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The human rights crisis at the border | Robin Reineke | TEDxTucsonSalon

2,286 views · Published 3 September 2014 · 17:40 · Indexed 20 October 2026

Channel: TEDx Talks · 2014 · Nonprofits & Activism

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This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Robin Reineke, Executive Director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, talks about how the massive numbers of dead and missing migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border constitutes a modern human rights crisis. From 1998 through 2012, US Border Patrol counted 5,595 deaths of migrants on the US side of the border with Mexico. To put that death toll in perspective, the US-Mexico border has been over 40 times more deadly than the Berlin Wall. More people have died on the US-Mexico border than in Hurricane Katrina and 9-11 combined. In addition, hundreds remain unidentified, and thousands are missing. Reineke argues that it is time to end the silence about death on the border.

Robin Reineke is the co­-founder and Executive Director of the Colibri Center for Human Rights. She has spent the last decade working to help family members of missing migrants last seen crossing the US­-Mexico border using forensic science and anthropology. From Seattle, Washington, Reineke received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, where she began her long­term interest in mass mourning, human rights, and the sciences and technologies of human identification. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona in the School of Anthropology, writing her dissertation, “Naming the Dead: Identification and Ambiguity along the U.S.­Mexico Border.” Her research is about the scientific, political, and social processes involved in identifying the bodies of deceased migrants along the U.S.­Mexico border. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Nation, and the documentary film, Who Is Dayani Cristal?

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