Texas law designates a single institution as the primary repository for unidentified human remains recovered along the Mexico-Texas border: the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas in Fort Worth. Every set of remains recovered by state and local law enforcement agencies along that corridor comes to CHI. Getting them identified is a different problem than most forensic DNA labs are built to solve.
Carlos Morales is CHI’s International Coordinator. He spent 22 years as a DNA analyst — at Westchester County Forensic Laboratory, the New Jersey State Police, and a private firm in Austin — before moving into a role that sits at the intersection of forensic science, immigration, and diplomacy. His talk at ISHI 36 focused on a Bureau of Justice Assistance-funded initiative to build the cross-border data infrastructure that standard CODIS workflows don’t provide.
The Problem CODIS Wasn’t Built for
Identifying unidentified remains from the border requires family reference samples. Many of those families aren’t in the United States. They’re in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico. Getting their DNA profiles into a searchable database — legally, securely, and in a form that can be meaningfully compared against unidentified remains — requires infrastructure that simply didn’t exist.
Morales described how CHI addressed this. In 2019, CHI signed a memorandum of understanding with the FBI, establishing what the lab calls a humanitarian database: an air-gapped server, isolated from all external networks, that holds unidentified remains profiles from CHI’s own index alongside profiles contributed by vetted international laboratories.
“We were able to take our local unidentified human remains index per se and install it in an isolated server, air gapped, that does not talk to anything else. No networking, no internet, not connected to the rest of the network.”
Profiles from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — laboratories CHI has vetted for quality and accreditation — are uploaded through a secure portal and searched within that database. The humanitarian database does not connect to CODIS. The two systems run separately.
Training Consulates, Collecting Family Reference Samples
Getting profiles into the database is one challenge. Getting family reference samples to compare them against is another. Morales’ outreach work includes training consulates — foreign governments’ own diplomatic missions — to collect buccal swabs from family members of the missing.
“We’ve been doing these series of trainings, for example… with consulates where we go out and we provide them with the resources to know how to collect a buccal swab, you know, in the best way possible… And, in this way, they can also serve as providers of family reference samples to us.”
Without family reference samples, no comparison is possible. The outreach effort — reaching families across international borders, through channels that aren’t built for forensic DNA logistics — is the operational core of what makes identifications happen.
The Numbers
Since launching in 2023, the humanitarian database has produced 98 identifications. CHI’s standard CODIS workflow produced 89 during the same period. Morales described what those numbers represent:
“I had a supervisor that… earlier in my career that always said, like, remember a little tube? That sample is not just that — it represents a person and it represents the family of that person potentially. When you come to this world, you’re given a name. So at the end of the journey… you deserve to have that name back.”
What’s Still Missing
The humanitarian database is a workaround. It functions because CHI built it carefully — air-gapped, MOU-backed, with vetted partners — but it operates outside the interconnected infrastructure that would make this kind of work systematic. Morales is clear about what the field still lacks.
“Ideally there would be something like the prim treaty, you know, some sort of like international… workflow interconnectivity of databases whereby you could just perform these searches and instantaneously almost across countries. But we’re a little behind that, but maybe one day.”
Carlos Morales is the International Coordinator at the Center for Human Identification, University of North Texas in Fort Worth. He brings 22 years of forensic DNA bench experience to a role focused on cross-border collaboration, international data-sharing infrastructure, and unidentified remains identification along the Mexico-Texas border.