It took two years for the body of Astrid Sulei Rivera to return to her home country of Guetemala.

Rivera’s body was found in Webb County, and the non-profit organization South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias helped facilitate a death certificate out of Austin so Rivera’s body could go back to her family.

The organization assists families with locating missing migrants, and recovers and identifies their remains, according to the center’s website.

The South Texas Human Rights Center also built water stations in Brooks County and surrounding areas for migrants.

The center’s founder, Eddie Canales, died on Wednesday at the age of 76 after battling pancreatic cancer.

Channel 5 News has interviewed Canales many times to highlight his efforts to save the lives of migrants. 

The center says Canales’ work is not stopping, as coordinators continue to answer calls from desperate loved-ones many thousands of miles away.

Nora Salinas, a forensic coordinator at the center, says the work of identifying remains, conducting autopsies and storing the bodies of migrants is many times expensive for rural South Texas counties.

This year, Brooks County budgeted $50,000 to help pay for autopsies and storage at the sheriff's office.

On average, Brooks County recovered around 100 bodies scattered across ranches in 2022.

“Eddie and I started working together because this is a huge issue, it's still a huge issue,” Texas State University forensic anthropologist Kate Spradley said.

According to Spradley, Canales worked to get officials together in counties overwhelmed with migrant deaths and improve procedures in order to identify bodies. They've been working on creating a central place to do that.

“So we're proposing an identification center in the Valley that everyone can send their cases to where they will be properly managed, and that's one of the big things that Eddie wanted to see go through,” Spradley said.

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