Not the end of human misery
The tableau of misery inside a tractor-trailer packed with undocumented immigrants at a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio last weekend was beyond horrific. At one point, before dozens of the migrants were offloaded by human traffickers, more than 100 people — possibly many more — were crammed into the trailer’s lightless, nearly airless interior, baking in the south Texas summer heat and taking turns to suck air through a hole in the vehicle’s side. By the time police were summoned, early Sunday, eight people lay dead inside the trailer; two more died in the hospital in the ensuing 24 hours. Many others, having succumbed to heatstroke and related afflictions, suffered grievous injuries.
This unimaginable spectacle of suffering was the product of desperation on the part of the immigrants for better economic circumstances and callous criminality on the part of traffickers. The carnage in the Wal-Mart parking lot was neither the first nor even the worst such incident. In 2003, 19 undocumented immigrants, including a 7-year-old boy and a 91-yearold man, were found dead from heat and asphyxiation in the back of a truck in Victoria, Texas.
It is to be hoped that state and federal authorities will sweep up the traffickers responsible for this outrage in San Antonio and that sentences will be harsh. (The truck driver, James Matthew Bradley Jr. of Florida, is in custody. He denies having known that people were locked in the truck before arriving at the Walmart and hearing banging and shaking in the trailer, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court. Inexcusably, he apparently failed to call 911 even after discovering the bodies.)
The magnetic pull of the U.S. economy and its demand for low-wage, low-skilled labor has for decades attracted povertystricken workers from south of the border willing to take inordinate risks and enter into bargains with unscrupulous smugglers.
The Trump administration, so far at least, has managed to drive down the number of illegal border crossers, partly by toughening actual enforcement but mainly by jawboning — establishing an inhospitable political environment. Undocumented immigrants, said Thomas Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “should be afraid.”
Without an overhaul of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration laws, don’t expect illegal immigration or human trafficking or further terrible tragedies to end anytime soon.