Tragedy in Texas: Police reveal how they discovered the bodies of the 50 migrants in an abandoned truck

Fifty people were found dead after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer on a remote back road in San Antonio, Texasin the latest tragedy to claim the lives of migrants smuggling across the border from Mexico to USA. Sixteen people were hospitalized, including four children.

A city worker heard a cry for help from the truck shortly before 6 p.m. Monday. and discovered the gruesome scene, Police Chief William McManus said. Hours later, body bags lay strewn on the ground near the trailer and bodies remained inside as authorities responded to the calamity.

LOOK: Tragedy in Texas: they confirm that there are 22 Mexicans among the migrants found dead in a truck in San Antonio

“An employee in one of the buildings behind me heard a cry for help”McManus told reporters. “I went to investigate, found the container with the doors partially open, opened it and took a look, finding several deceased individuals.”

the mayor of Saint AnthonyRon Nirenberg said the 46 who died had “families who were probably trying to find a better life…This is nothing short of a horrible human tragedy.”

But on Tuesday Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador raised the number of migrants found dead to 50 and said 22 of them were Mexican.

Police in San Antonio, Texas, remain at the site where a truck with 46 dead migrants was found. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

It is one of the deadliest tragedies that have claimed thousands of lives in recent decades as people try to cross the United States border from Mexico. Ten migrants died in 2017 after becoming trapped inside a truck parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a suffocating truck southeast of San Antonio.

LOOK: The Texas tragedy and other cases of migrants killed in trucks around the world

Among the 50 dead there are 22 from Mexico, seven are from Guatemala and two are from Honduras, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, head of the North America department at the Mexican Department of Foreign Relations, said on Twitter.

“Our condolences”, he tweeted. “All those responsible will be brought to justice.”

the south of Texas it has long been the busiest area for illegal border crossings. Migrants travel in vehicles through Border Patrol checkpoints to Saint Anthonythe nearest major city, from which point they scatter across the United States.

Other incidents have occurred long before the immigrants arrived at the united states border. In December, more than 50 were killed when a semi-trailer full of migrants overturned on a highway in southern Mexico. In October, Mexican authorities reported finding 652 migrants crammed into six trailers near the US border. They were detained at a military checkpoint.

Officers arrived and found a body on the ground outside the trailer and a partially open trailer door. Three people were taken into custody, but it was not clear if they were definitely related to human trafficking, McManus said. The trailer was gone Tuesday morning, but access to the area where it was found was still blocked.

Of the 16 taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses, 12 were adults and four were children, Fire Chief Charles Hood said. The patients were hot to the touch and dehydrated, and no water was found in the trailer, he said.

“They were suffering from heatstroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor trailer, but there was no visible working air conditioning unit on that bed.”

At least 46 bodies were found in a truck in San Antonio, Texas, on June 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Those in the trailer were part of an alleged attempt to smuggle migrants into USAand the investigation was being handled by US Homeland Security Investigations, McManus said.

Large trucks emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid increased surveillance of the US border in San Diego and El Paso, Texas, then the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.

Before then, people paid small fees to family-owned operators to get them across a largely unprotected border. As crossing became exponentially more difficult after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, migrants were herded through more dangerous terrain and paid thousands of dollars more.

Heat is a serious hazard, especially when temperatures can rise significantly inside vehicles. Weather in the San Antonio area was mostly cloudy Monday, but temperatures approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).

Some advocates drew a link to the border policies of the Biden administration. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director for the American Immigration Council, wrote that he had been fearing such a tragedy for months.

“With the border as closed as it is today to migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed onto increasingly dangerous routes. Truck smuggling is a way up”he wrote on Twitter.

Stephen Miller, one of the main architects of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, said: “Smugglers and human traffickers are wicked and wicked” and that the administration’s approach to border security rewards its actions.

Police guard an area at the scene where a tractor-trailer with dead migrants was discovered in San Antonio, Texas, on June 27, 2022. (Sergio FLORES/AFP)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican running for re-election, was blunt in a tweet about the Democratic president: “These deaths are on Biden. They are the result of his deadly open border policies.”

The migrants, mostly from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, have been removed more than 2 million times under a pandemic-era rule in place since March 2020 that denies them the opportunity to seek asylum but encourages repeated attempts. because there are no legal consequences. for being caught. People from other countries, notably Cuba, Nicaragua, and Colombia, are less often subject to Title 42 authority due to the higher costs of sending them home, strained diplomatic relations, and other considerations.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths at the southwest border in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths reported a year earlier and the highest number since it began tracking in 1998. Most are heat-related. exposition.

CBP has not released a death count for this year, but said Border Patrol conducted 14,278 “search and rescue missions” in a seven-month period through May, topping the 12,833 missions conducted during the previous 12-month period and more. from 5,071 the previous year.

Source: Elcomercio