Every day for two months, Arelis Coromoto Villegas asked God to protect her daughter, Aurimar Iturriago Villegas, as she trekked thousands of miles through treacherous jungle and desert terrain to reach America’s southern border. Now, she’s praying for the return of her daughter’s remains. In October 2022, within two months of her arrival in the U.S., Aurimar was shot dead in a road rage incident in Dallas. Then, without her family’s knowledge, county authorities donated Aurimar’s body to a local medical school, where officials cut it up and assigned dollar figures to parts. Arelis only learned her daughter had been used for research two years after her death, when NBC News and Noticias Telemundo — as part of a broader investigation of the U.S. body industry — published the names of hundreds of people whose unclaimed bodies were sent to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center. Read more at the link in bio. 📷️ Alejandro Bonillo Suarez for @NBCNews