Paul J. Weber, Juan Lozano and Elliott Spagat, Associated Press Published Tuesday, June 28, 2022, 10:03 AM EDT Last Updated: Tuesday, June 28, 2022, 10:56 PM EDT
SAN ANTONIO (AP) – Desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America frantically sought information from relatives as authorities began Tuesday’s grim task of identifying 51 people who died after being left in an air-conditioned tractor trailer in the scorching Texas heat .
It was the deadliest tragedy to take the lives of migrants smuggled across the Mexican border.
The driver of the truck and two other people were arrested, US spokesman Henry Cuelar of Texas told the Associated Press.
He said the truck passed through a border checkpoint northeast of Laredo, Texas, on Interstate 35. He did not know if migrants were inside the truck when he cleared the checkpoint.
Investigators tracked the registration of the truck to a residence in San Antonio and detained two men from Mexico for possession of a weapon, according to criminal complaints filed by the US Attorney’s Office. The complaints do not contain specific allegations related to the deaths.
The bodies were found Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio when a city official heard a cry for help from a truck parked in a lonely back road and discovered the horrific scene inside, said Police Chief William McManus. Hours later, the bags of corpses lay sprawled on the ground.
More than a dozen people – their bodies hot to the touch – were taken to hospitals, including four children. Most of the dead were men, he said.
The death toll is the highest ever from smuggling in the United States, according to Craig Laraby, a special agent in charge of internal security investigations in San Antonio.
“It’s a horror that surpasses anything we’ve experienced before,” said San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “And unfortunately this is a preventable tragedy.”
President Joe Biden called the death “horrifying and heartbreaking.”
“The exploitation of vulnerable people for profit is shameful, as is the political reputation surrounding the tragedy, and my administration will continue to do its utmost to stop smugglers and human traffickers from taking advantage of people who want to enter the United States between entry, ”Biden said in a statement.
Authorities did not know the home countries of all the migrants or how long they had been left on the side of the road.
By Tuesday afternoon, forensic doctors had potentially identified 34 of the victims, but were taking further steps, such as fingerprints, to verify their identities, Bexar County Commissioner Rebecca Clay-Flores said.
Among those killed, 27 are believed to be of Mexican descent, based on documents carried by Ruben Minuti, Mexico’s consul general in San Antonio. Several survivors are in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, he said.
At least seven of the dead were from Guatemala and two from Honduras, Roberto Velasco Alvarez, head of North America’s Mexican foreign affairs department, said on Twitter. About 30 people have approached the Mexican consulate in search of relatives, officials said.
Authorities have confirmed that one of the surviving Mexicans in the trailer is Jose Luis Guzman Vazquez, 32, of San Miguel Wautla in the southern state of Oaxaca, according to Aida Ruiz Garcia, director of the Oaxaca Migrant Care Institute. He was dehydrated and received a car in a hospital in San Antonio, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced.
Cousin Alejandro Lopez told Milenio TV that the family worked in agriculture and construction and migrated because “we have nothing but to weave hats, palm trees and crafts.”
Attempts to cross the US border from Mexico have claimed thousands of lives in both countries in recent decades.
US border authorities stop migrants at the southern border more often than ever before for at least two decades. Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, a third more than a year ago.
Comparisons with pre-pandemic levels are complex, as migrants expelled by a public health authority known as Title 42 do not face legal consequences, which encourages retrying. Authorities say 25% of meetings in May were with people who had been stopped at least once in the previous year.
South Texas has long been the busiest area for illegal border crossings. U.S. authorities find trucks with migrants inside “pretty close” to everyday life, Laraby said.
Migrants typically pay $ 8,000 to $ 10,000 to be transported across the border and loaded into a tug and taken to San Antonio, where they are transferred to smaller vehicles for their final destinations in the United States, he said.
Conditions vary widely, including how much water passengers receive and whether they are allowed to carry mobile phones, Larabi said.
Authorities believe the truck, found on Monday, had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad in an area of San Antonio surrounded by landfills for cars colliding with a busy highway, Wolf said.
San Antonio is a recurring scene of tragedy and despair in recent years involving migrants in semi-trailers.
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped in a truck parked in San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a sunken truck southeast of the city. More than 50 migrants were found alive in a trailer in 2018, driven by a man who said he had to be paid $ 3,000 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Other tragedies occurred long before the migrants reached the United States. In December, more than 50 people died when a semi-trailer overturned on a highway in southern Mexico. In October, Mexican authorities said they found 652 migrants packed in six trailers stopped at a military checkpoint near the border.
Some of the 16 people taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses were hospitalized on Tuesday in critical condition.
Those taken to hospital were hot to the touch and dehydrated and no water was found in the trailer, said fire chief Charles Hood.
“They suffered from heat stroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no visible working AC on this platform.
Temperatures in San Antonio on Monday reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).
Large platforms emerged as a popular method of smuggling in the early 1990s amid growing U.S. border services in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.
Previously, people paid small fees to cross a largely unguarded border. As the passage became much more difficult after the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, the migrants were led through more dangerous terrain and had to pay thousands of dollars.
Some defenders linked the Biden administration’s border policy. Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, political director at the American Immigration Council, wrote that he had feared such a tragedy for months.
“With a border as tightly closed as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people are being pushed along increasingly dangerous routes,” he wrote on Twitter.
During a vigil on Tuesday night in the rain in a park in San Antonio, many of more than 50 people present expressed sadness, frustration and anger at the death and what they described as a disrupted immigration system.
“I see that this is happening and should not have happened. “If we had a better way for brown and black people to enter safely, they wouldn’t go through these desperate measures,” said San Antonio resident Debbie Ponce.
Migrants – mostly from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – have been expelled more than 2 million times under the pandemic-era rule in force since March 2020, which denies the possibility of seeking asylum. The Biden administration planned to end the policy, but a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the move in May.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths at the southwestern border in the 12 months ended Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths reported the previous year and the highest since it began tracking in 1998. d. Most are related to heat exposure.
Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press reporters Eric Gay in San Antonio, Acacia Coronado in Austin, Terry Wallace in Dallas and Ken Miller in Oklahoma City.
Add Comment