(Along the U.S.-Mexico Border)

As President Donald Trump fights to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, journalists Azam Ahmed and Meridith Kohut are driving along the approximately 1,900-mile border and sending occasional dispatches.

FALFURRIAS, Texas — It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest border crossing to the town of Falfurrias, the seat of Brooks County, Texas.

From the highway, Texas unfurls in wide sheets of scrubland, dense understories of small trees and thorny brush that rise in gnarled stands along the sandy plains. Patches of mesquite, blackbrush and huisache crowd the horizon.

Like the border itself, which lies some 80 miles away, it is an unwelcoming place for migrants.

More than 700 have perished in transit through Brooks County over the last 15 years, claimed by heat and dehydration while trying to find their way along the parched tracts of ranchland. The real number is surely higher. The local sheriff, Benny Martinez, thinks only 1 in 5 is ever found.

Migrants disperse here after crossing into the United States, avoiding a border patrol checkpoint. They trek through the dried-out terrain, seeking shade under the boughs of live oaks. Hunters occasionally stumble across hats, empty water jugs and leathered remains banked against trees.

Despite the risk, migrants continue to make the journey through the wilds of Brooks County year after year, carried along by hope. And every year, dozens die. No one believes his or her journey will end like this. They can’t. Here, the dead do not teach the living.

For years, the remains were conveyed to the county cemetery in Falfurrias, then interred in the open space along its peripheries, often in plots too small or poorly located to sell.

No one is quite sure how many were buried; until 2013, the county kept no records.

But Eddie Canales, founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, has forced the remains into the open, hoping to rescue them from anonymity.

Since 2013, anthropologists have been coming with their students to exhume the bodies and extract DNA samples. With no maps or records, they dig narrow trenches guided by the memories of local gravediggers. The samples are then cross-referenced with missing-person databases.

Of the more than 150 remains unearthed in this cemetery, 30 have been identified.

“It’s for the families of the missing,” said Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist from Texas State University overseeing the effort.

Spradley stood nearby as a team of students brushed the dirt away from a set of remains buried several feet deep. A worn trash bag, blistered by age, held the bleached bones stacked neatly inside.

The bodies tell their own stories, Spradley explained. One man carried photocopied money in his pockets to throw off robbers. Others are buried with stuffed animals. Some are buried clothed; others as skeletons, having died long before they were found.

Each new discovery brings conflicting emotions, a sense of satisfaction tempered by sorrow. She wonders if they will ever find all of the remains.

“You look around and you just think, ‘There’s an open space, there’s an open space,'” she said, scanning the verdant grounds, where fresh cut flowers lay against polished headstones. “And there could be a migrant buried anywhere there.”

She paused for a moment. The sound of shovels striking dirt filled the cemetery.

“I always think, you know, what if one of my family members went to another country and never came back,” she said. “Would anyone pick up the phone to help me? And if they picked up the phone, would they care enough to help me?”

That was when Canales decided to come out of retirement to found the human rights center, after a career as a union organizer. A 70-year-old Texan with an easy laugh, he applied the same principles to human rights as he did to union organizing.

“Developing a connection, basically,” he said, as he drove the public roads that demarcate thousands of acres of ranchland. “And then, you know, I mean, I’m still the same pushy guy.”

Canales was on his way to replenish water stations that he maintains for migrants passing through. A little more work for him might mean a little less for the gravediggers. The large blue bins sit along the roadside every half-mile or so, and carry up to 6 gallons of fresh water. He has planted a flag near most, to help migrants spot them from the brush.

In the borderlands, of course, not everything is dark and serious. People live their lives as they do anywhere. Whatever the broader political debate, to most, this place is just home. And for some, it feels as if politicians who know little about the area are just trying to gain political points.

“There’s certainly no crisis or state of emergency here,” said Phillip Gómez.

Gómez was seated at the Jalisco Restaurant along the edge of the highway into town. The television was on over the bar, playing the highlights of President Donald Trump’s speech in McAllen, Texas, about an hour and a half’s drive away.

But no one was paying attention to that. The DJ was gearing up for karaoke night. Regulars began filing in, introducing themselves to diners as if they owned the place.

Gómez, a 64-year-old technician for DirecTV, sported a white handlebar mustache, plaid shirt and cowboy hat with a pair of sunglasses perched on top. He remained seated while he sang a slightly off-tune rendition of “The Chair” by George Strait.

Afterward, he didn’t much care to talk politics, though he allowed that everyone else seemed to want to talk about the border whether they lived there or not.

Then he talked about the border.

He agrees with Trump, he said, and though he feels bad for migrants fleeing violence, that’s no reason to let everyone just come into the U.S.

“Why do people have walls in their backyard?” he asked, passing off the microphone for the second time that night, after a second George Strait song. “Because they don’t want people in there. There’s no difference. Explain the difference to me.”

Gómez, who speaks Spanish and whose great-grandparents immigrated from Mexico, doesn’t feel as if the system can bear much more.

“I’m all for helping people,” he said. “But too many people are going to bring down our system.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.