As one of the worst heat waves on record rolls through much of the southern United States this summer, authorities and activists in South Texas found themselves embroiled in a mystery in the arid region near the border with Mexico. Barrels of life-saving water that a human rights group had strategically placed for migrants traveling on foot vanished. Usually, they're hard to miss. Labeled with the word "AGUA" painted in white, capital letters, the blue 55-gallon drums stand out against the scrub. The stakes of solving this mystery are high. Summer temperatures can climb to 110 degrees in Texas' sparsely populated Jim Hogg County, notes the AP. Migrants—and sometimes human smugglers—take a route through this county to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint on a busier highway about 30 mile east.
More than 60 miles from the US-Mexico border, it can take several days to walk there for migrants who may have already spent weeks crossing mountains and desert and avoiding cartel violence. "We don't have the luxury of losing time in what we do," says Ruben Garza, an investigator with the Jim Hogg Sheriff's Office. Tears streamed down his face as he recalled helping locate a missing migrant man who became overheated, called for help, but died just moments after his rescue. Exact counts of those who die are difficult to determine because deaths often go unreported. The UN International Organization for Migration estimates almost 3,000 migrants have died crossing from Mexico to the US by drowning in Rio Grande, or because of lack of shelter, food, or water.
John Meza volunteers with the South Texas Human Rights Center in Jim Hogg County, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island. He restocks the stations with gallon jugs of water, trims overgrown grass, and ensures GPS coordinates are still visible on the barrel lids. In July, Meza said 12 of the 21 stations he maintains were no longer there. The AP compared images captured by Google Maps over the last two years and confirmed that some barrels that were once there were gone. But to where? Wildfires are common in this part of Texas. Road construction crews frequently move aside obstructions. But as Garza walked a path designated for barrels, there were no signs of melted, blue plastic. And nothing indicated the heavy barrels had been moved.
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Garza suspects state road crews moved three barrels along an unpaved road, but the Texas DOT denied it. He also noted a "tremendous amount" of wildfires could be to blame, and is speaking with area ranchers in hopes that the disappearances may be a misunderstanding, not a crime. But in other states along the southern border, missing water stations have been ascribed to spiteful intentions. The group No More Deaths in 2018 released video of Border Patrol agents kicking over and pouring water out of gallon jugs left for people in the desert. For now, the mystery about the barrels' disappearance remains unsolved. But Meza plans to continue his work. "If that was intentional, that's a pretty malicious thing," he says. "You're saying, 'Let these people die.'"
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