McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — Eddie Canales, a longtime migrant advocate whose South Texas nonprofit helps to search for lost and deceased migrants, has died of illness.
Canales, 76, was director of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas. He died on Wednesday of pancreatic cancer in his hometown of Corpus Christi, several colleagues said.
“I think he saved lives. He really did,” Don White, a deputy with the Brooks County Sheriff’s Department who worked with Canales on lost migrant cases, told Border Report on Thursday.
Eddie Canales is seen Nov. 12, 2022, at the exhumation site of several unidentified migrant remains at a cemetery in Eagle Pass, Texas, where his nonprofit helped to work to identify migrant remains. (Sandra Sanchez/Border Report File Photo)
Canales was known for putting out and filling up giant barrels filled with gallon-water jugs for migrants. Advocates say the water jugs were a lifeline for migrants lost in the punishing South Texas brush where temperatures often exceed 100 degrees and migrants can walk for days.
Canales took Border Report on numerous outings to look for migrants and remains, and showed how the water stations worked. He often said that the water jugs were targets of those opposing illegal immigration and would empty them. He also said many ranchers did not allow the water barrels to be located on their property.
Migrant rights activist Eddie Canales carries jugs of water to a blue water drop Saturday, May 15, 2021, in Falfurrias, Texas. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
“He definitely put water barrels out there and filled them up. It took a while, maybe a year or two years, for some of them to be actually used because some of the coyotes (human traffickers) — at least from what we heard from some of the people who were rescued from the brush — their guides would tell them ‘Don’t use the water. It’s poisoned.’ Things like that. And that gradually loosened up and people started using the water,” White said.
The center is located in a rural area of Brooks County where every year migrants get lost and die in the punishing South Texas brush while trying to walk around a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint located in Falfurrias on the only south-to-north highway.
Canales spent hundreds of hours on the phone gathering information from families in other parts of the world as they tried to locate their lost loved ones. Sometimes he helped to find them, other times he helped to send home their remains.
Jen Bray, of the Environmental Defense Fund, also worked with Canales. She told Border Report that he died at home with his family. She said the cancer wasn’t diagnosed until May — at which point it was at Stage 4. She said he worked until mid-July helping migrants and their families.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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