CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Officials directly involved in reuniting migrants' remains with their families are worried that a funding change could slow down that process.
Brooks County Sheriff Urbino "Benny" Martinez told 3NEWS that since 2009, his department has recovered 912 remains.
So far this year, Brooks County has discovered 80 migrant remains in the desert-like terrain. Those migrants were honored in a special ceremony held by the South Texas Human Rights Center on Friday.
Operation Identification, led by Texas State University director and forensic anthropologist Kate Spradley, works to locate, exhume and identify the bodies of dead migrants. Every year, her scientists work to identify around 80 migrants' remains using DNA analysis.
She said they get a significant amount of help from Brooks County officials, who fingerprint the remains for identification and work with federal officials to get in contact with migrants' families.
RELATED: Special ceremony held for lives of migrants lost in Brooks County
The state government was directly funding their work, but Spradley said that's now changed.
"We just learned that the state of Texas is only going to be giving funding to individual counties -- not to state agencies anymore -- and we are a state agency," she said.
The move adds a layer of bureaucracy to the process. Now, instead of being able to immediately start working on identifying a migrant's remains, Spradley's team will have to wait until county officials request their help.
Spradley fears that the lack of funding could potentially slow down her department's work.
"In the future, we will be able to contract with counties, directly, but from now until next August 2023 we're going to be scrambling to get our funding," she said.
The South Texas Human Rights Center's Executive Director Eddie Canales said he's arranging to meet with state senator Juan 'Chuy' Hinojosa in order to smooth out the process.
"We are working through it," he said. "Senator Hinojosa's office has contacted Kate and they're trying to set up a meeting with the governor's office in terms of making sure that there is a process that facilitates and expedites. We've got a lot of work to do."
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