Shops burned down by the drug war are used to hide migrants before they cross the Altar desert. Their proximity to the border wall makes them a strategic location for human trafficking networks.
A short section of the border wall stands along the banks of the Colorado River. This border, considered a milestone in modern engineering—with an average cost of $15 million per kilometer—has gaps along its more than 3,100 kilometers, calling into question its effectiveness.
Telma, from El Salvador, holds a portrait of her husband, Willian Gustavo Pérez Ventura, who disappeared on the migration route to the United States in 2001. Since then, his wife has continued to search for him.
A bra abandoned inside “La Paloma del Desierto,” a burned-out restaurant just 500 meters from the border in the Altar desert. This garment usually marks the spot where a woman was sexually assaulted, either by attackers or other migrants. According to Father Prisciliano Peraza, parish priest of Altar, “80% of women who cross the Altar desert are raped.
Altar to Santa Muerte in a liminal neighborhood of Ciudad Juárez. According to Carlos Manuel Salas, attorney general of Mexico’s Northern Zone, this neighborhood is used by organized crime groups due to its proximity to the Cristo Rey hill crossing into El Paso for the kidnapping and trafficking of migrants, and where safe houses also serve as drug manufacturing laboratories.
White crosses mark the niches where up to 20 unidentified people lie in each one, in Tijuana’s cemetery number 12, located less than ten kilometers from the border wall.
Estela holds a photo of her son, Willian Ernesto Quintero Valladares, taken shortly before he left for Maryland from the Salvadoran neighborhood of Apopa. Willian disappeared in 2008, and his mother has not stopped searching for him since.
The interior of a house in the Libertad neighborhood of Tijuana, known for its links to drug dealing and human trafficking, activities facilitated by its proximity to the border wall.
Inés holds a portrait of her son, René Alonso Bolaños García, who fled to the United States in 2013 from El Salvador after receiving threats from the MS-13 gang.
The skull of a migrant in the desert of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, less than 10 kilometers from the border wall and about 20 kilometers west of El Paso, Texas. The remains were reported in September 2023, and as of early 2025, they had not yet been recovered by authorities to be repatriated and returned to her family.
In 1994, while the United States opened its borders to goods and capital, it reinforced them for human bodies. A year after coming to power, President Bill Clinton implemented a policy known as “Prevention through Deterrence” as part of his immigration strategy. This consisted of strengthening surveillance and controls in the busiest urban border areas such as San Diego and El Paso, thereby shifting the flow of migrants to more inhospitable areas. The intention was to let geography do the dirty work: swallow up the undesirables. In this context, the most vulnerable people or those accompanied by their children were forced to resort to the cartels that control different sections of the border and offer to take them across in exchange for thousands of dollars, with no guarantee of arrival.
This policy—later refined by his successors—has led to a huge increase in the number of migrant deaths. The most optimistic estimates (made by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection) point out that since its implementation, 10,000 people have lost their lives, while the most realistic estimates (made by human rights organizations) suggest that the actual figure could exceed 80,000 deaths. But the real figure is known only to the 3,142 kilometers that stretch between Mexico and the United States: the largest land cemetery in the world.
But the migrant is only half the story. The victim is the one who left, the victim is the one who stayed. The one who bet everything to pay the smuggler. The one who continues to wait for a call from their loved one and never received it. The people who died and disappeared on the migration route leave behind a trail of pain just as vast. Mothers, fathers, wives, grandmothers, sisters, friends who wander through the cemetery of the living. A cemetery without tombstones or flowers, a cemetery that no one will visit, a cemetery that piles up the living corpses of those who struggle to find their loved ones who were left behind.
3,142 kilometers where finding the body of a loved one requires a combination of luck and persistence, but even then, it is often not enough.
