At least 40 migrants found dead inside tractor-trailer in Texas

[Stevicus]

At least 40 migrants found dead inside tractor-trailer in Texas (msn.com)

Truly horrifying.

SAN ANTONIO — At least 40 migrants were found dead in the back of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio on Monday, according to two federal law enforcement officials briefed on the horrific finding.

Rescuers pulled at least 15 others from the vehicle and they were taken for medical treatment, said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide preliminary information.

It appears to be heat related.

The truck was found by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that specializes in human trafficking cases, one of the officials said. HSI agents are leading the investigation.

“There are about 46 migrants dead in San Antonio. Lord have mercy on them,” wrote San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller on Twitter. “They hoped for a better life. Lord after Uvalde and now this, help us!”

Near the scene, the lights of dozens of emergency vehicles flickered into the evening as investigators continued to search along a road running parallel to railroad tracks. Bystanders raised their cellphones toward the scene about 600 feet down the pockmarked road where a parked tractor trailer leaned into the brush.

The location is close to Interstate 35, a major transit route for traffic and commerce from the U.S-Mexico border. Police said the trailer was discovered around 6 p.m.

Smuggling organizations working inside the United States sometimes pack migrants into trucks and cargo trailers after they have already crossed the Mexico border, in order to sneak them past highway checkpoints operated by the U.S. Border Patrol.

The deaths come amid a surge in migration to the U.S. southern border, with the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures showing that immigration arrests there in May rose to the highest levels ever recorded. CBP made 239,416 arrests along the Mexico border last month, a 2 percent increase from April, according to the totals.

The agency is on pace to surpass 2 million detentions in the 2022 fiscal year, which ends in September, after reaching a record 1.73 million in 2021 — presenting an ongoing logistical and political challenge for the Biden administration.

The latest figures show growing numbers arriving from countries including Turkey, India, Russia and other nations outside the Western Hemisphere. High numbers of migrants from Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Haiti also continued to cross. CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus recently warned about the dangers of illegal crossings.

“As temperatures start to rise in the summer, human smugglers will continue to exploit vulnerable populations and recklessly endanger the lives of migrants for financial gain,” Magnus said. “The terrain along the Southwest Border is extreme, the summer heat is severe, and the miles of desert that migrants must hike after crossing the border are unforgiving.”

The tragedy immediately became one of the worst smuggling incidents on U.S. soil. Until now, the deadliest incident was on May 13, 2003, when 19 migrants died in the rear compartment of an 18-wheeler in South Texas.

Truck driver Tyrone Williams had agreed to smuggle the migrants across a border checkpoint for $7,500, but failed to turn on the truck’s cooling system and temperatures inside soared to a brutal 173 degrees.

Migrants clawed at the insulation and screamed for help, and when he finally opened the doors in Victoria, Tex., the 19 were found dead of dehydration, overheating and suffocation. Williams later was sentenced to 34 years in prison.

On July 23, 2017, 10 migrants died after being smuggled in a tractor trailer to the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in San Antonio. The driver, James Matthew Bradley, Jr. pleaded guilty to charges related to their deaths. Eight migrants died in the trailer and two later died at the hospital.

Thirty-nine migrants were found at the scene, but officials said as many as 200 may have been on the trip. Bradley was sentenced to life in federal prison without parole.

His co-defendant, Pedro Silva Segura, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death, and was sentenced to 108 months in federal prison and five years of supervised release.

 

[Subduction Zone]

It appears to be heat related.

My first thought. It appears that the trailer was abandoned. I wonder if the driver found out that everyone was dying and dropped his load. I hope that they catch the driver. I am sure that if reported right away the numbers of dead would have been far less.

 

[Revoltingest]

Don't ever get into a trailer that becomes locked from the outside.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I just read this on the BBC moments ago. Truly horrific that someone did that too them.

 

[Stevicus]

My first thought. It appears that the trailer was abandoned. I wonder if the driver found out that everyone was dying and dropped his load. I hope that they catch the driver. I am sure that if reported right away the numbers of dead would have been far less.

The article recounted a previous incident from 2003 when the driver failed to turn on the cooling units to keep the trailer cooled. The temperatures reached 173°. 19 people died in that incident, but this was more than twice that. The driver in that case was sentenced to 34 years in prison.

I hope they catch the driver, too.

 

[Subduction Zone]

The article recounted a previous incident from 2003 when the driver failed to turn on the cooling units to keep the trailer cooled. The temperatures reached 173°. 19 people died in that incident, but this was more than twice that. The driver in that case was sentenced to 34 years in prison.

I hope they catch the driver, too.

There is a very good chance that the driver will be caught. Trailers are registered too. Unhooking it from your truck and running will not do much good.

 

[Stonetree]

Will there come a time when citizens of the USA will pile into trailers to escape a graft ridden country. A country where the voices of the people won't mean a damn thing. It is not impossible....

 

[Stevicus]

It appears the death toll has risen to 46: 46 migrants found dead in abandoned trailer in San Antonio | AP News

Officers arrived to find a body on the ground outside the trailer and a partially opened gate to the trailer. Three people were taken into custody, but it was unclear if they were definitively connected with human trafficking, McManus said.

Of the 16 taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses, 12 were adults and four were children, said Fire Chief Charles Hood. The 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 visible working AC unit on that rig.”

Those in the trailer were part of a presumed migrant smuggling attempt into the United States, and the investigation was being led by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, McManus said.

Big rigs emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid a surge in U.S. border enforcement in San Diego and El Paso, Texas, which were then the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.

Before that, people paid small fees to mom-and-pop operators to get them across a largely unguarded border. As crossing became exponentially more difficult after the 2001 terror attacks in the U.S., migrants were led through more perilous terrain and paid thousands of dollars more.

Heat poses a serious danger, particularly when temperatures can rise severely inside vehicles. Weather in the San Antonio area was mostly cloudy Monday, but temperatures approached 100 degrees.

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

“With the border shut as tightly as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into more and more dangerous routes. Truck smuggling is a way up,” he wrote on Twitter.

Stephen Miller, a chief architect of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, said, “Human smugglers and traffickers are wicked and evil” and that the administration’s approach to border security rewards their actions.

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

Migrants — largely from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — have been expelled more than 2 million times under a pandemic-era rule in effect since March 2020 that denies them a chance to seek asylum but encourages repeat attempts because there are no legal consequences for getting caught. People from other countries, notably Cuba, Nicaragua and Colombia, are subject to Title 42 authority less frequently due to higher costs of sending them home, strained diplomatic relations and other considerations.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths on the southwest border in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths reported in the previous year and the highest since it began keeping track in 1998. Most are related to heat exposure.

CBP has not published a death tally for this year but said that the Border Patrol performed 14,278 “search-and-rescue missions” in a seven-month period through May, exceeding the 12,833 missions performed during the previous 12-month period and up from 5,071 the year before.

 

[Stevicus]

Two suspects charged after death of 51 migrants in sweltering Texas truck | Reuters

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, June 28 (Reuters) - At least 51 migrants have died after being trapped inside a sweltering tractor-trailer truck found abandoned in Texas, authorities said on Tuesday, as two Mexican nationals tied to the smuggling incident were charged in U.S. federal court.

The deceased migrants, 39 men and 12 women, were discovered on Monday on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, in one of the deadliest human trafficking tragedies in recent history.

Two suspects identified as Juan Francisco D'Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D'Luna-Mendez, both Mexican citizens, have been charged with possessing firearms while residing in the United States illegally, according to court documents and U.S. authorities.

Investigators traced the truck's vehicle registration to a San Antonio address that they placed under surveillance, and arrested the two men separately when each was seen leaving the residence.

A third suspect, described as a U.S. citizen who drove the truck, has also been taken into custody and was expected to be charged, but he remained hospitalized as of Tuesday evening, according to a Mexican official.

The truck had been left parked next to some railroad tracks on the outskirts of San Antonio, where temperatures soared to a high of 103 Fahrenheit (39.4 Celsius). Bodies were found inside the vehicle and strewn over a couple of blocks, after the rear door of the trailer had been opened, a local law enforcement official told Reuters on Tuesday.

Local authorities said there were no signs of water or visible means of air-conditioning inside the truck. The officials said there were "stacks of bodies" and that some of the migrants were hot to the touch.

"It's unspeakable," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said on MSNBC, noting that his community depends on migrants while there is a labor shortage. "It's a tragedy beyond explanation."

U.S. President Joe Biden said in a Tuesday statement the incident was "horrifying and heartbreaking."

"Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful," Biden said, vowing to crack down on multibillion-dollar criminal smuggling enterprises that have helped fuel a record number of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border since he took office in January 2021.

INVESTIGATIONS UNDERWAY
At least 27 Mexicans, three Guatemalans and four Hondurans were believed to be among the dead, according to officials from all three countries. There was no immediate information on the nationality of the other victims.

More than a dozen survivors were transported to area hospitals for heat stroke and exhaustion, including four minors.

At a press conference outside one of the hospitals treating patients on Tuesday, Rebeca Clay-Flores, a Democratic local official in Bexar County, Texas, sharply criticized Republican Governor Greg Abbott for a tweet on Monday night that blamed Biden's border policies for the incident even as the emergency response unfolded.

"While bodies were still being removed, and others being taken to local hospitals, he chose to be heartless and point the finger," Clay-Flores said.

The truck may have been carrying around 100 migrants, but the exact number remained unclear, according to the law enforcement official and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official briefed on the investigation.

It appeared the migrants had recently crossed the border and were picked up by the truck to be taken to where they would work, according to a Mexican official, the CBP official and another U.S. official, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the matter.

Authorities were alerted to the truck through an emergency-911 call from a passerby flagged down for help by a migrant who had escaped from the truck, the officials said.

The victims were found sprinkled with a pungent substance, officials said, a practice some smugglers are known to use to mask the scent of human cargo and evade canine detection.

San Antonio's police chief, William McManus, on Monday said a person who works in a nearby building heard a cry for help, came out to investigate, found the trailer doors partially opened and saw a number of bodies inside.

The surviving migrants will likely be released into the United States to pursue asylum or other forms of humanitarian relief, the CBP official and two other law enforcement officials told Reuters.

Some survivors of human smuggling in the past have been taken into the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service to testify as witnesses. read more

IMMIGRATION CHALLENGES
The deaths highlighted the challenge of controlling migrant crossings for Biden, a Democrat who came into office pledging to reverse some of the hard-line immigration policies of his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump. Republicans have criticized Biden's border strategy ahead of the midterm congressional elections in November.

The I-35 highway near where the truck was found runs through San Antonio from the Mexican border and is a popular smuggling corridor because of the large volume of truck traffic, according to Jack Staton, a former senior official with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigative unit who retired in December.

In July 2017, 10 migrants died after being transported in a tractor-trailer discovered by San Antonio police in a Walmart parking lot. The driver, James Matthew Bradley Jr., was later sentenced to life in prison for his role in that smuggling operation.

"It was only a matter of time before a tragedy like this was going to happen again," Staton said.

President Biden said it was "horrifying and heartbreaking."

They need to find a way to resolve this issue. We don't need to have a hostile border with Mexico. They're our neighbors, our friends, our allies. Their citizens should not have to go through this just to find work. All it does is give these human traffickers a source of profit, and they're linked with the cartels anyway. I'm glad they have some suspects and are getting to the bottom of this, but this problem is not going to go away.

 

[Subduction Zone]

At least they will not be deporting the survivors. Three people in custody, two of them charged. It looks as if the American driver, who has not been charged yet, is going to be hit with some very serious felonies.

 

[Stevicus]

Suspected driver of truck packed with suffocating migrants pretended to be a victim, may have been on drugs (msn.com)