Police block the scene where a trailer with several corpses was discovered, Monday, June 27, 2022 in San Antonio. Eric Gay / The Associated Press
Desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America frantically searched for the word of their loved ones as authorities on Tuesday began the sad task of identifying 51 people who died after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer without air conditioning in the heat suffocating from Texas.
It was the worst tragedy to claim the lives of migrants smuggled into the border from Mexico.
The driver of the truck and two other people were arrested, U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas told The Associated Press.
He said the truck had passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo, Texas, on Interstate 35. He did not know if there were migrants inside the truck when he left the checkpoint.
The bodies were discovered Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio when a city worker heard a scream calling for help from the truck parked on a lonely road and found the horrifying scene inside, the police chief said. William McManus. Hours later, the bags of corpses were lying on the ground.
More than a dozen people, with their bodies warm to the touch, were taken to hospitals, including four children.
Forty-six people were found dead at the scene, authorities said. Five more died later after being taken to hospitals, said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, the county’s top elected official. Most of the dead were men, he said.
The death toll was the highest in a smuggling incident in the United States, according to Craig Larrabee, a special agent in charge of national security investigations in San Antonio.
“This is a horror that surpasses anything we’ve experienced before,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. “And unfortunately it’s an avoidable tragedy.”
President Joe Biden called the deaths “horrific and heartbreaking.”
“Exploiting vulnerable people for profit is shameful, as is the political position around the tragedy, and my administration will continue to do everything possible to prevent traffickers and human traffickers from taking advantage of people who seeking to enter the United States between ports of entry “. Biden said in a statement.
It was not immediately known the countries of origin of all the migrants and how long they were abandoned on the side of the road.
At least 22 were from Mexico, seven from Guatemala and two from Honduras, Roberto Velasco Alvarez, head of the North American department of Mexico’s Foreign Ministry, said on Twitter. Throughout the morning, families contacted the Mexican consulate in San Antonio looking for their loved ones, an employee said.
Attempts to cross the U.S. border from Mexico have claimed thousands of lives in the two countries over the past few decades.
U.S. border authorities are stopping migrants more often at the southern border than at any time in at least two decades. Migrants were arrested about 240,000 times in May, a third more than a year ago.
Comparisons with pre-pandemic levels are complicated because migrants deported under a public health authority known as Title 42 do not face legal consequences, which encourages repeated attempts. Authorities say 25% of meetings in May were with people who had been stopped at least once the previous year.
South Texas has long been the busiest area for illegal border crossings. U.S. authorities discover trucks with migrants inside “quite close” on a daily basis, Larrabee said.
Migrants typically pay between $ 8,000 and $ 10,000 to be transported to the border and loaded onto a tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they are transported to smaller vehicles to their final destinations in the United States, he said.
Conditions vary widely, including the amount of water passengers receive and whether they are allowed to carry cell phones, Larrabee said.
Authorities believe the truck he discovered Monday had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad track in an area of San Antonio surrounded by scrap cars colliding with a busy highway, Wolff said. “They had just parked it next to the road,” he said.
San Antonio has been a recurring scene of tragedy and despair in recent years with migrants in semi-trailers.
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck parked in a San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a suffocating truck in the southeast of the city. More than 50 migrants were found alive in a trailer in 2018, driven by a man who said he would be paid $ 3,000 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
“These drivers take money out of cartels,” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat. “I am sure that many times these trucks end up at their destination successfully. Unfortunately, this has happened too often. “
Other incidents have occurred long before migrants arrived at the U.S. border. In December, more than 50 died when a semi-trailer full of migrants overturned on a road in southern Mexico. In October, Mexican authorities reported finding 652 migrants packed in six trailers near the U.S. border. They were arrested at a military checkpoint.
Of the sixteen people transferred to hospitals with heat-related illnesses on Monday, five died later. Some were in critical condition, according to hospitals.
A young woman was unable to speak due to a tube placed by doctors when she visited her Monday night, said Antonio Fernandez, president and CEO of Catholic Charities in San Antonio.
He asked her two questions: if he could pray with her, and if he was from Guatemala. She nodded twice.
“He was weak,” he said.
Transfers to the hospital were hot to the touch and dehydrated, and no water was found in the trailer, fire chief Charles Hood said.
“They were suffering from heat stroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no AC unit running visibly on that platform.”
Temperatures in Sant Antoni on Monday approached 38 degrees Celsius.
Large platforms emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid an increase in U.S. border enforcement in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.
Before that, people paid small fees to mom and pop operators to get them to cross a largely unguarded border. As the journey became exponentially more difficult after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S., migrants were driven through more dangerous terrain and had to pay thousands of dollars more.
Some advocates drew a link to the Biden administration’s border policies. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, director of policy for the American Immigration Council, wrote that he had feared this tragedy for months.
“With the border closed as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into increasingly dangerous routes,” he wrote on Twitter.
Migrants, largely from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, have been deported more than 2 million times under the rule of the pandemic era in force since March 2020 that denies the possibility of seeking asylum. The Biden administration planned to end the policy, but a Louisiana federal judge blocked the move in May.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths at the southwest border in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths recorded the previous year and the highest since began follow-up in 1998. Most were related to heat exposure.
Dozens of people were found dead in and near a tractor-trailer and 16 more were taken to hospitals in an alleged attempt to traffic migrants to the United States, officials in San Antonio, Texas said.
The Associated Press
Our Morning Update and Evening Update newsletters are written by Globe editors and give you a concise summary of the most important headlines of the day. Sign up today.