Landowners in Brooks County, Texas are angry over being blamed for the number of illegal migrants coming onto their ranches and dying, saying it's not their fault that the deaths are occurring.
"We just think the landowner shouldn't take the blame on this," Susan Kibbe, director of the Texas Property Rights Association, which represents the landowners
, told Rio Grande Valley ABC affiliate KRGV.
"Somehow the U.S. is blamed for their deaths, or ranchers are blamed on their deaths, or others are blamed for their deaths," she said. "When they know when they come into this country illegally, they're taking this chance."
So far 41 dead immigrants' bodies have been found in Brooks County, which lies about 70 miles north of the border. Many smugglers who make it as far as the Falfurrias Checkpoint in Brooks County drop off their illegal human cargo before they get to the checkpoint, leaving them there to fend for themselves in a part of Texas where temperatures often reach 100 degrees, and where there is little shade.
Human rights activists say part of the reason for the deaths is that many ranchers won't let searchers onto their private, vast ranches to find missing people, including a Honduran woman who recently was among the ones listed as missing.
Kibbe said Border Patrol and the local sheriff's office have access to the property where the woman went missing, but nobody else. Her organization feels "like the landowner is doing all they can that’s reasonable."
The issue of people dying on the ranches is just a smaller symptom of a bigger problem, illegal immigration, said Kibbe, and activists should change their focus from the Texas ranches and concentrate to Central America.
"If they want to help these people, they need to go down and help them in their countries,” Kibbe told the television station.
Her association is calling for Congress, not landowners, to provide more border security, reform immigration laws, and create a guest worker program, all of which would keep people from entering the country illegally.
Brooks County has been called "Death Valley" for immigrants, and last year, Sheriff Benny Martinez told
NBC News he often prays for rain, which would help keep the heat down and slow the numbers of immigrant deaths.
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