Profile: Robin Reineke, Executive Director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights

Guest blogger: Anna Manuel, J.D. Candidate 2017, University of San Francisco, School of Law

Robin Reineke is my new she-ro. Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, she also is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights. Colibrí is an advocacy organization working to end migrant death and related suffering on the U.S.-Mexico border. Her working dissertation entitled, “Naming the Dead: Identification and Ambiguity along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” delves not only into the science involved in identifying unknown migrant remains, but also the political and social considerations therein. Her mentors include Dr. Bruce Anderson, forensic anthropologist at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), her advisor Tom Sheridan, an anthropologist, historian and writer, and Mercedes Doretti of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. In 2014, Reineke was awarded the Institute for Policy Studies’ Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, and was honored as one of Tucson’s “40 Under 40” by the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Allow me to provide a bit of background on the nature of migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border. During the 1990s and again after 9/11, border security was beefed up around the more frequently traversed migrant paths from Mexico into the U.S. This has caused a funnel-effect wherein migrants are now diverted from safer urban routs into dangerous remote reaches of borderland deserts, primarily in Arizona and Texas. Dangers include scalding hot temperatures during the day, freezing temperatures at night, rough mountainous terrain, desert washes, exceedingly dry or humid environments, poisonous snakes, and lack of drinking water. It is impossible to hand carry the amount of water required to sustain a human for the number of days it takes to reach the safety of a town or residence. Many migrants perish due to exposure and/or dehydration as a result of losing their group and becoming lost in these vastly uninhabited lands; some become too sick or injured to keep up, while others scatter when running from Border Patrol. When migrant remains are found, they are often difficult to identify because many do not carry identification in the event they are detained by Border Patrol, and because their bodies are in extreme states of decomposition due to the harsh elements mentioned above. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 6,000 people died while trying to migrate into the U.S.[1]—presumably, however, many more have in fact perished, their bodies yet to be discovered. The multi-faceted problem Reineke is tackling is that we have hundreds of unidentified migrant remains found in the U.S., a dearth of missing persons reports for migrants who go missing at the border,[2] and no centralized multi-national system in which to reconcile unidentified remains and missing persons reports.

Reineke’s professional record exhibits hard work, innovation, and devotion. In 2006, Reineke began her work with the PCOME, helping to identify migrant remains and to take missing persons reports—a task for which the PCOME is not actually responsible. She organized and archived missing persons reports, and took on the extensive mission of matching them with the unidentified remains. Reineke’s role at PCOME gave birth to the Missing Migrant Project, which was the pre-cursor to the Colibrí Center for Human Rights. Colibrí has a database of missing and unidentified migrants that is open to families of the missing, regardless of their immigration status, in effort to provide peace of mind to those who do not know the fate of their missing loved ones.

Bodies are central when it comes to mourning someone who’s lost . . . I think the experience of having someone missing is one of the most emotionally destructive human experiences possible. The person could be in the desert still suffering and lost while you’re going to someone’s birthday party. So every single day can feel somehow traumatic. That cumulative experience over years and years, sometimes, can really affect families.[3]

Challenges do not always end when there has been a positive identification of a family’s missing loved one. Ms. Reineke says the toughest thing her work requires is notifying the family of the death of a missing loved one. In one particularly difficult case, she had informed the family that the medical examiner had positively identified their loved one, Mario, and suggested they do not open the body bag due to Mario’s highly decomposed state.

They had opened the body bag, and what they saw was so horrifying that they no longer believed that it was Mario . . . They were so angry and distraught that they didn’t want to speak with any of us again. I still feel badly about that case. I think it is an important story because it reminds us that, not only are people dying on the border, but they’re bodies are brutalized by the conditions of the desert. It’s really hard on the families.[4]

Colibrí’s holistic approach to this humanitarian crisis is inspiring; science, research, and advocacy combine into a powerful tool for advancing human rights. In addition to her work in forensic science and missing persons investigations, Reineke has written numerous articles addressing political, anthropological, and sociological implications of these migrant border deaths as well as other related topics such as unaccompanied minors and U.S. foreign policy. She actively challenges, with hard statistical evidence, the U.S. Border Patrol’s erroneous “prevention through deterrence” strategy. Colibrí has set out to characterize immigration as an issue that ought to be addressed within the framework of compassion and human rights, not fear and criminality. Reineke advocates against the pervasive dehumanization of immigrants: “How have we come to define someone in terms of illegality to the point where somehow that’s more important than their humanity, than their families, than their hopes and dreams?”[5]

General Biographical Information

Colibri Center, http://www.colibricenter.org/.

About Robin Reineke, Univ. of Ariz. Coll. of Soc. & Behavioral Sci. Sch. of Anthropology, https://anthropology.arizona.edu/user/robin-reineke.

Sarah Illingworth, Identifying the Bodies of Border Crossers, Huffington Post, (April 8, 2015), available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-illingworth/identifying-the-bodies-of-border-crossers_b_7023596.html.

[1] Sarah Illingworth, Identifying the Bodies of Border Crossers, Huffington Post, (April 8, 2015), available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-illingworth/identifying-the-bodies-of-border-crossers_b_7023596.html.

[2] Our police force generally does not provide for missing persons reports of undocumented individuals, and the immigrant community distrusts the authorities, to name a couple reasons.

[3] Collegeofsbs, Torn Apart, Robin Reineke, Colibri Center For Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, YouTube (July 31, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR9tARIVxvw.

[4] E-mail from Robin Reineke, Executive Director, Colibrí Ctr. for Human Rights, to author (Mar. 23, 2016, 20:28 PST) (on file with author).

[5] Collegeofsbs, supra note 3.

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