Episode 29: Operation I.D. with Kate Spradley

The Big Ideas TXST Podcast is brought to you by Next is Now. For more information, visit www.txtate.edu. Hello and welcome to Big Ideas, a podcast from Texas State University. I'm your host, Dan Seed from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. On this month's episode, we're joined by Dr. Kate Spradley from the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Spradley is a biological anthropologist with specific research interests in human biological variation, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and quantitative methods. She's joining us to discuss Operation Identification, which Dr. Spradley is the director of. Dr. Spradley, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So before we get into Operation Identification, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in anthropology and your current areas of interest. Sure. So I'm a professor of anthropology. I've been here since 2008, and I became interested in anthropology as an undergraduate. I took the class. I had no idea what it was. It was a biological anthropology class. It just really intrigued me. A professor held up a bone and said that it belonged to a Neanderthal who was an adult, 40 years old. The healed fracture indicated that somebody cared for that person, or otherwise they may have died. And it was amazing that you could learn so much from one single bone. And I just stuck with it. I didn't like anything else in college, so I stuck with it. And here you are now leading this, I say, fantastic, but really interesting and integral operation identification, which began in 2013 under the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State. For folks that are familiar with the university and this area, many people may know that as the home of the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, which is locally known as the body farm, the largest such facility in the world. And you're the director of Operation ID. How did this come about and what's the focus of it? So I came here in 2008 and I was in my PhD program. My advisor had sent me to Arizona to collect data on migrant skeletons there for a database. And at the time, I learned a lot about migration and how the forensic anthropologist in Arizona managed to identify a lot of these migrants. I learned about the issues. I've never heard of these issues. I never knew that there were so many people dying at the border. And I applied for a job in Texas because that work really intrigued me and I wanted to work in a border state. And I also wanted to work at a university that was starting a body farm. I mean, this is a huge resource. It draws students. It was really the perfect combination. So I consider myself very fortunate that I got this job here. And I figured that maybe with my skill set and my interest, I might be able to provide some type of assistance for the migrants that were dying at the border. But it took a long time to figure out what was happening to the migrants that died at the border. And I came to find out years later because nothing was really happening. There is a mass disaster that's reoccurring yearly. Hundreds of people die every year in the South Texas border. And for the longest period of time, and still some counties do this when remains are found, they're just buried without DNA sampling. So that's what I mean by, you know, nothing was going on. And in 2012, you have this huge surge of Central Americans coming across the border. It's not just men, but it's men, women and children fleeing violence, extreme poverty, many other things. There were so many deaths that it hit the news. And Brooks County, which has the most migrant deaths in the state, they began to get overwhelmed. And then the news started reporting on it. And this is how we found out about the news is reporting that they were finding bodies and burying them without following the Texas laws. And so a colleague of mine at Baylor and I, we became interested in helping with this. And that's how we got to where we are today. We just, we were offering, we thought if we went there, we offered some services to help assume these individuals and help facilitate DNA testing that that might solve the problems. But the problems are more complex and multilayered. Of course. And obviously, the border has been a focal point of discussion and policy and whatnot from Austin. And of course, in Washington DC, in the last few years, people, when they hear about it, it snippets on the news, a body found, or whatnot. But when you look at the totality of the numbers of migrants that have been found, migrant deaths along the southern border, it's pretty staggering, the numbers, especially in the last 20 years or so, with the border patrol recording these deaths. You know, after we, after we started this project, I found it, what's called the forensic border coalition with the Argentine forensic anthropology team and the Colibri Center of Human Rights and other organizations. And we wanted to ask and answer the question, how many migrant deaths have occurred in the state of Texas? And what we found is we cannot answer that question, because it's up to each county to keep track of that. And nobody's keeping track of it, except border patrol. And border patrol numbers are likely an undercount of the number of deaths, because it counts only the individuals that are found and not found. But it doesn't capture all of the deaths because border patrol doesn't attend every migrant death to be able to count it. So it's most likely a gross undercount across the entire border. And since like the late 90s, over 8,000 deaths have been found across the entire border. And, you know, the majority of those are going to happen in Texas, because Texas has such a long, has such a large border. The sheriff in Brooks County estimates, and I think he's probably onto something with this, that for every one individual that's found, there's five that are not found. Because these individuals are dying trying to evade border patrol checkpoints, they're driven up to an interior checkpoint, which is 70 to 100 miles north of the border. And they're told to get out of the car, walk around the checkpoint, and they'll be picked up on the other side. This is where most of the deaths occur. So they're not happening. They're not all happening right on the border. And they have to walk through private ranch lands to evade these checkpoints. So when they get lost, to come to the elements and die, they are in a very rural territory. In Texas, it's 96% private land. If border patrol is searching for a living individual in distress, they're allowed to go on private property. But in order to search for remains, they have to get landowner permission. And not all landowners provide permission for this. So it's very hard to actually provide an accurate count. And to put it in perspective, and the numbers that you gave are staggering, especially when you consider the idea that these numbers are undercounted. Just for last year, the United Nations reported at least 650 migrant deaths along the border, which is the highest number since those statistics started being kept in the late 1990s, 1998 and 1999. With this situation, with the work that you do, walk us through the process, if you will, starting with how does it begin? Do you get a phone call? Is it a sheriff's border patrol? How does that begin? And then we can get into the actual work that you do. There's two different ways that this starts. We started out serving really the long-term debt, the debt that we found and buried and put in a cemetery and forgotten about. No one recorded where they were buried, the temporary markers paid over time. So that's one way that we find individuals. And then the other way is we get a call from a sheriff saying, "Hey, I have someone here. I don't know what to do. I can't identify them." So when we go and perform exhumations, I go into a county with my students or some of my colleagues, and we start asking questions. We go to the county clerk's office, to the justice of the peace, to funeral homes, and to cemeteries. And we ask people, "Do you have unidentified deaths here? Who picks up the remains? Where are they buried? Can you walk us through the process? Have they been provided identification services? Is DNA been taken? And if there's an identification, can you track the name of that person? Can you track where the body is? Can you go and recover the body and repatriate it? And usually in most counties we visit, they're not sure where the remains are buried. DNA may have been taken for some, but not all. And they cannot track the location of the remains. So then we go in and we perform exhumations. A lot of it is layering information from what the cemetery worker tells us, his memory or a memory of a community member who says, "Hey, I tried to buy this plot next to my father, but I can't because they said unidentified people are buried there." So it's not what you would expect. And then sometimes the sheriff will call us. Like in Brooks County, we work a lot with Brooks County. They send us skeletal remains. But then we take everything back to the lab and we begin our process. And when you're out in the field exhuming these bodies, and correct me if I'm wrong, because in my mind what I'm picturing is like an archaeological dig. Is that what happens? And what exactly are you looking for when you're digging out there? Yes, that is what happens. If the cemetery worker, we were just in Navrat County exploring for future exhumations. And the cemetery worker, they know the most because they're burying the individuals. So they walked us to an area and said, "We bury unidentified individuals here and here." And then we try to ascertain if there's a map. Usually there's not a map or maybe the map is so chaotic you can't decipher it. So we dig a trench and we try to, it is like an archaeological investigation. We dig a trench, we try to define where the burials are. Once we figure it with, you can see outlines in the soil. You can see the disturbed soil or maybe the outline of the body bag. And then we can just kind of expand the area like you would in archaeological investigation. And we call it forensic archaeology. We're doing archaeology, but we're doing it a lot faster. And we're documenting everything that we do so we can also use that information to tell the story of what happened, how the individuals were buried, how they were treated. You can tell a lot about the treatment of the remains through these exhumations. I mean Brooks County, for example, the burials were just below the surface. They were very haphazard. They weren't lined up east to west. In some places we go, bodies are just thrown in face down or sideways. There's no care and putting it into. So you can tell some counties we visit, they care a great deal. They're very respectful. So we want to be able to tell those stories as well. A lot of people to get back to the work that happens and then we can get into the larger issue. But when people have this idea of forensic identification and forensic anthropology, thanks to television, everything's wrapped up neatly in an hour. And it's solved and we figure it out or a couple of episodes. And it comes across as a fairly linear and neat process, but that's not the case. It's clearly much more complex and difficult than that. Could you describe what that's like? Sure. Yes, the TV, I wish it was like what it is on the TV where the DNA is wrapped up very quickly. So DNA is the main way that we facilitate an identification. And our federal system of identification, we have a DNA database that's owned by the FBI called CODIS, the combined DNA index system. It contains DNA from missing individuals or their relatives and DNA from unidentified individuals. And then there's the criminal offender index that doesn't have anything to do with what we do. It's a great DNA system. It is truly outstanding if you are a U.S. citizen and if you are a missing person and someone is looking for you. Because if you want to make a DNA identification, you have to have DNA from family and DNA from the unidentified. So one aspect that's frustrating is that not all counties are sampling, taking DNA samples from unidentified human remains. So you first need this DNA and the database from the unidentified human remains. And secondly, to get family DNA, families of the missing individuals, you have to provide DNA in the presence of U.S. law enforcement. So if you're undocumented, it's difficult. You may not want to do that because you may be risking many things. And then if you're in Latin America, you can't provide the DNA into this database because there's no U.S. law enforcement down there. So it's very difficult. So it's a very fragmented system. I work with, it's a transnational issue, but our federal DNA database does not cross borders. You cannot share this information across borders. My colleagues and I have even gone to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights and pleaded a civil society for the federal government to allow transnational DNA data sharing. And to this day, no. So I work with NGOs in Latin America who collect DNA on behalf of the foreign governments. And the International Committee for the Red Cross, the ICRC, gives us money and we select a certain amount of DNA samples each year that we can submit to a private lab so that DNA can be processed and then compared to these other DNA databases across the U.S. So about, well actually over half of our identifications come from partnering with these NGOs across the border and then about less than half of our identifications come through our federal system because some people do have family living in the United States and these families are desperate enough to risk being undocumented to provide DNA. So I would say that it is very difficult to work in our federal system that doesn't cross borders and then to work in such fragmented systems when we have the technology to really solve all of our problems right now. It's policy and the lack of political will that gets in the way. We have over 300 unidentified individuals at the lab right now and we have identified 60 individuals which is huge. In the first five years we only identified two to three individuals but we're we're getting more now and one of the reasons is we've partnered with a rapid DNA company who is interested in seeing if this rapid DNA technology can work in this situation. But in these cases we have some idea of who the person might be. So that makes it a little easier. We work with our our colleagues across the border and ask them to go see if they can collect a family DNA sample and then we usually get a result pretty quick. And again we're joined by Dr. Kate Spradley discussing Operation Identification. A number of news organizations have profiled Operation Identification everyone from the New York Times to Esquire even internationally. The Guardian newspaper out of England and what struck me about those articles is the humanity that that is uncovered. Meaning the things that you find that speak to who these people might have been. That they were living people, that they were loved, they had things that they liked and enjoyed. Things like personal items, stuffed animals, rosary beads. How do those clues tie everything together especially with the difficulty that you have at times with obtaining DNA? Those personal effects when they come in with a person or when they're buried with a person are so helpful. So we have, I would like to say we do get funding from the governor's office. But a lot of what we do is volunteer based. So we have a lot of undergraduates and graduate students who volunteer to wash these personal effects. You can imagine they've been buried with a person for many years. They've got decomposition fluids all over them, dirt, and our students come in and hand wash these, blind-ride them, and take photographs of them. And we put them into a publicly viewable database called the National and Unidentified Missing Person System or NamUs. And if families have access to the internet and they know about NamUs, they can search themselves for their loved ones. And this is a great tool because the families feel like they can do something. You know, they're not just sitting around waiting. And we have had, I would say, a half dozen identifications based on families looking at these personal effects. So it's helpful to lead to identification or identification hypothesis that can be verified through DNA. But another thing these personal effects do is help the families accept the identification. We've had families who, they'd rather think that their loved one is still alive and doing well. And I understand that. But sometimes the families, you can explain DNA all the time, but that doesn't matter. When they see the handwritten note or the clothing that they remember, that seals the identification for them. And those personal effects are very important for the family to receive as well. I do have to ask because, you know, looking at this, and again, you mentioned how you first get interested in this that a professor held up in the ender-tall bone. And for me, when I look at that, it's very remote, right? Like, okay, this person lived a long, long time ago. But when you're dealing with people that were living not long ago and still have family members alive, wondering what happened to them, is it difficult for you and your team at times to do this kind of work? Because I would imagine that it would get overwhelming sometimes. It can be difficult. And I think that this isn't for everybody. And, you know, this is our skill set. And we do it. But that doesn't mean that it's always easy. And I think that we always feel that humanity. We always know that this is a person and that there is a family looking for them. And that, I think, allows me to do what I do. And I think that allows our students to do this as well. For me, the hardest part is the personal effects. Looking at those, you really get an insight. You get to know that person better. The first body bag that we opened that came from the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Brooks County, she had a backpack and it was full of chips and ramen noodles and other snacks. She was also about my age. And I totally identified with that because I'm always worried about where my next meal is coming from. I'm always hungry and I'm always carrying a lot of food with me. And, you know, I, because I'd been at Arizona and they told me, I learned all kinds of things there, like looking underneath the insoles of the shoes for identifications, look for false pockets, we pulled an ID card out. And that's how I knew she was my age. And that helped facilitate the identification, of course. And then we learned that she had three small children and Honduras, her husband was killed by a stray bullet due to gang violence. So she left her children and her mother at home to come here to try to earn enough money to get her family out of harm's way. That's, that's the hardest part, dealing with that. But it's also motivating to keep doing it, to keep giving families answers who were suffering from this ambiguous loss. And you've mentioned Brooks County multiple times throughout the course of this interview. And I know that you were just down there a few weeks ago, a week ago. Tell us why Brooks County seems to be this epicenter of this. You did mention that they have to cross at a much farther point. But why that county? And when you were down there, just in the last few weeks, what did you find? What, what's the story that's been told? Brooks County is the epicenter of this nasty disaster. I mean, it happens all over the South Texas border. There's not any county or adjacent county that's not impacted by this. But Brooks County receives the highest number of documented deaths each year. So it's, it's likely due to just the migration route that the coyotes are taking. You know, it's a big checkpoint as well. It's a rural county. It's one of the poorest in the state, one of the poorest in the country. And prior to 2012, they had the worst practices they would find remains and bury them. No records, nothing. That's why going to Sacred Heart to do exhumations, it's just exploratory archaeology all over the cemetery. But in 2012, you had an NGO, the South Texas Human Rights Center that moved in there. You had a new sheriff elected. And that county turned things around. And it's now an example of best practices for what to do for all border counties. And they take it even this past year. I'm just, I'm so proud of that county. You have county officials where the sheriff cares, these officials care, and they're working together to provide solutions. They really stepped up to the plate and they started working with Border Patrol recently to fingerprint recently deceased people. So now they're able to identify, they've identified over 50% of their deaths this past year, within the first two weeks, just working through fingerprints. So they're innovative, forward thinking, and they've just really, really turned it around. And they're a group of special people, and they're basically doing this with nothing, very few resources. And you were recently also down in Cameron County and Maverick County. And what did you see? What did you find when you were down there recently? So we were in Cameron County and Maverick County looking for cemeteries that may have an identified human remains, see their candidates for exhumation. We found cemeteries in both counties that we will go back to pending more surveys and legal permissions. But right now you have so many National Guard that are deployed to these border counties. It was hard for us to get a hotel because the National Guard has built them up. You also have an incredible amount of DPS. People are gearing up for a surge in migrant deaths right now. The number of deaths so far this year is high, and everybody anticipates that it's going to be higher. So this work that you're doing clearly is scientific in nature, right? You're adding to the body of scientific knowledge, but it also strikes me as having a much larger impact in society and how people understand what's happening at the border when you do this work and the way that this is contributing to this greater understanding, hopefully, perhaps, of what's happening at the border. Yes, when I started at Texas State, my work was really quantitative, academic, and I loved it and I still enjoy that work very much. And if you told me that I would be doing the kind of work I'm doing now, 15 years ago, I couldn't imagine it. If you wanted to do humanitarian and human rights work, you really had to go outside the U.S. I didn't know that this was an issue at our U.S. border. We're doing this work. We're contributing to a large body of information of understanding the processes, understanding the decision-making practices at local county levels. We're understanding what happens to migrant deaths, but we're really helping identify people and return them to their families. So we're providing a huge community service, which at the same time helps bring these border counties into legal compliance, which is also very important. Four years ago, our anthropology department also started an applied PhD program. So I think this work is just very well suited for our applied PhD program. This is very much applied anthropological work. We're providing a service, but we're also contributing to understanding what's going on at the border and understanding how to improve it as well. You mentioned your students and the work that they do here, the PhD students, discuss their contribution to this. And ultimately, the purpose of university is to help people get better in their field, gain more knowledge. How does this all do that? And what's the impact these students have had on this project? Yeah, our students are so important. And this project would not be possible without all of our students, our undergraduate and graduate students who volunteer countless hours at the lab to do work that is very hard to open up a body bag and take out the contents, clean human remains, wash personal effects. They are so integral and their work is so appreciated. I say thank you all the time. And I don't know if they understand how thankful and how grateful I am for their work. They're learning, whether they know it or not, especially the ones who volunteer at the lab, they're really learning how this process works, especially for the graduate students. I had five PhD students with me in the Valley and over an Eagle Pass these past two weeks. And for this, I was showing them how you go into a county, how you figure out where unidentified human remains are buried. With that, they will have gone through the entire process because they all participate in excavations, they're all leaders in excavations, they lead and they teach the undergraduates. So they're learning this entire process from start to finish. So when they leave here, they can go do this work anywhere. Because even though we have a crisis at the border, they are long term unidentified in every state in this country. We have a global migrant crisis right now. So our students are well suited to go out and address these issues anywhere in the world. A sobering and informative discussion here this month with Dr. Kate Spradley. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And thank you for joining us and downloading and listening. We'll be back next month with another episode. Until then, stay well and stay informed. Big Ideas TXST is a presentation of Texas State University and the Division of University Advancement. Subscribe to experience more innovative, thought-provoking content. If you like what you hear, consider leaving us a starred review. Five if possible. The views expressed during this program are those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent those of the university. Big Ideas is hosted by Daniel Seed, produced by Jamie Bloschke, Strategic Consultant as Kelly Raz.