The bodies of 50 dead migrants were on Monday discovered inside a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, city officials said, in one of the most deadly recent incidents of human smuggling along the US-Mexico border.
A San Antonio Fire Department official said they found “stacks of bodies” and no signs of water in the truck, which was found next to railroad tracks in a remote area on the city’s southern outskirts.
Sixteen other people found inside the trailer were transported to hospitals for heat stroke and exhaustion, including four minors, but no children were among the dead, the department said.
Photo: Reuters
“The patients that we saw were hot to the touch. They were suffering from heat stroke, exhaustion,” San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood told a news conference. “It was a refrigerated tractor trailer, but there was no visible working air-conditioning unit on that rig.”
Temperatures in San Antonio, which is about 250km from the Mexican border, swelled to a high of 39.4°C on Monday, with high humidity.
San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said a person who works in a nearby building heard a cry for help and came out to investigate.
Photo: Reuters
The worker found the trailer doors partially opened, looked inside and found a number of dead bodies.
This was the largest incident of its kind in the city, McManus said, adding that three people were in custody following the incident, although their involvement is not yet clear.
A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson said that Homeland Security Investigations was investigating “an alleged human smuggling event” in coordination with local police.
Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard called the suffocation of the migrants in the truck the “tragedy in Texas” on Twitter and said consular officials would go to the hospitals where victims had been taken to help “however possible.”
A Honduran Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said that the country’s consulates in Houston and Dallas, Texas, would be investigating the incident.
Ebrard said two Guatemalans were hospitalized, and the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Twitter that consular officials were going to the hospital “to verify if there are two Guatemalan minors there and what condition they are in.”
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 ICE’s investigative unit who retired in December last year.
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