Thanks to statists, rising immigrant deaths put burden on Texas county

By the time the woman perished, she had probably slogged 25 miles through dry ranch lands in her quest to enter the United States. She was found just feet from a highway where she might have been picked up and taken to Houston with other migrants making the same journey.

Not long ago, her body would have been taken to a funeral home for a cursory attempt at identification, then buried in this town an hour north of the Mexico border under a sign reading "unknown female."

Her death, probably from hyperthermia, is part of a mounting body count that has overwhelmed sparsely populated Brooks County, providing further evidence that immigrants are shifting their migration routes away from the well-worn paths into Arizona and instead crossing into deep southern Texas. The changing patterns have put an extra burden on local governments with limited experience in such matters and even fewer financial resources.

"There are some counties that have the economic wherewithal to take on these issues, and there are other counties that just don't have any money, so that puts them into a real bad bind," said Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, coordinator of the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona, which researches immigration issues.

But Brooks County is trying to step up to the challenge. Now, all newly recovered bodies and skeletal remains of suspected immigrants will travel 90 miles to nearby Webb County for autopsies, DNA sampling and more intense efforts at identification.

It's a monumental step for Brooks County, population just over 7,100, where on a recent morning the chief deputy mopped the floors of the sheriff's office himself. He will also be making the weekly trips to deliver corpses to the medical examiner in Laredo.

The county handled 129 bodies last year, which Judge Raul Ramirez, the county's top administrator, says blew a hole in the budget. And even though he and most other local officials see illegal immigration as a federal problem, federal money has not followed.

Last year, Brooks County trailed only Pima County, Ariz., in the number of immigrant bodies recovered and they already have 76 this year. Nearly a million people live in Pima County, and the 171 bodies found in 2012 were consistent with annual totals dating back to 2004, according to a report by the migration institute.

Brooks County, on the other hand, averaged 50 to 60 dead before last year, but Border Patrol apprehensions in the area have soared.

More: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/23/rising-immigrant-deaths/2853107/

Thanks to statists, rising immigrant deaths put burden on Texas county

Thanks to statists, rising immigrant deaths put burden on Texas county

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

Via AnCaps: Law & Enforced Unnatural Order