Journey fatal for 9 migrants found in truck in a San Antonio parking lot

SAN ANTONIO — Authorities here discovered eight bodies in a tractor-trailer in a Walmart parking lot early on Sunday (July 23) in what they said was a human trafficking crime that underscored the perils facing migrants trying to enter the United States by any means available.

By Sunday afternoon, another person had died at a hospital, according to a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. All of the dead were men.

The eight people whose bodies were initially found were believed to have died from heat exposure and asphyxiation, a spokesman for the San Antonio Police Department said. Federal officials said in a statement Sunday that 39 people had been in the trailer. The city’s fire chief, Charles Hood, said at a news conference that 30 were taken to hospitals; about 20 were in “extremely severe” or critical condition.

In a statement, Mayor Ron Nirenberg of San Antonio called the episode “tragic”, adding that it “shines a bright light on the plight of immigrants looking for a better life and victims of human trafficking”.

Smuggling migrants in the backs of trucks is a common form of human smuggling in the region, and it has claimed lives in the past.

An expert on border enforcement and migrant deaths called the trucks “mobile ovens”.

“Those things are made out of steel and metal,” the expert, Nstor P. Rodrguez, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, said Sunday. “Yesterday in Austin, it was like 96 degrees at 9:30 in the evening. Even if the cooling system is on in the tractor-trailer, it’s just too hot.”

The San Antonio police chief, William McManus, said at a pre-dawn news conference that a store employee making the rounds late Saturday had been approached by someone from the truck “asking for water.” The employee returned with the water and called police, who found the bodies.

McManus said that “we’re looking at a human trafficking crime here” and that officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were helping with the investigation.

Two of those found were “school-age children,” and the others were in their 20s and 30s, the chief said. The two youngest of those hospitalised were 15, authorities said. The bodies were taken to the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office to determine the cause of death. Details about the victims were unavailable.

The driver, identified as James M Bradley Jr, 60, of Clearwater, Florida, is in custody and will be charged, the top federal prosecutor in the San Antonio area said in a statement Sunday.

“These people were helpless in the hands of their transporters,” said the prosecutor, Richard L. Durbin Jr., the US attorney for the Western District of Texas. “Imagine their suffering, trapped in a stifling trailer in 100-plus-degree heat.”

No further details were available about how long the truck had been in the parking lot of the Walmart, which is on the southwestern side of the city, or where it had come from. McManus said surveillance video showed that several vehicles had approached the trailer to pick up people. Some occupants fled into the woods nearby, and the police chief said officers would search on foot and by air.

Hood said the air-conditioning in the truck had not been working, adding that those found were “very hot to the touch.”

Of the survivors, he said, “our paramedics and firefighters found that each one of them had heart rates over about 130 beats per minute.”

A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, said Sunday that the people in the truck were probably migrants who had crossed the Mexican border on foot and been taken to a stash house before being put in the tractor-trailer to be transported farther north.

Experts were at odds over whether US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration had increased the likelihood of such cases, but Mr Rodrguez said the 2003 episode illustrated the persistence of the problem.

“We don’t have any good way of measuring if it’s increasing because of Mr Trump, but we know it’s a constant,” he said. “Smuggling is a billion-dollar industry when you look at the whole border.”

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an expert in border issues and a fellow at the Wilson Center, a Washington research institute, said these types of smuggling services were in greater demand because of the difficulty of crossing the border by other means.

“Events like this are an unintended consequence of enhanced border enforcement and security measures,” she said. “Further enhancing border security puts migrants under greater risk and strengthens transnational human smuggling networks.”