SAN ANTONIO — The number of migrants who died after apparently being abandoned in a sweltering tractor-trailer in Texas rose to 50 on Tuesday in a suspected human-trafficking attempt now under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.
Federal officials said agents had detained three people believed to be a part of the “smuggling conspiracy.”
Among the dead were 22 Mexican nationals, seven Guatemalans and two Hondurans, Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said on Twitter Tuesday.
“We are in mourning,” Ebrard wrote.
World leaders — from Pope Francis to President Joe Biden — weighed in on the tragedy, with the Pope urging prayer “for these brothers and sisters who died following their hope of a better life.”
At the same time, migrant advocates renewed calls for more legal pathways to enter the U.S. as well as harsher punishment for human traffickers on both sides of the border.
The trailer was discovered Monday evening near a stretch of railroad tracks in an industrial section of San Antonio after a worker heard a cry for help, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said. The worker opened the doors, found “a number of deceased individuals inside” and called police.
First responders discovered 46 migrants dead in the truck along with 16 survivors — 12 adults and four minors — who were taken to hospitals. The survivors were too weak to exit the trailer on their own, said San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood, who described their bodies as “hot to the touch.”
“They were suffering from heat stroke, heat exhaustion,” said Hood, who said there was no sign of water or working air-conditioning in the vehicle.
Temperatures in San Antonio on Monday hovered around 100 degrees.
Judge Nelson Wolff, the top elected official in Bexar County, where San Antonio is located, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that local authorities believe the truck came from Laredo, a border city 150 miles to the south and the nation’s largest inland port.
“They had just parked it on the side of the road,” Wolff said. “Apparently they had mechanical problems and left it there.”
Stephanie Leutert, director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, said smugglers often ferry migrants from the border in tractor-trailers or car trunks to avoid detection at migrant checkpoints that dot southern Texas.
The vehicles are often bound for San Antonio, she said, where migrants are dropped at safe houses and later ferried to other parts of the country.
On Tuesday morning, investigators and local residents were searching for clues along Quintana Road, where the tractor-trailer was discovered.
About a mile down the road, the owners of Leo’s Truck & Trailer Repairs were reviewing their surveillance camera footage.
Cynthia Rocamontes, who owns the shop with her husband, said she had been headed to lunch shortly before 11 a.m. Monday when she saw several minivans speed by.
It stuck with her because it was a rare sight on the deserted roads. So on Tuesday, she summoned her daughter-in-law and grandson to help her scroll through the footage.
“All right look, look!” Cynthia exclaimed when the first minivan appeared. They counted six minivans, the drivers obscured by tinted windows, front license plates difficult to read.
“Those were the pickup people,” her grandson, Aydyn Rocamontes, speculated. At age 11, he already knew how smuggling operations worked.
“It’s where we live,” his mother, Shelly Rocamontes, explained. “We talk about stuff like that.”
The family wondered whether the truck’s driver may have detoured from Interstate 35, a major smuggling artery that is a straight shot north from Laredo. They said there was a major wreck on the interstate Monday — a truck hauling cows collided with two others in the median.
Police were still searching the lots abutting Quintana Road with dogs Tuesday, business owners said.
Tony Bokanian said he found police behind his A-1 Salvage yard soon after they discovered the tractor-trailer Monday.
Standing atop the bed of his truck, Bokanian said he could see over his rear fence with a direct view of the back of the trailer. By then, police had removed several bodies and covered them with yellow sheets, he said.
“I saw the bodies, two heads. There were yellow sheets, but it was windy,” he said. “They were young kids: 20, 21.”
Bokanian immigrated to the U.S. from Iran with a student visa in 1999, became a citizen five years later and is raising his three children in San Antonio.
He said he realizes his experience was different than that of migrants coming from Mexico and Central America. “There should be a better system” to enter the U.S. legally from those countries, he said. “The way it’s going is very dangerous.”
The migrant trail has grown increasingly perilous in recent decades, and the number of migrants relying on smugglers has exploded. Deadly accidents are common.
More than 650 people died while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border last year, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.
In 2017, 10 people died after they were left in a tractor-trailer outside a Walmart in San Antonio. The driver, James Matthew Bradley Jr., was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In 2003, 19 migrants died after they were abandoned in a trailer at a truck stop in Victoria, Texas. The driver, Tyrone Mapletoft Williams, was convicted and is serving a sentence of nearly 34 years in prison.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei on Tuesday called for stiffened sentences for smugglers.
“It is inexcusable that innocent lives continue to be lost to migrant smuggling!” he wrote on Twitter. “It is imperative that mechanisms are found to toughen sentences and that smuggling is a crime for which perpetrators can be extradited.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a news conference Tuesday that his country was ready to support the investigation. “I want to express my deepest condolences to the families of Mexican, Guatemalan and Honduran migrants who died yesterday asphyxiated in a trailer,” he said, adding that he plans to address the incident during a meeting in Washington next month with Biden.
In a statement, Biden, who is in Europe for G-7 and NATO summits, blamed smugglers for the tragedy, saying they “have no regard for the lives they endanger and exploit to make a profit.”
“This incident underscores the need to go after the multibillion-dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths,” he said.
But migrant advocates said tough border policies push those trying to reach the U.S. into smugglers’ arms.
“The Biden administration should see this heartbreaking tragedy for what it is: a clarion call to abandon deeply flawed and dangerous immigration policies,” said Wendy Young, the president of migrant advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense.
“This most recent tragedy and the disturbing rise in migrant deaths globally underscore the need to create safer pathways to protection for refugees.”
In recent years, U.S. border enforcement has targeted not only economic migrants seeking work but also asylum seekers in search of protection.
Title 42, which former President Donald Trump invoked in 2020 on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19, allows border authorities to immediately expel migrants, even if they say they want to seek asylum in the U.S. Since it was put in place, the U.S. has expelled migrants nearly 2 million times.
The Biden administration sought to lift Title 42 this year, but its efforts were blocked by a judge after 24 states sued.
Eunice Rendon, a migrant activist in Mexico, said a variety of measures are needed, arguing that authorities should target not just smuggling networks, but the officials in Central America and Mexico who help them.
At the same time, there should be more information sharing between law enforcement agencies in each nation, she said.
“These tragedies happen again and again,” she said. “They show the utter failure of immigration policy in the region.”
