César Ortigoza looked out over the Arizona desert and sighed. “It’s not easy out there,” he said. It was 5.30am, and we had driven eight hours eastward through the night from San Diego, California, to a remote region of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near the Mexican border, some 110 miles from Tucson, Arizona. Before us stretched miles of barren flatlands that, on the horizon, gave way to a range of jagged mountains. The isolated location has made the area a popular crossing point for migrants into America, and Ortigoza had recently heard that two had been spotted in a cave nearby. We had come to find them.

Ortigoza is a thick-set handyman in his late 40s, who himself entered America illegally as a teenager. He is also the co-founder of Armadillos Search and Rescue, a volunteer organisation he established in 2015 with his twin brother, Alex. Their mission is to help families find the bodies of the many migrants who disappear in the borderlands. The group’s name was inspired by a pet armadillo that the Ortigozas had once kept in their back garden in Mexico. One day, the armadillo fled, never to return. “I always wondered if it had a better life where it went,” said Ortigoza.

Read the rest of the piece at the Economist: https://archive.ph/BuDmE