Migration down, but human remains still turning up along the border

Illegal migration remains near historical lows along the U.S.-Mexico border. But a group of volunteers continues finding skeletal remains on a stretch of desert in New Mexico. Battalion Search and Rescue leaders say they have located 100 sets of skeletal remains there in the past two years. Most of the remains appear to be women, group founder James Holeman said. “It’s a shocking number, it’s a shocking statistic,” Holeman said Monday on Border Report Live. “Women and young girls have been found in a very small area just west of El Paso. Their average age is 29, the youngest are a pair of 16-year-old girls.” Battalion Search and Rescue has been looking for imperiled migrants since 2020 in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The group focused on New Mexico after nonprofits and federal authorities began reporting a record number of migrant deaths in the El Paso Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol in 2023 and 2024.