By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor
Dead bodies of illegal immigrants are turning up in south Texas as Central Americans pour across the U.S.-Mexico border, and a veterinarian who ranches cattle 70 miles from ground zero has the photos to prove it.
Dr. Mike 'Doc' Vickers of Brooks County, Texas showed some of the grisly images to MailOnline, all of them far too grotesque to publish unedited.
One picture shows a corpse propped up against a tree near his ranch in Brooks County, his eyes missing and dried blood cascading down his shirtless body.
'This guy, obviously, had to lay down up against that tree, and that's where he died,' Vickers says in interview footage provided exclusively to MailOnline by documentary filmmaker Chris Dugard.
Falcons native to the Rio Grande river valley 'plucked his eyes out before he was dead,' the animal doctor concludes. 'He bled out through his eyes, which tells me that he was probably in a coma but they were eatin' on him before his heart stopped beating.'
SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO
Two graphic for words: The body of an illegal immigrant whose eyes were plucked out by birds of prey as he lay dying -- Filmmaker Chris Burgard has published footage showing the uncensored images on YouTube
In one Texas county 259 bodies of illegal immigrants have been recovered since 2012, and local advocates suspect they are only finding one out of every five casualties
'Lots of people die out here': Dr. Mike Vickers and his Texas Border Volunteers group routinely find corpses on their south Texas ranches; his photographs are too graphic for MailOnline to show unedited
Dugard is working on a sequel to his 2007 documentary, 'Border,' which made a splash on the film-festival circuit years before illegal immigration swelled to what President Barack Obama now concedes is a 'humanitarian crisis.'
When he filmed 'Border' in 2005, he said, 'we had to go out and find illegal traffic.'
'This time it found us.'
He screened his film on Capitol Hill back then, telling members of Congress that children were becoming pawns in Mexican drug cartels' smuggling operations into the U.S. homeland.
'I am not surprised to find immigrants dying 70 miles north of the border,' Dugard told MailOnline, but 'I am surprised that nine years later it is still a secret to most of the American people.'
'The Federal Government has long known about this,' he said, ticking off Texas and Arizona counties where human remains are continually turning up.
'Local officials who deal with collecting the bodies are so overwhelmed financially that the cost of coroner inquests on each case is dramatically affecting their budgets.'
Vickers, 64, told MailOnline on Wednesday that since 2012 his organization, the Texas Border Volunteers, has counted 259 dead bodies in his native Brooks County alone, including those of children.
'And we're probably only finding 20 per cent of them. A lot of people die out here.'
'We find a hell of a lot of women,' he said. 'Three of the last ones who have died on my ranch have been women. We found a dead 12-year-old boy on my neighbor's property.'
Some have the good fortune to find Vickers and his crew.
'We've rescued some small children, quite a few,' Vickers recalled. 'One boy, 11 years old, was left behind 8 or 9 miles off the highway. He had no idea where he was.' The border volunteers gave him water and arranged for U.S. Border Patrol agents to pick him up.
'I've seen families out in my front yard under a tree,' he said, 'with little bitty toddlers with them.'
The group of about 300 amateur patrolmen go out in teams of up to 40 armed men at a time for 4- to 5-day patrols, reporting to Border Patrol agents and Texas Rangers on where the immigrant traffic is heaviest.
In nine years of scouring south Texas, no shots have been fired.
Vickers carries an M4 semiautomatic rifle with a 30-round magazine for his encounters with armed drug-runners on his ranch
Gang-bangers: Vickers and his group intervened to save this tattooed drug-runner's life although he was armed when they found him
Exhausted and alone: Underage illegal immigrants are trekking across treacherous terrain by the hundreds, some of them never living to see a Border Patrol agent
The closest U.S. Border Patrol station, at Falfurrias, Texas, is about 4-1/2 miles from Vickers' 1,000-acre ranch.
An official in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency confirmed that in the month of June more than 4,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended at or near that checkpoint.
About 82 per cent of them were so-called 'OTM' border crossers – 'Other Than Mexican.'
More than 400 were children.
The federal government doesn't keep statistics on how many dead immigrants' bodies are recovered, the DHS official told MailOnline.
Women and children: The Texas Border Volunteers group regularly rescues border crossers who walk to the point of dehydrated exhaustion, and some turn up on their doorsteps
He conceded to MailOnline that 'we don't know how many people are dying without reaching us, just like we don't know how many people are making it past the checkpoint without being detected.'
Most come from Central America and pay human traffickers known as 'coyotes' between $5,000 and $8,000 each to be smuggled into the United States.
Many don't make it alive.
'The fact is, they're all homicides,' Vickers said. 'These people pay coyotes who are affiliated with drug cartels big money to be brought here and dropped off at the checkpoint. And they go through our private property to avoid detection.'
'And the coyotes, a lot of times, by the time they get to the checkpoint, or even north of the checkpoint, run off and leave them. And you know, they'll point at a light up north, one of those radio towers, and say, "Just keep walking toward that tower. Houston's 20 minutes away".'
Houston is a 280-mile drive from Falfurrias.
'They've already duped them of their money,' he explained. 'And then some days later they're still walking around in circles up here with no water. And you know, a lot of them die.'
'A lot of coyotes don't leave them, but they put them on a fast pace. We're talking 3 to 4 miles per hour, through all this deep sand and all this brush, and real, real treacherous terrain. And if they can't keep up, they'll beat on them a little bit and tell them, "We're just going to leave you here to die." And they do.'
Vickers, a small-time cattle rancher who spends most of his days as a veterinarian caring for his neighbors' livestock, will play a significant role in Dugard's next movie.
In the filmmaker's footage, Vickers shows a photo he took of a gang-tattooed drug runner who was armed but dehydrated when the Texas Border Volunteers stumbled onto him, near the point of death from heat exhaustion.
'We actually saved this guy's life,' he said.
'After we got the "pistolero" treated, we went another 300 yards and found this guy,' he says, pointing to a picture of a badly decomposed corpse. 'He wasn't so lucky.'
Coyotes and their prey: U.S. Border Patrol agents captured more than 4,000 illegal immigrants like these men in the month of June in the land near Falfurrias, Texas -- including hundreds of children
CLICK HERE FOR CHRIS DUGARD'S UNCENSORED FOOTAGE
Dugard also saw an Urdu-to-English dictionary that Vickers picked up near his ranch, dropped by 'a coyote leading a group of Middle Easterners into our country.'
And Chinese immigrants, paying up to $50,000 each to be smuggled into Ecuador and then into the United States, are now numerous enough that the federal government has added Mandarin translations to signs at emergency stations dotting the Texas border region.
But it's those 'OTM' aliens, especially the hundreds of unaccompanied minors crossing every day along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, who have turned illegal immigration into relentless front-page news.
No comments:
Post a Comment