Down on the U.S.-Mexico border, they use numbers to identify the dead bodies.  We are not talking about victims of an earthquake, a flood, or some other natural event.  We are talking the dead bodies of people who tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

It is the latest tragedy of a serious humanitarian crisis that local authorities get stuck with, as Manny Fernandez reported:

Case 0435 died more than a mile from the nearest road, with an unscuffed MacGregor baseball in his backpack. 

Case 0469 was found with a bracelet, a simple green ribbon tied in a knot. 

Case 0519 carried Psalms and Revelation, torn from a Spanish Bible. 

Case 0377 kept a single grain of rice inside a hollow cross. One side of the grain read Sara, and the other read Rigo.

The belongings are part of a border-crossers' morgue at a Texas State University lab here — an inventoried collection of more than 2,000 objects and 212 bodies, the vast majority unidentified.

All 212 were undocumented immigrants who died in Texas trying to evade Border Patrol checkpoints by walking across the rugged terrain. 

Most died from dehydration, heatstroke or hypothermia. 

Even as the number of people caught trying to illegally enter the United States from Mexico has dropped in recent months, the bodies remain a constant, grim backdrop to the national debate over immigration.

"When we get them, we assign them a case number because we have to have a way of tracking cases, but no one deserves to be just a number," said Timothy P. Gocha, a forensic anthropologist with Operation Identification, a project at Texas State University's Forensic Anthropology Center that analyzes the remains and personal items of the immigrants to help identify them. 

"The idea is to figure out who they are, and give them their name back."

What a disgusting tragedy.

The left will probably try to blame U.S. immigration laws.  In other words, leftists will say this is because we do not have immigration reform or some path for people to come over.

In fact, we have a legal path – i.e., go to a U.S. consulate and apply for entry.  At the moment, there are people all over the world waiting for their turn to come to the U.S.

The real culprit is the political class, from Mexico down to Central America.  They've grown dependent on "remesas," or the money these people send back: $69 billion in 2016.

So the dead bodies stack up, and more personal items will end up in the warehouse.  It gets bigger every day.

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