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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Collecting DNA in New York to Identify Bodies in Arizona

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Monday, August 14, 2017   

TUCSON, Ariz. -- This week, a group from Tucson's Colibri Center for Human Rights is traveling to New York and New Jersey to take cheek-swab DNA samples from families who have missing loved ones last seen at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The DNA results will be compared with the unidentified remains of more than 1,000 people at the Pima County Medical Examiner's office, presumed to be migrants who died trying to cross the harsh desert into southern Arizona. Reyna Araibi, co-founder and communications director at the Colibri Center, said the goal is to give grieving families a measure of peace.

"Families deserve to know what happened, even if someone went missing crossing the border,” Araibi said. "And on the other side, for the people who've died crossing the border, it isn't enough just for them to be buried under the name 'John or Jane Doe.' These people deserve to go home. They deserve to be with their families."

Colibri created its Missing Migrant Project in 2006, but started the DNA program in December with a trip to Los Angeles, followed by stops in San Francisco and Phoenix. Chicago is up next, this fall.

So far, a handful of matches have been made - but there are still more than 2,000 active missing persons cases from families in the U.S. and Latin America searching for relatives who disappeared trying to reach the U.S.

Araibi said she expects those numbers to grow if President Donald Trump extends the border wall.

"Policies that militarize the border funnel people into the most dangerous and remote areas of the border, like the desert in Arizona,” she said. "And the desert doesn't discriminate. It can be the youngest, healthiest person that's crossing, and they still die."

In order to collect samples from families south of the border, she said Colibri has partnered with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a group formed after the disappearance of more than 9,000 people under Argentina's military regime in the late 1970s and early '80s.


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