Battalion Search and Rescue

We search so that death will not have the last word.

Battalion Search and Rescue (BSAR) is a volunteer, community-led search and documentation group working in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of Arizona and New Mexico. We are not a government agency. We do not work individual cases. We conduct general searches in remote desert corridors where people die and are routinely ignored.

Our role is witness.

We go into places where people have disappeared — and where institutions too often fail to respond — to search, document, and report what we find before time, terrain, and neglect erase the evidence entirely. We do not recover remains. We document and report them so they are counted, acknowledged, and remembered.

A Crisis Centered on Women

Nowhere is this work more urgent than west of El Paso in Doña Ana County, New Mexico.

In a small 5 × 10 mile area, more than 100 women and young girls have been found deceased in less than two years. Approximately 55% of the deaths documented in this corridor are women, an unprecedented concentration along the border. The average age is 29, and the youngest documented cases include two 16-year-old girls.

These are not isolated tragedies. They represent a pattern.

Many of these deaths are not fully investigated. Reported sites often go unrecovered for months — or remain untouched altogether. Families wait. Answers never come. And those who return to search and document are met with resistance, deflection, and attempts to discredit the work rather than address the deaths themselves.

In this landscape, women are leading women to find women. The majority of our New Mexico searchers are women — navigating harsh terrain, institutional indifference, and emotional weight to ensure these lives are not dismissed or erased.

What We Do — and Why It Matters

We search because disappearance is not accidental here — it is structural.

Every site documented is a life that mattered. Even when names are unknown and identification is uncertain, documentation matters. Counting matters. Witness matters. These deaths are part of the present-day history of the borderlands, and refusing their erasure is an act of care and resistance.

In Arizona, our winter searches take us deep into the Sonoran Desert on multi-day backpack missions through wilderness areas where vehicles are prohibited. In New Mexico, we work in heavily militarized zones where humanitarian access is increasingly restricted. In both places, we go where others will not.

Why We Need Support

Battalion Search and Rescue is entirely volunteer-run. No one is paid. Donations support only the essentials required to search:

Fuel and field logistics

Food and water for multi-day missions

Mapping tools and satellite communication

Gear and supplies necessary to safely operate in remote terrain

Every dollar goes directly into the field.

Why We Keep Going

We reject narratives that normalize death as a deterrent or treat disappearance as inevitable. People who die in the borderlands are not statistics — they are human beings with histories, relationships, and futures cut short. Many of us doing this work come from migrant families ourselves, or are guests on land long traversed by Indigenous peoples who understood movement as survival, not crime.

We search so that these lives are seen.

We search so they are counted.

We search so that death will not have the last word.

Thank you for standing with us.

— Battalion Search and Rescue

We search for the lost but not forgotten.