This Arizona group's database helped identify migrant remains. Now, it's not accessible

Family members of migrants and forensic investigators who study migrant deaths are reeling in the wake of a puzzling outage at the Colibri Center for Human Rights.

The center has played a key role in identifying remains of migrants for the last decade — but as of late last year, the state of Arizona is working to dissolve the organization, which hasn’t filed critical paperwork.

To explain how this whole mess happened, Caroline Tracey, a reporter for the Border Chronicle, joined The Show.

Eliseu Cavalcante

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Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: So, Caroline, the centerpiece of Colibri's work was this big database that matched missing persons reports and human remains with DNA samples. Tell us why this was such a significant project.

CAROLINE TRACEY: Yeah. The Colibri Center for Human Rights was created in 2013 at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, which is the medical examiner that serves not only Tucson and Pima County, but three of Arizona's four border counties.

And so in the early 2000s, they were handling a lot of remains that were presumed to be of deceased migrants. And they didn't have a great way to connect those remains with family members that could have been anywhere in the U.S. or even around Latin America.

And so in 2013 and then in 2016, there were two sort of incorporations of Colibri. They created a nonprofit organization that had a database of missing persons reports that family members could file. But then they also began to do DNA collection from family members so that those DNA samples could be cross-referenced with the skeletal remains that the medical examiner's office had.

DINGMAN: And this work was a really big deal, right? I mean, this was making it possible to identify people who otherwise could have gone unaccounted for, possibly forever.

TRACEY: Exactly. There wasn't any other way. When you have skeletal remains, there's no other way besides DNA in most cases to produce an identification. And in Arizona, there was no other way to connect these remains to their loved ones.

DINGMAN: So, as you have reported, Caroline, over the years, the pressures of running this organization and this database became very intense for its leadership, in particular, the co-founder, an anthropologist named Robin Reineke.

What happened?

TRACEY: Yeah, Robin Reineke is a cultural anthropologist who founded or co-founded Colibri while she was working in close collaboration with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner. And then she served as its director for several years.

But as you can imagine, it was a stressful organization to run both the sort of deep grief that comes with dealing with the dead and the missing all the time, but also, of course, the normal financial pressures of rent, running a nonprofit.

So Reineke ended up stepping down as director in July 2019.

DINGMAN: And eventually this guy, Jason De Leon, became the head of Colibri. Tell us who he was.

TRACEY: Jason De León is a well known anthropologist who at the time that he joined Colibri's board in 2017, had written a book called "The Land of Open Graves," which is a really important work that catalogs the way that U.S. border policy created the crisis of migrant death in the desert and how organizations like Colibri had responded.

DINGMAN: And so De León's tenure at Colibri, I know there was a lot of excitement about it initially because of his significance to the work, but his time quickly became controversial, right?

TRACEY: Yes. De León joined the board of the organization in 2017, and then he was named executive director in 2021. He had been his own nonprofit called the Undocumented Migration Project. And the decision by the board was to merge the two organizations.

One of the things that we uncovered in our reporting is that that merger never legally was finished. And so the organizations have continued to exist as two separate organizations.

But what became controversial between De Leon and the staff was questions of protocol and ethics, and the presence of people from outside the organization at DNA collection events, which was something that the staff, the existing staff of Colibri, found very objectionable and had been outside of their protocols.

And then also the efficiency with which they sent the DNA samples that they collected for processing. It had been in the past Colibri's policy that those samples needed to be sent immediately for processing, that it was unethical to hold them for a lot of time. It was not in the family's interests to do that.

And what the staff reported, what they complained about to the board was that numerous samples had not been sent in for processing under De León's tenure.

DINGMAN: So all of these problems began to mount and De León eventually resigned. And that seems to be when things really fell apart.

In particular, access to Colibri's DNA database, which as we've been talking about is basically the linchpin of this project, went down. Do we know how that happened or why?

TRACEY: Yes, there, you know, we sort of know the chain of events. The DNA program managers expressed their concerns to Colibri's board or to one specific member of the board in 2022 about DNA not being sent for processing. And later those staff were fired. So in September of 2023, those staff were fired.

And then after that, in 2024, De León sent a letter of resignation to Colibri's board. That was Oct. 17, 2024. And within a week, the partner organizations that also used Colibri's database discovered that not only did they not have access to the database, but it appeared that the database was no longer being hosted.

DINGMAN: So I know you and your reporting have tried to reach De León. It seems like at this point, the continued existence of the project is in jeopardy. We have just about 30 seconds left here. Caroline, where do things stand?

TRACEY: Well, we were able to speak with De León, but because De León says that he resigned, he said that the board, the other board members are the people that would know where the database are, we found them harder to reach.

We did speak with them very briefly, but we didn't get a conclusive answer.