Waiting for José The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America. By Harel Shapira. Princeton. 208 pp. $27.95.
No one knows how many migrants have died trying to cross the desert into the United States. The US Border Patrol reports more than 5,500 deaths since 1998. Immigrant rights groups, like the Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos, estimate that the remains of at least 6,000 people have been recovered. These numbers certainly are just a fraction of the actual toll. The border is nearly 2,000 miles long, and as Kat Rodríguez, a spokeswoman for the Coalición, says, “The desert is a big place.”
Exhausted migrants crawl into caves and die, their remains never recovered or their bones, picked clean by carrion birds and other animals, disappearing into the sand. A Texas rancher recently…