Missing in Brooks County is a 2020 feature-length documentary (1 hr 21 m), directed and filmed by Lisa Molomot and Jeff Bemiss.
[1] The ground is sandy and taxing to walk in, and lack of landmarks makes it easy for migrants to get lost and go in circles.
This proved not to be the case, and a network of internal checkpoints up to 100 miles (160 km) from the border was set up to catch those who made it in.
This total assumes that county officials do not request an autopsy, pay nothing for a burial plot, and use no specialized equipment to retrieve a drowned individual.
[4]: 31 The movie project began when Molomot and Bemiss, who met while teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, heard a story on NPR's Story Corps series about Lori Baker, a Baylor University associate professor of anthropology, who has spent years volunteering her time and expertise to ID bodies of anonymous dead migrants.
"[15] We meet the Brooks County Sheriff, who tries to help migrants' families as best he can; he has binders full of pictures of remains.
[16] As they search for answers, the family members encounter a haunted land where death is a part of everyday life.
Missing his family in Houston, and unable to feel at home in Mexico, in 2015 he paid a coyote (human smuggler) to guide him across the Rio Grande and around the Falfurrias checkpoint.
A major figure in the film is Eddie Canales, a retired union organizer who founded the shoestring South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias in 2013.
Canales says that he needs ranchers' permission to leave the water along the route through their ranches, which lessens the chances that migrants will die on the property in question; at first only one allowed him, but at the time of the movie, he states, there were seven.
[10] Vickers is a hunter, and proudly exhibits his large collection of mounted heads with antlers, of deer and similar horned animals.
He says he has seen the flow of migrants increase from "a few polite peasants a week" to "a flood of desperate people", many of whom, according to him, are criminals and possibly terrorists.
Medical examiner Dr. Corinne Stern explains that water in these cattle troughs is usually contaminated and can kill people.
The film interviews, without showing his face, a migrant who says he was with Maceda when he died, a direct result of drinking bad water.