MISSION, Texas -- In the freezer of a small funeral home nearly 13 miles from the Texas-Mexico border, 22 bodies are stacked on plywood shelves, one on top of the other. 

The bodies wrapped in white sheets have names, families and official countries of origin -- Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, sometimes China or Pakistan. The bodies in black shrouds are the remains of the nameless and unclaimed, waiting to be identified.

For the past few years, the family-owned Elizondo Mortuary and Cremation Service in Mission, Texas, has been taking in the remains of undocumented immigrants found dead in nearby counties after crossing the border from Mexico. This year, however, they had to build an extra freezer. It’s become difficult to keep up with the rising tide of dead coming to them from across the Rio Grande Valley.

Crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally has always been dangerous, but this year heat and drought have made the journey particularly deadly. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, this part of the border has seen a sharp rise in both rescues and deaths of people crossing the border illegally. So far in 2012, agents have rescued more than 310 people, and found nearly 150 dead in the Rio Grande Valley -- an increase of more than 200 percent over the last fiscal year. 

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This comes as migration across the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped to historic lows, falling nearly 62 percent over the last five years, according to numbers recently released by CBP. But the proportion of deaths to apprehensions is rising -- suggesting that while fewer are crossing, more are dying.

Ground zero is over 70 miles north of the border, in Brooks County. Last year the remains of about 50 presumed undocumented immigrants were found in the county. This year, the tally has reached about 104, with nearly three months to go.

The rising number of unclaimed corpses marks a growing crisis for this cash-strapped county of fewer than 7,500 residents. Because Brooks has no coroner, it sends the bodies recovered on its vast cattle ranches to Elizondo in neighboring Hidalgo County. It costs, according to county officials, about $1,500 for each body to be processed. 

Both the county and Elizondo also make efforts to identify the remains. In most cases, chances are slim. The mortuary uses physical descriptions and accounts of the clothing worn by missing immigrants to attempt to match bodies, but often there are few clues to work with. The elements and animals often destroy corpses and scatter bones across the desert. While DNA testing could help, neither Brooks County nor Elizondo can afford to order the tests for every unidentified body. 

Many of the migrants who are found dead in this part of South Texas end up buried in paupers’ graves, remembered only by their gender, case number and the name of the ranch where they died.

Adaptation
In September, Marta Iraheta traveled from Houston to Falfurrias, Texas, the seat of Brooks County. She came seeking the remains of her nephew and a friend who disappeared in July as they crossed illegally into the United States.  

Twenty-year-old Elmer Esau Barahona left his hometown of San Vicente, El Salvador, on June 10th. On June 27^th -- his is daughter’s second birthday -- he called his mother to say he had arrived in the border city of McAllen, Texas.

He told her he and his friend were staying in a stash house, waiting for the smugglers to take them on the next leg of the journey. From the stories Iraheta has pieced together from survivors, her nephew and his friend left McAllen five days later, on the evening of July 2.

They began the long walk with a group of migrants through desolate private ranch land, skirting the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias. After a day of walking, his friend, a 17-year-old Salvadoran named Elmer Amilcar Sevallos Martinez, sat down and did not get up again. The rest of the group continued on. 

Just minutes from the highway where the coyotes -- as the smugglers are known -- were to pick them up, Barahona hurt his knee.

“The coyote told them they had to leave him there,” said Iraheta, his aunt, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen. “They said he was bad, really bad. He was faint. He remained there, sprawled on the ground.”

The Rio Grande Valley is one of the most trafficked illegal immigration routes used by people known in Border Patrol parlance as “OTM,” or “other than Mexican.” About 60 percent of those apprehended in this area come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as countries as distant as China, Afghanistan and Russia.

“When you look at South Texas on a map and draw a straight line to Central and South America, this is your furthest southern point to cross into the U.S.,” said Enrique Mendiola, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley.

But the recent increase in traffic through this corridor is attributable to more than geography.

Since the mid-1990s, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has clamped down hard on border crossings. The agency has more than doubled in size since 2004, and now has 28,000 agents, nearly half of them in Texas. Fences, sensors, drones, checkpoints and disciplined, coordinated enforcement have choked off routes through urban areas that were once easily crossed.

Smugglers have adapted by moving into sparsely populated areas like the Sonoran desert in Arizona, and the west Rio Grande Valley.

“We’re starting to see these crossings more in these particular areas than we have in the past,” said Mendiola.

With triple-digit temperatures and wide deserts, these uncompromising landscapes are harder to patrol than populous areas on the border’s edge. They are also more dangerous for those crossing into the country.

“There’s no doubt that the increased vigilance has pushed people into these more hostile areas,” said Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, a professor of Mexican American Studies and coordinator of Arizona State University’s Binational Migration Institute. “Traditionally, people crossed in urban areas. If you cross into an urban area, you can find a way of making it. If you have to cross through these rural areas, you’re taking a big chance.” 

Despite the rising danger and cost, people keep coming. Advocates and families say that with few legal avenues into the U.S., migrants feel this is the only way to make a better life.

“Had they been able to have a good chance of getting a visa, they never would have tried to cross the desert,” she said.

Lucrative cargo
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that Gulf Cartel out of Mexico controls most of the lucrative smuggling routes through this area of the Rio Grande Valley, and uses them to ferry both humans and drugs into the country.

The Border Patrol has made dismantling these networks a priority. Despite daily apprehensions of individual migrants, Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Woody Lee said the agency’s larger aim is “not focusing on what it is that’s coming across, but how do we take out the infrastructure.”

“How do we take out the people who are moving the product, or the people, on this side of the border? ” he said. “Those people are within our control.”

This means the agency, which has jurisdiction up to 100 miles from the border, does much of its work far from the Mexico line, following the smugglers as they forge new tactics and routes.

The coyotes hustle people across the border into stash houses in towns and cities like McAllen and Mission. From there, they pile them into vans -- the seats torn out to fit more bodies -- and drop them off along the road south of the Falfurrias border checkpoint in Brooks County, the northernmost patrol point in this area.

Those who pay more walk less, according to the Border Patrol and immigrants who have made the crossing. The going rate varies. A thousand, or a few thousand, just to cross the border. For those from Central America, it may cost more than $5,000 or $7,000. For those from China or Pakistan, some say the cost is as high as $50,000. 

The terrain the immigrants must cross is brutal. The walk can be dozens of miles through the sandy terrain with nothing -- no water, mountains or hills by which to navigate. During the summer, daytime temperatures reached nearly 110 degrees. The brush fools the unaccustomed. One minute they are tired. The next, their bodies begin to give out.

People in Falfurrias know what happens on the journey, often better than the migrants themselves. 

They know how some groups have coyotes as guides across the desert. Others are left on their own, with a cell phone to call the coyote when they arrive. Some use it to call 911 if they are dying. 

Ranchers and Border Patrol agents have seen evidence of brutality. They will tell you that a pair of women’s panties hung in a tree is a sign that a woman was raped there. The coyotes leave them to mark the conquest.

They will tell you how the coyotes tell their charges that the walk around the Falfurrias checkpoint is short, that they should aim for those lights.

“That’s Houston,” some coyotes say to give the migrants hope the trip is nearly done. But that distant glare is merely light over a ranch gate, or the streetlights illuminating Highway 281. Houston is nearly 300 miles away.

‘The depravity of man’
The photos spread across the desk of Brooks County rancher Mike Vickers show corpses in various states of decomposition. From the pile, the sun-bleached skulls of women peer out from beneath the rotting flesh of young men. Others show immigrants who were found near death by the Border Patrol or Vickers himself -- women huddling underneath trees and men leaning against trucks, dazed by thirst and heat exhaustion.

All the images were taken on Vickers’ ranch.

“These bodies are everywhere,” Vickers said. “The bones are everywhere.”

Vickers, who is also a local veterinarian, spoke of the toll the stream of illegal migration has taken on Brooks County ranchers and their families.

Desperate for water, migrants break the pumps that provide water to the cattle. They tear down fences. Men have scared Vickers’ wife, Linda, as she rode her horse. And finding the remains, which sometimes end up right in their backyard, wears on him.

“We see the depravity of man out here,” he added. “It’s altered our way of life.”

Vickers is the chair of a group called the Texas Border Volunteers. At least once a month, members gather in Brooks County to search private ranch lands for migrants and their remains.

When they find either, they contact the Border Patrol.

They carry water, food, cameras and GPS devices on their patrols.

“We do everything we can to try to rescue them and get them out of a bad situation,” Vickers said. “The heat can fool you. It doesn’t have to get that hot to really make someone walking through that sand get dehydrated real quick and suffer heat stroke.”

They also bring weapons in case they encounter coyotes, gang members or people carrying expensive cargo, such as drugs.

On a recent patrol, Vickers and two volunteers wearing military camouflage rolled across deep sand in a four-wheeler, searching for signs of life or death.

Black buzzards drifted above one of the few hills on the land. To ranchers and cowboys, the buzzards have become a sign not of dying cattle, but of a dying human. “Something’s dead up there,” Vickers said.

On top of the hill, Mark Medina, 45, and Ed Aldredge, 45, both military veterans, picked their way through trees and cacti, searching for a corpse. They found nothing.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Medina said.

But evidence of crossers was everywhere. Half-empty water jugs, crushed energy drink cans, socks, and jackets lay discarded under trees or covered in sand.

The Border Patrol has stepped up efforts to rescue immigrants who find themselves lost, dehydrated or sick. They’ve placed rescue beacons on the ranches, where an immigrant can push a button to alert Border Patrol agents. They’ve posted signs with GPS coordinates across the landscape so immigrants with cell phones can call 911 and give their location.

They’ve also produced public service announcements, including some in Spanish, imploring people not to cross.

The message is this: “Don’t put your life in the hands of these ruthless people,” said Border Patrol agent Mendiola. “To them, you’re just a commodity. You’re not a human being. You’re cargo.”

‘Are you going to come or go?’
After 17-year-old Sevallos Martinez fell behind, Barahona continued with the rest of the group to trudge through the private ranch land flanking Highway 281.

In the morning, Barahona stepped into a hole and injured his right leg. In pain, he could barely walk. A friend he made along the journey took off a brown checked shirt and tied it around Barahona’s knee, over his black jeans, then helped him limp along.

They were almost to the road when Barahona gave out. His friend helped him over a fence. They were minutes from the pickup point, near enough to hear the highway. There were just two fences left. The coyote said the truck was waiting. People ran for the road.

“He was yelling. Yelling for people to help him,” Iraheta said. “The coyote told him to stop yelling because people would hear him.”

The friend who helped Barahona told Iraheta her nephew’s lips went white and he fell. The coyote yelled at the friend. “Are you going to come or go?” He ran to the vehicle.

On July 5th, the coyote called Barahona’s mother in El Salvador and told her he left Elmer in the desert.

“And that’s where the tragedy began,” said Iraheta. “I looked for him alive in all of the jails and nothing, so I’ve started to look for him among the dead.”

‘On our own’
Brooks County Chief Deputy Urbino Martinez has a stack of white binders filled with emails, letters, and reports of the missing and the dead. His office, he said, is “overwhelmed” by the deaths.

With a yearly budget of about $585,000 and only one investigator and five deputies on patrol, the county has neither the staff nor the resources to process the remains. Since they’re not technically a “border county,” Martinez said, it’s been impossible to get federal grants to help.

“We’re pretty much on our own out here,” he said.

Brooks County has no medical examiner, so it can’t perform autopsies or extract samples. Instead, deputies send remains first to a funeral home in Falfurrias, and then to Elizondo in Mission, where they can extract samples for DNA testing. 

But Brooks County’s responsibility doesn’t end there. The sheriff’s office keeps pages of records. Deputies call consulates. They try to match remains to open missing persons cases.

“At times people wonder why we put all this effort into it,” Martinez said. “Because our administration feels like they’re humans. I know they’re trespassing, I know they shouldn’t be in the United States. But they’re on U.S. soil. We have to protect them and we have to make sure that we do what we have to do on our end, regardless of what we have to go through.”

Martinez said the Sheriff’s Office is deluged by phone calls, emails and in-person visits from desperate families and friends of the missing. But it’s difficult to find and identify someone who has died in the desert, he said, even when the families offer clues.

“It’s a sad thing sometimes because you just can’t help them and they don’t understand that,” he said. “They’ll call you and say, ‘He’s by this tree, they’re telling me he’s by this tree.’ If the animals get to them, they’re not going to be by that tree. The limbs are going to be everywhere. That’s just the way it is.”

Like the files at Vickers’ ranch, the binders deputies have assembled contain photographs both of the living and the dead. In some, the victims are smiling with their children, or clutching their husbands or wives. In others, their bodies are sprawled on the sand, staring up at the sky. Paging through the photographs, Martinez wondered aloud what went through their minds as they lay dying in the desert.

“It’s not worth it,” he said. “They feel like the dream that they hear about, as soon as they get onto U.S. soil, they’re closer to the dream.”

“But a lot of the time when they’re being walked across,” he added, “that dream is empty.”

Searching for answers
In mid-September, Iraheta came to Brooks County carrying photographs of the two Elmers.

She believed she had identified a man in one of the sheriff’s files as her nephew, but wanted to know for sure. She carried a snapshot of the picture in the sheriff’s file, showing a man prone face down in the brush, a brown-checked shirt tied around his knee. But her discovery had come too late -- the body had already been buried. Now, answers would cost money.

Iraheta can recite the figures by heart: $900 to exhume the body; $250 to cut the bone for DNA testing. $3,000 for the DNA test; $100 a day to store the body for nearly four weeks until the results come in; $3,000 to $4,800 to send the body home.

“That means that’s more than $12,000,” said Iraheta. “I can’t afford that. I’m poor.”

But she is trying to raise the money, for her sister crying in El Salvador, and for Barahona’s daughter.

“I want his daughter to have a place to carry a flower to,” she said. “I want her to have a place to say, ‘Here is where my father is buried.’”

On this trip, she came with a group assembled by Angeles Del Desierto, or Desert Angels, which has for 15 years conducted rescue mission and searched for the dead along the southern border.

They went to the sheriff’s office, which had nothing more for Iraheta. They spoke to the local funeral home, which could offer little. They went on a mission into the desert, searching for people, alive or dead.

Finally, with little hope, they drove to Elizondo Mortuary in Mission. Iraheta carried her photographs of the Elmers and the little she knew about where they were last seen, what they wore, and the things they carried.

The owner of Elizondo looked at Iraheta’s pictures, and went to her files. She stopped at one file of a man found with no face, no hair, no discernable features -- just bones. But the people who found the remains had recovered personal effects: a white rosary and a pair of pants with two pictures tucked in the pockets -- the same pictures Iraheta had been given by the family of 17-year-old Elmer Amilcar Sevallos Martinez, the boy left in the desert a few hours before her nephew.

“With those two things, we knew that it was him,” said Iraheta.

The discovery came just in time for Sevallos Martinez’s family. His remains were to have been buried the following day.

His family had held out hope the teen would be found alive. They only knew that he had been left in the desert. In some stories, he fell. In others, he was exhausted, and stopped to rest under a tree. But maybe he had recovered and begun to walk again.

Iraheta called a number she had for the boy’s father, a man from El Salvador living in Maryland.

“I think he was in shock,” said Iraheta. “He asked how we knew it was him. And we told him by the photos that were in his pants pocket.”

Sevallos Martinez’s remains are being sent to Maryland by the Salvadoran consulate, so his father can examine the photos and rosary. In some cases, the consulate will help with the cost of sending a body home. Even so, the family, like Iraheta, may want a DNA test to know for sure -- if they can afford it.

Money is the reason the two Elmers risked their lives to make the illegal crossing -- money and a search for a better life. Now it is a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to their families’ efforts to bring them home.

“You have nothing to give to your children, to help your mother, so you have to take the decision to come here to find a….to try to find a job to send money to the family,” said Iratea. “They paid the high price for the American dream.”

“We can’t turn back time,” she added. “But I hope that everyone sees that it’s not worth it, that voyage. To give up your life to that desert.”

NBC News Correspondent Mark Potter contributed to this report.

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NOGALES, Mexico – “They call me the soap opera guy.”

Jesus Castro Romo states his new nickname and gestures toward the small television in front of his bed. That’s where he spends most of his days, lying on his back in the bedroom he shares with his wife and youngest son, watching soap operas. Cartoons, too, and animal shows.

Ever since the Border Patrol agent shot him and the bullet damaged his spine, Castro has adjusted to a sedentary life. He used to drive a dump truck and do landscaping work. Now he walks with a cane.

“Now, I am more tranquil,” Castro says. “I think of my dad, my mom, my children, and everyone else. I am more conscientious about everything. Thinking. Here at home, locked up, I only have time to spend thinking and thinking.”

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On this day, he moves to his covered patio that’s surrounded by chain link fence and drying laundry. He wants to share the story of his “terror” in the desert and his survival.

 

***

About a year-and-a-half ago, Castro was trying to sneak into the United States through Arizona’s hilly backcountry when a Border Patrol agent on horseback spotted his group of about 12 travelers. They scattered. The agent zeroed in on Castro.

Castro claims the agent, Abel Canales, beat him, hurled insults at him and then shot him in the side before riding away. He says he waited in the desert for an hour and a half, bleeding through his clothes, thinking about his children and preparing himself for death.

An emergency crew arrived and airlifted him to University Medical Center in Tucson, where he had three operations. Once he was well enough to be released, he claims he was handcuffed to his wheelchair, was not allowed to bathe or use a restroom and was denied access to a Mexican consular official.

Lawyers for the government said Canales acted in self defense, that Castro tried to throw a rock at him. Canales’s lawyer did not respond to requests for an interview, and a lawyer for the government declined to comment.

In January, Castro sued the U.S. government, a gutsy move for a Mexican citizen who entered the country illegally. The lawsuit is about compensation for lost income, but it also amounts to a last-resort effort in a system where Border Patrol agents are rarely prosecuted for violence against migrants, and where current immigration policy, the political climate and the authority of border enforcement agencies often combine to enable Border Patrol agents to have the last word.

A months-long collaborative investigation among nonprofit newsrooms in California, Texas and New York examined fatal confrontations with border agents and found that at least 14 civilians have died, most of them shot, since Oct. 1, 2009. This despite declines in both illegal immigration and assaults on officers.

Statistics gathered from Customs and Border Protection and compiled by reporters show one fatality four years ago and two the following year. In each of the last two years there were five and four so far this fiscal year. The agency has declined to comment in these cases.

Border Patrol agents have been prosecuted for other crimes, such as bribery and corruption, in recent years. But trials are rare for on duty situations involving lethal or excessive force.

A grand jury in San Diego took testimony last week in the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, who died after being beaten and shot with a taser in 2010 in San Ysidro. U.S. lawmakers called for an investigation of the agents’ actions after a new video of the incident was aired by the PBS national newsmagazine, Need to Know, in April.

The circumstances in cases reporters investigated for this project vary: Some of the dead were Mexican, others U.S. citizens and at least one was Central American. Some were trying to cross illegally into the U.S. for the first time – a misdemeanor; others were allegedly involved in more serious crimes, like trafficking drugs. But they all died as a result of violent altercations with Border Patrol agents.

Castro’s lawyer, William Risner, a straight-talking type with a crisp white mustache, is unabashed in saying Castro’s lawsuit is about money. But he also said it’s the only way to get justice.

Canales was suspended from the force without pay -- but not for his actions in this case. Last October he was indicted on allegations he took bribes to allow drugs and illegal immigrants to be smuggled into the U.S.

Even in cases where a video has captured an altercation at the border, there are generally distinct differences in what witnesses and law enforcement say happened. Castro’s case is no exception.

****

Castro lives in a neighborhood called Colonia Esperanza, which is one mile south of the border as the crow flies. You can’t see the United States from his patio, but a quick drive brings the border wall into sight. His house, like others on his sloping street, is a pale pastel that stands out against the rocky hillside. That’s where he lives with his two children -- the youngest named after him, Jesus -- and his wife. He has two grown children from a previous marriage. He’s already a grandfather.

Many of the men in this border city of about 210,000, directly south of Nogales, Ariz., work in construction or other manual labor. Castro did, too. He started working on a “dompe,” or dump truck, when he was 14. Whenever work dried up, he would put his life in Mexico on hold, head to the U.S. for a job and then come home. He has been previously deported, but continued to return.

“I would go back and forth. I never tried to stay any longer,” he says. “My wife is here. I did not plan on abandoning her."

His wife, Ana Luisa Alarcon-Ramirez, is precise and articulate. It’s hot this morning, and she has pulled her long black hair into a twist. She finishes his sentences when he can’t find quite the right words, and she interrupts him to offer richer details about their life together. They are all sitting on the covered patio – Castro, his parents with their sad eyes, his fidgety children – as he tells his story.

Early on the morning of Nov. 16, 2010, Castro crossed into the U.S., illegally, he concedes without flinching, to get to Tucson for a landscaping job.

The hills north of the border are dusty and dense with trees and shrubs. Temperatures are disastrously hot in the summer, but on that fall day they dropped to a chilly low of 32F.

His group was traveling north, a mile or two past the border, when he spotted “muchos migra,” many Border Patrol agents. The travelers ran back down a hill they had climbed, toward the creek they had crossed and spread out. Castro says he imagined he would be safe, running back toward Mexico.

“We weren’t walking into the U.S. anymore, we were leaving. So we said, according to us, we were free,” he says.

“We all ran in different directions. Liliana, me and another guy ran ahead. Then Liliana went to the left, and the other guy went to the right, and I left towards the creek -- and it was me that the officer chased.”

Castro claims the officer called him names and started grabbing and pushing him.

“Take it easy officer, why are you hitting me? Why are you pushing me with the horse?” Castro says he asked. The officer allegedly continued to hit him with his horse and his reins.

“It was like when bees are all over you and you got them crazy. This is how he was hitting me,” Castro says.

Castro says he asked the officer to stop. The agent then said, “I’m going to shoot you,” Castro says. And when he cowered to protect himself, the officer allegedly shot him. When he gets to this part, Castro uses his cane as an extension of his arm, drawing on the cement where each man was standing – a few feet apart.

“And when I fell he was pointing at my head … and he told me ‘I am going to kill you, you son of a bitch. Don’t move. I am going to hit (shoot) you in the head,’ he told me.”

“His eyes looked like they were about to pop out, like if he was going to kill me. But at that moment I shouted ‘help’ and he turned and saw Liliana (a fellow traveler) on top of the hill. And, he said, ‘Oh, m*****f*****.’ ”

Castro says the officer asked him where he was injured and said he’d go get help.

He pressed a white T-shirt from his backpack against the wound from the .40 caliber bullet and waited.

When help arrived, by helicopter, other Border Patrol agents returned with the officer, who accused Castro of hitting him in the head with a rock, Castro says.

“I told him, ‘Which rock?’ Never did I grab any rock.”

A government lawyer declined to let Canales be interviewed, but in court documents the government argued that force was necessary again the rock-thrower.

“Agent Canales acted justifiably in self-defense to protect himself against plaintiff’s attempt to throw a large rock at him; moreover, plaintiff, who was suspected of committing the felony of illegal entry into the United States, was attempting to avoid arrest and Agent Canales was justified in using physical force to effect a lawful arrest and prevent escape.”

Investigative reports obtained by the Nogales International, the paper that first reported the incident, suggest Castro may have been a coyote. Risner denied that claim, saying his client was merely entering the U.S. to work.

At the hospital in Tucson, doctors operated on Castro to remove the bullet. Fragments had penetrated his spine, his discharge records state. He underwent two more surgeries and was discharged more than two weeks later.

That’s when the second ordeal began, he says. For days he says he was mistreated by officers. He said he was handcuffed to his wheelchair, denied prescribed painkillers, transported between prison and a hospital in a freezing car while still bleeding and not allowed to meet with the consular official who came to visit him.

“Then he handcuffed me again and I said, ‘Why do you handcuff me again if I can’t even walk, I can’t run.’ ‘No,’ he tells me, ‘it is safer this way.’ He shoved me into the patrol car handcuffed and all cut, bleeding,” he says.

In March 2011. a bus dropped Castro back in Mexico.

“They should pay for their mistake
Around lunch time, Castro swallows a fistful of pills.

One is for sleeping. Most are for pain – pain in the neck, pain in the back, pain along the spinal cord, deeper pain, shifting pain, pain where the bullet sliced through his side, grazed his spine and landed in his stomach.

He keeps his pills in a clear plastic shoebox. If he followed the prescriptions, he’d be taking 14 pills a day, he says, but he has been cutting back to save money. The pain is constant, and it will probably get worse over time, creeping like a vine along nerves in his back and down his legs.

Castro says he decided to sue to right a wrong.

“They should pay for their mistake,” he says. “They should compensate me for their error.”

In an interview in his Tucson office, walls decorated with a Mayan print and a vintage movie poster -- the 1949 Cold War propaganda classic “I married a Communist” -- Risner, Castro’s lawyer, explains his client’s goals.

“It’s about money,” he says. “That's it.”

Castro lost the ability to buy food for his family, send his kids to school. “He's been damaged economically,” Risner says.

“In addition, the Border Patrol could do a better job of checking their agents, training them better, actually do things to make them do a better job, where it's safer for the people they encounter. Those are possibilities. But, realistically it's just money.”

Castro tried working but almost crashed the dump truck. His has turned to his family for help. “One lends me money, then the other. That is how I go on,” he explains. He needs another operation that will cost 100,000 pesos, or around $8,000, he says.

His wife is now the family’s provider.

“He was in charge of everything and, well, now there is nothing,” she says. “I work, sell cakes, sell clothes in the flea market, clean houses, anything. I move around, bring things, take things up, get things down, everything, everything, everything.”

He used to see America as a place of opportunity, worth risks and sacrifices. Would he ever go back?

“No, not anymore. No more, for nothing. Americans do not like us. Even more so the officials (Border Patrol agents). The officials are racists who do not want us there.”

Tomorrow, we’ll walk you through what happens when a border agent fires a weapon and why prosecution is rare. With apprehensions down and deaths up, we’ll also tell you who is advocating for greater accountability.

--Spanish translation by Diana Crofts-Pelayo. 

Deadly Patrols is an investigative collaboration among nonprofit journalism organizations Investigative Newsource and KPBS, in San Diego, the Texas Observer in Austin, the PBS TV-Web newsmagazine Need to Know and The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. The project was coordinated by the Investigative News Network, a national membership organization of journalism nonprofits.