In Eagle Pass, Texas, once the busiest border city in the nation for illegal alien crossings during the Biden administration, illegal alien deaths overwhelmed local funeral homes. They resulted in Maverick County authorities relying on a temporary morgue to store the deceased. This week, County officials laid to rest the last of the illegal alien remains in their emergency morgue at a local cemetery.
In a moving message posted to social media, Maverick County Judge Ramsey Cantu, a Democrat, spoke of the pauper burials provided to the last remaining illegal aliens who lost their lives under the Biden administration’s open border years. Cantu gathered with law enforcement officers, country workers, and citizens from the border community to honor those laid to rest who had no relatives to mourn their passing.
In Texas, a county judge is the chief executive officer of the county.
Most of those kept in the temporary morgue were located after drowning in the Rio Grande, attempting to reach the riverbank in the United States. Others lost their lives after becoming dehydrated on vast private ranches surrounding the border city. In many cases, the decedents whose remains were stored in the temporary morgue remained unidentified. Some, according to Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, also a Democrat, who has spoken to Breitbart Texas about the issue in recent months, have been doing so for more than a year.
According to Judge Cantu, one of the county’s solemn responsibilities to the decedents is to provide pauper burials and make attempts to identify the migrants through a variety of means. In Cantu’s post, the judge told the story of a five-year-old Colombian child, Anthonella Nazareth, who would not have been identified without the efforts of Dr. Kate Spradley, who leads Operation ID at Texas State University. Anthonella and 13 others were buried by Maverick County authorities this week.
Although the child’s mother did not attend the funeral after being notified of her identification, Cantu says county officials were able to speak to her in Honduras. Like more than 500,000 unaccompanied alien children that crossed the border during the four-year term of President Biden, Anthonella was likely abandoned at the border alone to seek entry into the United States by family members.
Cantu attended a moving funeral for Anthonella at the Maverick County Cemetery, where other illegal aliens found deceased within the county are buried. As reported by Breitbart Texas, in 2023, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration declared the U.S./Mexico border the deadliest in the world.
Border deaths in Eagle Pass quickly mounted at the time, resulting in Maverick County having to store illegal alien remains after an Eagle Pass funeral home reached capacity and was no longer able to accommodate the increase in deaths.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Before his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @RandyClarkBBTX.
