SAN ANTONIO (AP) — In the chaotic minutes after dozens of migrants were discovered dead inside a truck with a choking trailer in the Texas sun, the driving force tried to sneak away posing as one of the survivors, a Mexican immigration official said Wednesday.
The driver of the U. S. truck, along with the U. S. citizen and two other men, remained in custody as the investigation into the tragedy that killed 53 others in the country’s deadliest smuggling episode on the U. S. -Mexico border continued. Federal prosecutors said two of the suspects, adding the driver, face fees punishable by life in prison or the death penalty if convicted.
Two more people died Wednesday as the death toll slowly rose since 46 bodies were found Monday at the scene near car recovery yards outside San Antonio.
The truck had been carrying 67 people, and among the dead were 27 from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, said Francisco Garduño, director of Mexico’s National Migration Institute.
According to the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office, officials had prospective IDs of 37 of the patients on Wednesday, pending verification with the government of other countries. Forty of the patients were men, he said.
Identifying the dead was tricky, as some were discovered without identity documents and, in one case, with a stolen ID. The remote villages in Mexico and Central America where some of the migrants come from do not have a telephone service to succeed in the circle of relatives and members. knowledge of fingerprints will have to be shared and compared through the governments involved.
Relatives of Javier Flores López were waiting to find out if he was in the van. He had returned home to see his wife and 3 young men in southern Mexico and returning to Ohio where his father and brother live and where he worked in construction. He is now among the missing and his cousin, Jose Luis Vasquez Guzman, is hospitalized in San Antonio, the circle of relatives said.
The tragedy occurred at a time when gigantic numbers of migrants have arrived in the United States, many of them in dangerous danger to cross fast-moving rivers and canals and hot desert landscapes. Migrants were arrested nearly 240,000 times in May, a third more than a year ago.
While it’s unclear when or where the migrants boarded the San Antonio-bound truck, Homeland Security investigators found it on U. S. soil near or in Laredo, Texas, U. S. Rep. Henry Cuellar told The Associated Press.
The truck passed a Border Patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo on Interstate 35 on Monday, Cuellar and Mexican officials confirmed. It was registered in Alamo, Texas, but had fake plates and logos, Garduño said.
Mexican authorities also released a surveillance photo showing the driver smiling at the checkpoint during the more than two-hour drive to San Antonio.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that infantrymen would set up more checkpoints for trucks on the roads, but did not specify how many. that the state go through more inspections as part of its ongoing fight with the Biden administration over immigration policy.
Authorities were investigating whether the truck had any mechanical damage when it left next to a railroad. The driver was apprehended after seeking to disguise himself as one of the migrants, Garduño said.
Federal prosecutors identified the driver as Homero Zamorano Jr. , 45, who was charged with smuggling resulting in death. Zamorano lives in the suburbs of Houston and is originally from the Texas border with the city of Brownsville, according to the U. S. Attorney’s Office in San Antonio. .
He faces the maximum serious fees with Christian Martinez, 28, who is accused of conspiracy to commit a crime and allegedly communicated with Zamorano about sending migrants.
Martinez arrested in East Texas and will be transported to San Antonio. Zamorano is scheduled to appear in court for the first time on Thursday. It was not without delay that it was clarified whether any of the suspects had a lawyer.
Two other men who are not U. S. citizens were also arrested for illegal possession of weapons. Prosecutors say investigators found the men on a San Antonio front where the truck was searched.
Some of the more than a dozen people transported to hospitals suffered brain damage and internal bleeding, according to Ruben Minutti, Mexico’s consul general in San Antonio.
Migrants pay between $8,000 and $10,000 to cross the border, be loaded into a trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they are flown in smaller cars to their final destinations in the United States, said Craig Larrabee, acting special agent at the Homeland Security Investigations rate in San Antonio.
The death toll from Monday’s tragedy in San Antonio was the highest ever recorded in an attempted smuggling into the United States, he said. Four years ago, another 10 people died in 2017 after being trapped in a truck parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were discovered in a suffocating truck southeast of the city.
Temperatures in San Antonio on Monday approached one hundred degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), and other people who were taken to the hospital were hot to the touch and dehydrated, the government said.
It wouldn’t have taken long for the truck’s internal temperature to be deadly, said Jennifer Vanos, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who has investigated the deaths of children in hot vehicles.
Most likely, the semi-trailer would have been hot even before it was given the inside and, due to the upper humidity, lack of airflow, and the large number of other people inside, their sweat could not evaporate to cool their bodies and they would have quickly become dehydrated. , she said. .
With little on the victims, desperate families in Mexico and Central America frantically searched for news of their loved ones.
Felicitos Garcia, owner of a grocery store in the remote network of San Miguel Huautla, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, said vasquez Guzman’s mother, who is hospitalized in Texas, traveled to the state capital to learn more about her son’s physical condition and where his cousin is. that has disappeared.
“Life is hard here,” he said García. La people by developing their own crops such as corn, beans and wheat. Sometimes the land provides the way and rarely not when the rains are late. There is nothing in position for other people to have other resources. People live by the day.
The identity of those affected was difficult because among the stumbling blocks were forged or stolen documents.
Mexico’s foreign secretary on Tuesday met two other people hospitalized in San Antonio. But it turned out that one of the ID cards he shared on Twitter was stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.
Haneydi Antonio Guzman, 23, was in a mountain network more than 2,092 kilometers from San Antonio when he began receiving messages from family and friends worried about his fate.
“It’s me on the ID, but I’m not the user who is in the caravan and they say she’s hospitalized,” Guzman said.
In some parts of Mexico, seeking to move to the United States is a culture that most young people in highly migratory cities at least consider.
“All the other young people start thinking about leaving (to the United States) as soon as they are 18,” said migrant activist Carmelo Castañeda, who works with the Casa del Migrante association. “If there are no more visas, our other people will continue to die. “
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Verza and Sanchez reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writers Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas; Elliot Spagat and Julie Watson in San Diego; Tammy Webber in Fenton, Michigan; Edgar H. Clemente in Villa Comaltitlán, Mexico; Sonia D. Perez in Guatemala City and Marlon Gonzalez in Tegucigalpa, Honduras contributed to this report.