled with wildlife, and is often extremely difficult to access. Additionally, some decedents are found weeks or even months after their death often causing remains to scatter across the desert due to wind, floods, and wildlife.”

Pushed toward ‘hostile terrain’

López Montoya’s belongings, and likely her bones, were found nearly 20 miles from El Paso, where her family believes she was headed.

How did she end up in the desert scrub of Southern New Mexico?

Part of the answer could lie in a decades-old Border Patrol policy.

Officers patrol the remote desert region, but the large majority of the agency’s personnel and surveillance systems are concentrated in urban areas. This stems from a policy known as “prevention through deterrence” in a 1994 document detailing the agency’s strategy for the future.

The document, approved by then-Border Patrol Commissioner Doris Meissner, states urban areas pose the greatest concerns — especially “twin cities” like El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, which she named as the greatest risks for illegal entry.

The plan emphasizes the importance of controlling urban areas, so that “illegal traffic” is forced onto rural roads with less anonymity and less access to public transportation and nationwide travel.

“The prediction is that with traditional entry and smuggling routes disrupted, illegal traffic will be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement,” the plan states.

These days, though, migrants have little choice in their final destination, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said.

The El Paso Sector, a 264-mile stretch of border that includes New Mexico and a handful of West Texas counties, poses “multiple different dangers,” said Claudio Herrera Baeza, a supervisory Border Patrol agent in the sector.

“The terrain itself is very, very hard. It’s unforgiving,” he said of the New Mexico desert. “A simple twist of an ankle can mean a difficult situation, if not a possibility of dying.”

“Transnational criminal organizations” decide where and when migrants cross the border and often abandon individuals in their care without food, water or supplies, said Landon Hutchens, a spokesperson for Border Patrol’s El Paso and Big Bend sectors.

“Most of the time, [migrants] don’t even know where they’re being smuggled through,” Herrera Baeza added. “They don’t know the terrain; they don’t know the vastness of the terrain, the difficulties of the walk.”

Underscoring the perils in the barren desert, a solar-powered emergency beacon looms a few miles from the truck stop near Santa Teresa. The beacon offers no emergency supplies — only a red button, a diagram of a collapsing person and a sign.

It reads: “If you need help, push red button. U.S. Border Patrol will arrive in 1 hour. Do not leave this location.”

Border Patrol logged nearly 1,000 humanitarian rescues in fiscal year 2024, Hutchens said, and the agency employs a combined 150 or so paramedics and emergency medical technicians to respond to medical emergencies near the border.

Upon being nursed back to health, once-injured migrants will be “placed on removal proceedings” and sent back to their country of origin, Herrera Baeza said.

The choice to push an emergency beacon’s red button, then, is not an easy one to make.

“I completely understand the difficulties of wanting to have a better life, a better future for your loved ones,” Herrera Baeza said.

But he issued a plea for those considering the treacherous trip through the El Paso Sector: “Please don’t cross,” he said. “Don’t come over illegally.”