In the chaotic minutes after dozens of migrants were found dead inside a tractor-trailer in the sweltering Texas heat, the driver tried to sneak out by posing as one of the survivors, a Mexican immigration official revealed Wednesday.
The driver, along with two other men from Mexico, remains in custody while the investigation continues into the tragedy in which 53 people died, which constitutes the worst case of human trafficking on the border between the United States and Mexico.
Two more people died on Wednesday, bringing the total death toll rising from the discovery of 46 bodies Monday at the site near car yards outside San Antonio.
The truck had been parked with 67 people inside. Among the dead were 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, said Francisco Garduño, head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute.
Authorities already had the potential identification of 37 of the victims as of Wednesday morning, pending verification of that information with authorities in other countries, according to the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. Forty of the victims were men, he noted.
Identifying the dead has been difficult because some were found without identity documents and, in one case, with stolen identification. The remote towns from which some of the migrants in Mexico and Central America came from lack telephone service to speak with relatives, and fingerprint data needs to be sent abroad to be identified by the governments involved.
Javier Flores López’s family was waiting to find out if he was in the truck. Flores López had returned to his home to see his wife and three young children of his in southern Mexico and was returning to Ohio, where his father and his brother live and where he worked in construction. . He is now among the missing, and his cousin, José Luis Vásquez Guzmán, is hospitalized in San Antonio, the family said.
The tragedy occurred at a time when huge numbers of migrants have been arriving in the United States, many of them taking risks crossing raging rivers and canals, as well as scorching deserts. There were nearly 240,000 migrant apprehensions in May, a third more than a year ago.
Although it is not clear when or where the migrants boarded the truck, investigators from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) believe they boarded within the United States, in or near Laredo, the federal lawmaker for Texas said Wednesday. Henry Cuellar to The Associated Press.
The truck passed a Border Patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo on Interstate 35 on Monday, Cuellar and Mexican officials confirmed. The vehicle was registered in Alamo, Texas, but its plates and logos were fake, Garduño said.
Mexican officials released a photo taken by surveillance cameras showing the driver smiling at a checkpoint during the more than two-hour drive to San Antonio.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that state law enforcement officers will set up more roadway checkpoints for trucks, without specifying how many. In April, Abbott brought a gridlock to the Texas-Mexico border by requiring every truck entering the state to undergo additional inspections, part of his dispute with the administration of President Joe Biden over immigration policies.
Authorities are investigating whether the truck had mechanical problems when it was abandoned next to a railway line. The driver was detained after trying to pass himself off as one of the migrants, Garduno said.
Several of the more than a dozen survivors who were taken to hospitals suffered from brain injuries and internal bleeding, reported the Mexican consul in San Antonio, Rubén Minutti.
Migrants typically pay between $8,000 and $10,000 to be helped illegally across the border, loaded onto a tractor-trailer, and driven to San Antonio. There they are transferred to smaller vehicles to be taken to their destinations in different parts of the United States, said Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of the Homeland Security investigations division in San Antonio.
The death toll from Monday’s tragedy in San Antonio was the highest ever recorded in a human smuggling attempt in the United States, he said. Ten migrants died in 2017 after becoming trapped in a truck in a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a truck in intense temperatures southeast of the city.
Temperatures in San Antonio on Monday hovered near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), and those taken to the hospital were hot to the touch and dehydrated, authorities said.
It wouldn’t have taken long for the temperature inside the truck to turn lethal, said Jennifer Vanos, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who has researched child deaths in hot vehicles.
He explained that the truck was probably hot even before anyone entered it, and due to the high humidity, lack of airflow, and the large number of people inside, their sweat could not evaporate to cool their bodies and they would have become dehydrated. quickly, he added.
With little information on the victims, desperate families of Mexican and Central American migrants frantically tried to get news of their loved ones.
Felicitos García, who owns a small grocery store in the remote community of San Miguel Huautla in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, said the mother of Vásquez Guzmán, who was hospitalized in Texas, traveled to the Oaxacan capital to find out more about the status of her son and the whereabouts of her cousin, who is missing.
“Life is complicated here,” Garcia said. “People survive by living off what they sow: corn, beans and wheat. There are times when the land is given and there are times when it is not, when the rain comes late. There is no system where you can have many resources. You live from one day to the next.”
The process of identifying the victims is complicated because one of the obstacles is that there are forged or stolen documents.
Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign secretary, on Tuesday identified two people hospitalized in San Antonio, but it turned out that one of the identity documents he showed on Twitter had been stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.
Haneydi Antonio Guzmán, 23, was alive in a mountain village 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) from San Antonio when she began receiving messages from family and friends eager to know how she was doing.
“It’s my credential, yes it’s me with the credential, but I’m not the person who was in the trailer and who they say is hospitalized,” he said. “My relatives spoke to me concerned, asking where I was.”
In some regions of Mexico, trying to get to the United States is a tradition that most young people at least consider.
“All the youth begin to think about going as soon as they turn 18,” said activist Carmelo Castañeda, who works with the non-governmental organization Casa del Migrante. “If there are no more visas, our people are going to continue dying.”
