Families wait for answers
Toll rises, as investigation continues into migrant tragedy
In the chaotic minutes after dozens of migrants were found dead inside a tractor-trailer sweltering under the Texas sun, the driver tried to slip away by pretending to be one of the survivors, a Mexican immigration official has revealed.
The driver along with two other men from Mexico remained in custody as the investigation continued into the tragedy that killed 53 people — the nation’s deadliest smuggling episode on the Us-mexico border.
Two more people died yesterday as the death toll slowly climbed since the discovery of 46 bodies Tuesday at the scene near auto salvage yards on the edge of San Antonio.
The truck had been packed with 67 people.
Identifying the dead has been challenging because some were found without identification documents.
Remote villages where some of the migrants came from in Mexico and Central America have no phone service to reach family members and fingerprint data has to be shared and matched by the governments involved.
Javier Flores Lo´pez’s family was waiting to find out whether he was on the truck. He had returned home to see his wife and three small children in southern Mexico and was going back to Ohio where his father and a brother live and he worked in construction. He is now among the missing and his cousin, Jose´ Luis Va´squez Guzma´n, is hospitalised in San Antonio, the family said.
The tragedy occurred at a time when huge numbers of migrants have been coming to the US, many
of them taking perilous risks to cross swift rivers and canals and scorching desert landscapes. Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, up by one-third from a year ago.
While it’s not clear when or where the migrants boarded the truck bound for San Antonio, Homeland Security investigators believe it was on US soil, near or in Laredo, Texas.
The truck had travelled through a border patrol checkpoint, Cuellar and Mexican officials confirmed.
It was registered in Alamo, Texas, but had fake plates and logos, Francisco Gardun˜ o, chief of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, said.
Officials in Mexico also released a
surveillance photo showing the driver smiling at the checkpoint during the more than two-hour trip to San Antonio.
Authorities were looking into whether the truck had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad track. The driver was apprehended after trying to disguise himself as one of the migrants, Gardun˜o said.
Some of the more than a dozen people transported to hospitals were found suffering from brain damage and internal bleeding, according to Rube´n Minutti, the Mexico consul general in San Antonio.
Migrants typically pay US$8000
($12,323) to US$10,000 to be taken across the border, loaded into a tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they transfer to smaller vehicles for their final destinations across the United States, said Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio.
The death count from Tuesday’s tragedy was the highest ever from a smuggling attempt in the US, he said.
Four years ago, 10 died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck parked at a San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of the city. —AP