Big rigs can be rolling traps for migrants
Even as Trump’s tough talk slows flow of border crossers, many risk life in back of 18-wheelers
ISAN ANTONIO, Texas n one truck, the migrants crouched in the dark in a 3-foot crevice between the trailer’s ceiling and the top of medical-supply boxes. In another, smugglers crammed 73 men, women and children into a trailer filled with rotting watermelons, to try to disguise their scent for Border Patrol dogs.
Sometimes, the trailers are comfortable, or as comfortable as a human-cargo operation can be, with water, ventilation and even refrigeration to keep everyone cool. But just as often, especially in the South Texas heat, they can become inhumane.
One group of trapped migrants cut their hands trying to rip insulation from a trailer’s door to try to get some air and left bloody handprints. Others drank their own urine when their water supply went out.
Luciano Alcocer, 56, still vividly recalls his 12-hour trip from Chaparral, N.M., to Dallas packed into an unventilated trailer in 2002. Two immigrants died, and Alcocer thought he would, too. “I thought my final moment had arrived,” he said. “We were desperate. We were like chickens spinning on a rotisserie.”
Last Sunday, a thirsty immigrant’s request for water at a Wal-Mart in San Antonio led to the discovery, in the parking lot, of the deadliest truck-smuggling operation in the United States in more than a decade. Ten of the 39 people found in or near the truck died, and others were hospitalized, some with brain damage.
The case has cast a harsh light on a practice known for its cruelty. But it also showed that the big rig rolls on as a highly organized, often effective and remarkably enduring transportation option for the smuggling underworld.
Hundreds of migrants every year are caught inside tractor-trailers, and hundreds more are believed to be cruising in undetected. Even though President Donald Trump’s tough stance on unauthorized immigration has slowed the flow of border crossers, many are still trying to slip past the Border Patrol in the back of 18-wheelers.
In late June, for example, a Homeland Security task force found 21 people in the back of another tractor-trailer in Laredo, leading to the prosecution of four suspected smugglers. And Mexican authorities reported that on Saturday that they had rescued 147 Central American migrants, including 48 children, found abandoned in a wilderness area in Veracruz state after a truck carrying them crashed.
“It has been going on certainly throughout the entire 30 years that I’ve been doing this,” said the director of the task force, Paul A. Beeson, a veteran Border Patrol agent. “They use every method of conveyance that they can come up with.” Court records, news reports and interviews with officials, border experts and migrants who have survived the trip illustrated both the lure of the truck and its dangers. In South Texas, the busiest border for illegal entry and a mostly unfenced one, crossing the Rio Grande is in many ways the easy part. The hardest is getting past the 100-mile-wide zone where Border Patrol traffic checkpoints function as a last line of defense before migrants reach San Antonio, Houston and cities beyond.
Unauthorized immigrants and the people who profit off smuggling them must decide whether to go around the checkpoints on foot, or go through them in a vehicle.
Those who circumvent the checkpoints on foot often do not make it out alive, dying from dehydration or heat stroke. For decades, particularly in hot Texas summers, going through the checkpoints in the trailers of 18-wheelers has appealed as a far less perilous option.
“It’s considered VIP, considered safer, faster and therefore more expensive,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an expert on border issues and a fellow at the Wilson Center, a research institute in Washington. “With stronger border enforcement measures, people don’t want to be visible.”
Alcocer’s truck trip in 2002 cost $2,500. According to the criminal smuggling complaint against the driver of the San Antonio truck, James M. Bradley Jr., one of the migrants told investigators that he was to pay his smugglers $5,500 once he reached San Antonio safely.
Far more people are smuggled in cars. In the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, nearly 2,000 migrants have been caught in cars, compared with about 225 in commercial trucks, according to the Border Patrol. (In the previous fiscal year, those numbers were 3,400 and 369, respectively.)
But trucks provide several advantages over cars for smugglers and migrants. One is bulk. One 18-wheeler trip is often the work not of a single smuggler but of several working together, who load four, five or six groups of 20 or so migrants into a trailer. In the San Antonio case, one immigrant believed that up to 200 people had been inside at one point. “Usually if you’re in those big vehicles, it’s trying to coordinate large groups and move people around,” said Jeremy Slack, a migration expert and professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.