SAN ANTONIO — The number of migrants dead in a suspected smuggling operation rose to 50 on Tuesday, federal immigration authorities said, a day after dozens of bodies were found lifeless in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, which is handling the investigation, said in a statement they have detained three people “believed to be part of the smuggling conspiracy” but provided no further details.
At least 22 of the victims were Mexican nationals, while seven were originally from Guatemala and two were Honduran, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, head of the North American mission for the Mexican government, wrote on Twitter. No nationality has been determined for another 19 individuals. The dead include 39 men and 11 women, Bexar County’s top elected official Nelson Wolff said.
The deaths come amid a record migration influx across the Mexico border, with the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures showing that immigration arrests there in May rose to the highest levels ever documented. Authorities are coping with a major increase in all types of smuggling, not only in trucks, as people flee violence, corruption and poverty. U.S. Border Patrol agents across the Southwest are spending more time responding to 911 calls from migrants in distress.
Those seeking to evade detection by hiring smugglers are typically adults from Mexico and Central American countries who are far more likely to be deported or “expelled” under the pandemic-era Title 42 public health order.
Interstate 35, one of the country’s busiest trucking arteries, is a well-known smuggling corridor, near where the truck was found Monday, and ICE has announced several arrests related to tractor-trailer incidents this year. Criminal organizations regularly pack together scores of people who pay thousands of dollars to be snuck past highway checkpoints across South Texas. In recent years, there have been several deadly human trafficking incidents on U.S. soil — but the death toll in Monday’s tragedy surpassed all those events.
“As horrific as this, is it is not the only time,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who ran the nation’s immigration system from 1993 to 2000 when it was under the Justice Department. “It will not be the only time.”
Actualización sobre la tragedia en San Antonio, TX. El número de víctimas fatales ha aumentado a 50: 22 de 🇲🇽. 7 de 🇬🇹. 2 de 🇭🇳. 19 sin información sobre nacionalidad. Nuestras condolencias. Todos responsables serán llevados ante la justicia.
San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood said Monday that 16 people pulled from the truck were alive, including four teenagers, and transported to various hospitals. Five patients were taken to Baptist Medical Center, where two later died, a spokesperson said. Three remain in critical condition. A University Health Systems representative said the hospital received two patients, a 23-year-old woman in serious condition and an adolescent in critical condition.
Temperatures in San Antonio have been in the triple-digit range for weeks and inside the refrigerated trailer there was no air conditioning unit or water located. In similar fatal cases, temperatures have risen to above 173 degrees inside the trailer.
“This incident underscores the need to go after the multi-billion dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths,” President Biden said.
Guatemala’s President Alejandro Giammattei described the tragedy as “unforgiveable” in a tweet. He called for hardening penalties, including extradition to the United States, against those involved in human trafficking and smuggling across Latin America.
The Mexican government is sending a team to the Texas city to investigate, help identify and notify families and eventually, repatriate the victims’ bodies. Wolff said the county’s medical examiner’s office is conducting autopsies — one month after examining the victims of the Uvalde elementary school massacre.
Authorities in San Antonio said they were alerted to the scene after a worker from a nearby building heard a cry for help and went to investigate. The trailer door was ajar when law enforcement arrived but those inside were too weak to get themselves out, Hood said. Some of the victims were moaning when emergency personnel arrived.
The truck was found on Quintana Road, a sparsely populated road that runs alongside a set of railroad tracks and a handful of small trucking and automotive businesses. Cynthia Rocamontes, who runs Leo’s Truck and Trailer Repair, said she saw six small SUVs driven by young women Monday around noon, which caught her attention since the street usually doesn’t see much traffic.
“I thought, ‘It’s not a funeral, why would they be coming this way?’ I thought it was odd,” she said.
Marvin Hass, 42, owns several businesses nearby including King’s Auto Parts, where he was about to close up on Monday evening when he heard a siren. As he looked outside, he heard another siren, this one coming from a police vehicle speeding by.
He said he drove to the back of his 15-acre lot, stood in the bed of his pickup truck and peered over an eight-foot-tall steel-paneled fence. He saw police officers pulling out yellow tape to close off the area. Then he saw the bodies, he said. No one appeared alive.
“They were actually picking them up and carrying them out, and then covering them with a yellow plastic,” Hass said. When he saw the tractor-trailer — a red cab with a white trailer — Hass remembered he’d seen the same truck, or one just like it, driving around the area just before noon.
“We saw this truck stop and turn around, he pulled out where we thought it was one of those delivery drivers, but we didn’t pay attention, you know?” he said.
Linda Guzman, who owns Guzman’s Paving, said one of her employees saw a man running away from the truck, toward a nearby cornfield.
Police searched the area near the vehicle and used helicopters, but Guzman said she did not think the found the man, who appeared to be wearing a black T-shirt. Her business remained closed Tuesday while officials continue to work the crime scene outside of their front gates.
“We couldn’t work today,” she said.
The scene in Texas after 46 migrants were found dead in a sweltering tractor-trailer
In recent months, authorities have made multiple arrests in tractor-trailer smuggling operations. In February, U.S. agents found 73 migrants in the back of an 18-wheeler at a highway checkpoint near Falfurrias, Tex. The driver, Leonardo Davila Jr., 24-year-old resident of Mission, Tex., pleaded guilty in June to illegally transporting undocumented migrants, according to ICE.
In another incident in April, 67-year-old David William McKeon of Laredo, Tex., was arrested along Interstate 35 after Border Patrol agents found 124 migrants, including two minors, in the back of his tractor trailer. And in May, Louisiana resident Roderick DeWayne Chisley, 47, was convicted in connection with transporting 52 migrants along I-35 in the back of a stolen tractor trailer.
Central American migrants traveling to the United States in smugglers’ trucks face peril in Mexico as well. In December, 57 were killed when a tractor-trailer crammed with migrants rolled off the highway and crashed in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas.
Millions of other adults have boarded overloaded panga boats racing for Southern California beaches, navigated choppy seas on crude vessels, followed smugglers known as “coyotes” into the punishing desert, traversed rugged, wild mountains and risked drowning in the Rio Grande.
With the surge has come more deaths. Authorities have reported dozens who have died while trying to cross the Rio Grande. More migrants are falling from 30-foot segments of the border wall than ever before in the El Paso and San Diego areas. And the number of migrants found dead from heat exhaustion and exposure, primarily in Arizona and South Texas, has also jumped.
The U.S. government does not maintain a comprehensive count of migrant deaths along the border, because bodies and remains recovered by local or state officials are not always added to federal tallies. At least 650 people died in 2021 attempting to cross Mexico’s border with the United States, higher than in any year since 2014, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
“It’s a lot of strain for us to be doing all this type of work, it’s unbelievable,” said Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, whose deputies found six dead, two women drowned in the river and four men on a remote ranch Monday. Sometimes, all they find are bones.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was quick to blame the president for the tragedy, writing that “these deaths are on Biden” in a tweet. He and other GOP candidates running in the November elections have been hammering Democrats over border security issues.
Later Tuesday, President Biden called out “political grandstanding around tragedy,” promising to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers.
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But immigrant advocates say it’s federal border policies that are pushing people to make extreme choices and put their lives in the hands of criminals. The border’s ports of entry have been closed to most asylum seekers since 2020, giving families seeking protection few other options for entering the country.
“There’s a direct relationship between U.S. deterrence strategies at the border and migrants dying at the border,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. “The numbers will go higher.”
They also slammed Abbott and other Republicans for blaming Biden’s policies for the tragedy, noting that smuggling deaths have plagued the nation’s borders for decades. The U.S. government has spent billions on a border wall and heightened enforcement, but advocates say the buildup has spurred migrants to take more dangerous routes.
Twenty-five percent of border-crossers arrested in May had been detained in the past year, up from 7 percent in fiscal year 2019, federal data show. Recidivism spiked after former president Donald Trump shut down the land borders at the start of the pandemic. Biden tried to repeal those and other policies, but Republicans in Texas and other states sued to keep them in place.
Greg Casar, the Democratic nominee to fill a congressional seat representing parts of San Antonio and Austin, said the U.S. can prevent deaths by creating safer ways for migrants, such as expanding asylum processing on the borders or passing an immigration bill so that their U.S. relatives can sponsor them for residency.
“Nobody in Texas can seriously believe that Greg Abbott cares about immigrant families,” he said. “Governor Abbott has been pushing immigrant families into the shadows and that results in people dying, trying to go across the river, it results in people burning to death inside of trucks like this.”
Meissner, the senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said smugglers are capitalizing on migrants’ desperation, in part because U.S. lawmakers won’t make it easier to come to the United States legally.
“You can’t enforce your way out of this situation at the border, “ she said. “There have to be answers in addition to border enforcement in order for border enforcement to work.”
Hass, an immigrant from Lebanon, recalled calling his wife to tell her what he was seeing Monday as police began pulling bodies out of the tractor trailer. She ordered him to leave and soon, a Texas Ranger did the same thing, he said.
“I’m Middle Eastern, my wife is Hispanic, we all come from different countries and stuff,” he said. “So it’s very hard whenever you see people trying to make a better life and come into this country and they end up dying this way. It’s just insane. And it’s very sad.”