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51 migrants die after trailer abandoned in San Antonio heat
Jun 28, 2022 1 min, 53 secs
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America frantically sought word of their loved ones as authorities began the grim task Tuesday of identifying 51 people who died after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer without air conditioning in the sweltering Texas heat.

It was the deadliest tragedy to claim the lives of migrants smuggled across the border from Mexico.

He said the truck had passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo, Texas, on Interstate 35.

He did not know if migrants were inside the truck when it cleared the checkpoint.

The bodies were discovered Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio when a city worker heard a cry for help from the truck parked on a lonely back road and found the gruesome scene inside, police Chief William McManus said.

“This is a horror that surpasses anything we’ve experienced before,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said.

Among the dead, 27 are believed to be of Mexican origin based on documents they were carrying, according to said Rubén Minutti, Mexico consul general in San Antonio.

border authorities are stopping migrants more often on the southern border than at any time in at least two decades.

authorities discover trucks with migrants inside “pretty close” to daily, Larrabee said.

Migrants typically pay $8,000 to $10,000 to be taken across the border and loaded into a tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they transfer to smaller vehicles for their final destinations across the United States, he said.

Authorities think the truck discovered Monday had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad track in an area of San Antonio surrounded by auto scrapyards that brush up against a busy freeway, said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, the top elected official in the county that includes San Antonio.

Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck parked at a San Antonio Walmart.

“With the border shut as tightly as it is today for migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, people have been pushed into more and more dangerous routes,” he wrote on Twitter.

If we had a better way for brown and Black people to enter safely, they wouldn’t go through these desperate measures,” said San Antonio resident Debbie Ponce.

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