As the deaths of undocumented migrants expose the violence of border security policies around the globe, a complicated politics emerges between bodily death and the ways in which the migrant association of decedents (dis)appears in vital records – even as many migrants physically disappear during their border crossings. What happens between death and bureaucratic disappearance after a migrant body is discovered? How does the overwhelming material presence of migrant death, someone who dies through an unnecessary and excruciating process like drowning or dehydration during a border crossing, become not-a-migrant? This article considers these questions by exploring the materiality of body counts at the nexus of biopolitics, forensic anthropology, and material culture studies. To probe the process behind migrants’ seemingly systematized bureaucratic postmortem disappearance, this ethnographic case study of local postmortem investigations of migrant deaths at the US–Mexico border examines practices around burial or cremation and body discovery.

由于无证移民的死亡暴露了全球边境安全政策的暴力，在人身死亡与死者移民协会在重要记录中的出现方式之间出现了复杂的政治-尽管许多移民在其生活中身体失踪过境。发现一个移民尸体后死亡与官僚失踪之间会发生什么？移民死亡中压倒性的物质存在是如何成为非移民的，他们死于不必要的痛苦过程，如过境时溺水或脱水等。本文通过在生物政治学，法医人类学和物质文化研究之间探索人体计数的重要性来考虑这些问题。