Said Arif, a 21-year-old who died in this summer’s mass crossing into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, hailed from M’diq, a Moroccan town less than 30 kilometers (19 miles) away. He was buried in Ceuta’s Sidi Embarek Muslim cemetery, one of around 90 people laid to rest there after more than 70,000 people crossed the border.

The cemetery overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, where they drowned on July 30 and 31. The dead were washed, shrouded and positioned on their right side, facing Mecca. Those without confirmed names were assigned numbered headstones. By late September the cemetery’s manager said only nine bodies had been identified. The other 81 graves still remain nameless.

Those numbers aren’t a sign that the dead were discarded. Each person was given an individual grave, and each number links a grave to forensic records, including DNA and fingerprints. These steps ensure that the anonymity of a number need not be permanent, but whether they lead to a name depends on what comes next. And much of what comes next is still shaped by the border.

Border policy is usually discussed in terms of the living: who may enter, who must leave, how irregular crossing can be deterred. Yet every major migration route also has a largely invisible posthumous dimension. From the English Channel to the Sahara to the US-Mexico frontier, the place where a person dies, the place where their body is found and the place where their family is searching often fall under different authorities.

Sometimes no individual authority is clearly responsible for connecting the pieces. Evidence from Ceuta and from other tragedies on global migration routes shows that few nations, even those that directly share borders, have established truly integrated systems that respect the dead and allow families to find closure.

The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project has recorded more than 82,000 dead or missing people since 2014, as of April 2026, affecting an estimated 340,000 family members. Counting, though, is not naming. A study of migration routes to Europe in 2020 and 2021 found that only about 7% of people reported missing at sea were ever found, and that fewer than half of bodies recovered were identified.

Many people, in other words, go missing first on the journey, then again later on, when their remains are recovered but never reconnected to a family. “People shall not go missing twice,” a 2024 Council of Europe report said, and should be buried individually in registered and mapped graves, to help with location and identification at a later date.

Sidi Embarek’s numbered graves show that this first step has taken place. The failure would be to stop there.

Whenever a migrant dies trying to cross a border, three steps ideally follow: Their body is found, they are named, and then their body is brought home.

After a death at sea, where a body comes ashore determines which state examines it and how the investigation proceeds. The dead of the Ceuta crossing were counted on both sides of the frontier, yet the counts didn’t match. By Aug. 7, Ceuta’s forensic institute had certified 82 autopsies, but 90 people were later buried at Sidi Embarek. The institute’s director attributed the discrepancies partly to uncertainty over whether every body recovered belonged to the same crossing. Caminando Fronteras, a cross-border nonprofit group, also counted the dead in Moroccan morgues, putting the overall toll at more than 140.

Borders divide the dead from the living in other ways too. When a small boat sank in UK waters in the English Channel on the night of Nov. 23, 2021, its passengers called for help from the British. But 27 bodies were later found in French waters, by French authorities. Four more people were believed to have died without having been found. Because the bodies were recovered to France, the UK government said this “does not allow” for a British coroner’s inquest. Almost two years later, it set up a nonstatutory inquiry instead. France opened a criminal investigation, but rules on judicial secrecy meant the British inquiry couldn’t see its evidence, including postmortem examinations.

Forensic teams need DNA, fingerprints, clothing and other data from the dead; from the living they need family DNA, photographs and medical histories. Migration can place thousands of kilometers and several jurisdictions between them. For Moroccans crossing into Ceuta, the distances are short but the barriers are real. Spain’s Guardia Civil opened an office for relatives on Aug. 4 and received 160 emails on its first day. But most Moroccans need a visa to actually enter Ceuta, and many parents waited for days in neighboring Fnideq for news; more than two weeks after the crossing, some families still had none. Information that could help identify a body may be on one side of the frontier, while the family able to supply the match is on the other.

Journalist Maël Galisson told a French parliamentary inquiry this year that according to his research, 528 deaths had occurred on the France-UK border since 1999, adding that there was “no coordination” for obtaining reference DNA from relatives abroad. Mustafa Bakro, a Syrian refugee, went missing in a shipwreck in late 2024. His family could not pay the €60 ($67) to mail a DNA kit, so the work stopped. He was identified only in January 2026 and lies in a cemetery in Boulogne-sur-Mer, near Calais.

Where the two halves are brought together, names follow. After the Pylos shipwreck of June 2023, Greek police forensic specialists identified 74 of the 82 recovered bodies because hundreds of families provided DNA and a system existed to receive it. Elsewhere, progress still depends on individual efforts. In Italy it took until December 2025, and help from a private donor, for a victim of the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck to be exhumed for identification.

After the Cutro sinking of 2023, in which at least 94 people died, a 3-month-old baby was buried under the code KR16 M0. Identification was problematic, but he was eventually named as Mohamed Sina Hoseyni. Only this February, on the initiative of two journalists, did his grave receive a headstone bearing his name.

For years the sea carried bodies to the Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis. Many of them were people from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and elsewhere, whose families were far away. A local fisherman, Chamseddine Marzoug, buried the unclaimed in a cemetery for nameless migrants, and in 2021 the artist Rachid Koraichi opened the Jardin d’Afrique, a dignified resting place for those the sea returned but no one could name.

In September 2022 a boat carrying 18 people from Zarzis itself disappeared. As bodies washed ashore, four were buried in the Jardin d’Afrique before any DNA tests had established who they were. Families protested for days, and the four were exhumed; DNA tests showed that three of them had been aboard the missing boat. Weeks later, some families began digging up graves themselves, suddenly aware that the “unknown migrants” in the cemetery might be their own sons, daughters and neighbors.

In Ceuta, that last crossing has yet to happen. Even the nine people who were identified were buried in the city; disagreement over documentation and verification meant that repatriation did not take place. InfoLibre reported that the mother of Salma, the only woman among those interred, could not enter Ceuta for her daughter’s funeral.

Across these three moments — recovery, identification, reunification — borders can separate systems that need to interact, databases that need to communicate and people who need to travel. Europe has built sophisticated systems for the living under the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, which began to apply in June. The recast Eurodac system collects biometric data from people disembarked after rescue at sea from the age of 6. There is no equivalent European system for matching the fingerprints or DNA of the dead with the families looking for them.

Council of Europe Resolution 2569 sets out what is needed, including cross-border cooperation on identification, permanently marked graves and faster issuing of visas for families. But, as a 2025 study for EuroMed Rights noted, “there are no binding national or international obligations requiring authorities to search for missing migrants.”Some countries are beginning to act, though there remains some way to go. Spain’s Ombudsman has recommended a national forensic database for unidentified remains, and in Italy a bill tabled this year would create one.

On Oct. 13, Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia visited Ceuta and observed a minute’s silence among the numbered graves at Sidi Embarek. In a speech that evening, the king sent his condolences to the victims’ families “wherever they may be.”Recognizing the tragedy and honoring the dead is an important start. But there are also practical steps for Spain and Morocco to take: providing a single point of contact that families in Morocco can reach without crossing the border; collecting DNA through consulates or humanitarian organizations; expediting visas so relatives can visit a grave or accompany a body home; and keeping records for as long as it takes. None of this would require either government to give ground on questions of sovereignty.

Mohamed Said Arif was buried under his own name. Eighty-one of the people lying beside him were not. Some of those who could give them back their names may be only a few kilometers away, on the other side of a line, still waiting for news.