Mark Reagan and Lorenzo Zazueta-Castro Nearly 300 cardboard boxes sit on shelves inside Dr. Kate Spradley’s laboratory. Each individually labeled box contains artifacts such as skulls, femurs, assorted bones, tattered clothing and personal items of immigrants who died in South Texas. Working with a team of graduate students in San Marcos at...

The question of what happens to people who died immigrating illegally into the country turned into Operation Identification, a program at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University in San Marcos. “Our mission is to locate and exhume and identify and repatriate unidentified human remains on or near the...