January 8, 2025 — Last month, eleven Jesuits and three laypeople from six countries took part in a search and rescue mission in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The group was in search of migrants who crossed the Mexico border into the United States, and they came across eight areas that had remains of missing people.
The team included six members of Jesuits West: Fr. Brad Mills, SJ; James Millikan, SJ; Chris Nguyen, SJ; John Meyers, SJ; Ulises Covarrubias, SJ; and Jaret Ornelas, SJ. They focused their search on a 30-mile stretch of Growler Valley in south-central Arizona. They tied bright pink ribbons to tree branches to mark the spots where they found human remains and notified authorities of the locations.
Ornelas, who is currently studying theology at the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry, has been a volunteer for the past three and a half years with Battalion Search and Rescue, a humanitarian nongovernmental agency. He said it is very rare to find anyone other than migrants in such remote areas of the state. With Battalion, he said, he has helped recover the remains of 30 (identified) people and found eight people alive.
“You don’t get used to it,” Ornelas told OSV News after finishing the mission, which took place December 20-22. “It’s still heartbreaking every time. Usually, how it works for me when I first spot something, a pit will form in my stomach, but then, there’s a little shot of adrenaline and you get about doing your work. And it’s later, sometimes a couple hours, sometimes a couple days later, that it really hits you.”
Ornelas said he still had to process the search mission. But he added that in the past after finding pieces of a child’s skull, he has felt “furious that this world is so broken” but that he was also grateful because he was certain the dead were “with God.”
Ornelas said the difference in the search and rescue mission this time was that he was able to be with fellow Jesuits, whom he invited. The two priests present celebrated Mass nightly for the dead.
“After Mass and after dinner, we had faith-sharing every night, just checking in with each other. And I felt so much gratitude for the other companions here,” he said. “But at the same time when I heard on the (walkie talkie) radio … a guy … (who) I was big brother to in the novitiate said he found a humerus and his group found a skull, I got choked up because I’m grateful that there are more people who are doing this work, but I also know that these things are going to stay with them.”
Fr. Mills, associate pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in San Diego, was one of the priests who celebrated Mass for the deceased whose bones were found. On his first ever search and rescue mission, he said it was “especially meaningful to have said the Mass “in a setting where countless people had lost their lives.”
“We were remembering them in some ways,” he said. “All of them were present in that Mass. And one phrase we kept saying as a group was that ‘death does not have the final say.’”
“I think when we encounter great suffering and great darkness, we can’t help but long for Christ’s coming. We can’t help but long for more light. I found myself longing for more light in the form of more justice, more humane treatment of immigrants and refugees around the world and longing for a world where immigrants aren’t talked about in demonizing terminology, but rather are seen as human beings, and valued,” said Fr. Mills.
[Source: OSV News; photos courtesy of Jaret Ornelas, SJ]
