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Emergency services have never witnessed anything like it, Sally Biddulph reports
The death toll has risen to 50 after people were found in the back of a suffocating abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas.
Sixteen people were hospitalized, including four children, and four died later Tuesday.
It is one of the deadliest tragedies that has claimed the lives of thousands of people trying to cross the U.S. border from Mexico in recent decades.
It was not immediately known which countries of origin were found and how long they were abandoned on the side of the road.
“These deaths are in Biden,” tweeted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican candidate for re-election, after the incident.
“They are the result of their deadly open-border policies. They show the deadly consequences of their refusal to enforce the law.”
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 tightly as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into increasingly dangerous routes. Truck smuggling is a way to go up.” he tweeted.
Police block the scene where the trailer containing several bodies was discovered. Credit: AP
A city worker heard a cry for help from the truck shortly before 6 p.m., local time, Monday and discovered the horrific scene, police Chief William McManus said.
Hours later, bags of corpses lay on the ground near the trailer as a gloomy symbol of tragedy.
Of the 16 transferred to hospitals with heat-related illnesses, 12 were adults and four children, fire chief Charles Hood said.
Patients were hot to the touch and dehydrated, and no water was found in the trailer, he 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.”
The weather in the Sant Antoni area was mostly cloudy on Monday, but temperatures approached 100 degrees.
San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said the first 46 who died had “families who were probably trying to find a better life.”
“This is just a horrible human tragedy,” Nirenberg said.
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Those in the trailer were part of an alleged attempted trafficking of migrants to the United States, and the investigation was led by U.S. National Security Investigations, McManus said.
Three people were arrested, but it was unclear if they were definitely related to human trafficking, McManus said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths at the southwest border in the 12-month period ended Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths recorded the previous year and the highest since which began to be tracked in 1998. Most are related to heat exposure. .
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck that was parked in a San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, 19 migrants were found in a suffocating truck in southeastern San Antonio.
In England, 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a truck trailer in Essex in 2019. Four men were jailed for manslaughter.