- Angelica Casas and Leo Sands
- BBC correspondent
Last updated: 3 hours ago
image source,Getty Images
Emergency crews arrived at the scene at around 18:00 local time (23:00 GMT) after being alerted.
At least 46 people were found dead in a truck on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, according to US media reports. These victims are believed to be migrants.
16 people, including four children, have also been taken to hospital, a fire official said. Survivors were “hot to the touch” and had symptoms of heat stroke and heat exhaustion.
San Antonio, in Texas, about 250 kilometers (150 miles) from the U.S.-Mexico border, is a major transit route for people smugglers.
Once illegal immigrants have successfully entered the United States, human traffickers often connect with illegal immigrants in remote areas and transport them by truck.
“They have families … just maybe looking for a better life,” said San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “This is simply a terrible human tragedy.”
Images posted on social media showed a large number of emergency workers surrounding the large van.
San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood said emergency crews arrived at the scene around 18:00 local time (23:00 GMT) after being alerted of the death.
“We didn’t expect to open a truck and see piles of bodies inside,” Hood said. “We never expected that to happen.”
He added that the car had been abandoned by the driver and had no air conditioning and no drinking water in the car.
Summer in San Antonio is hot, with temperatures reaching 39.4 degrees Celsius on Monday.
San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said at a news conference that the investigation has now been handed over to federal agents and three people are in custody.
Timberyard security Edward Reyna said he wasn’t surprised to hear the news while working the night shift.
scary scene
BBCreporterAngelica Casas(Angelica Casas) fromSan AntonioPress
It was dark now and only a few law enforcement vehicles and a few police officers cordoned off the dark road, apparently the scene of a mass casualty incident.
The victims, presumed to be immigrants, may have died from heat stroke or dehydration.
Edward Reyna, a lumber yard security guard just a few yards away, said he wasn’t surprised to hear the news while working his night shift.
He has lost count of the number of times he has seen migrants jumping off trains passing where the trucks were found.
“I think sooner or later someone will get hurt,” Rainer said. “The gang who brought them here don’t care about them.”
This story has played out in San Antonio before, but not as seriously.
In 2017, 10 migrants were found dead in a similar tractor trailer outside a Walmart, also on the city’s south side.
At the southernmost end of San Antonio is a corridor with two major highways connecting the city with the Texas border towns.
This area of San Antonio has a lot of rural communities, some dumps and a handful of developing communities, making it easy for a truck of this size to go unnoticed until the event.
The truck was found next to railroad tracks in southwest San Antonio, Texas, KSAT TV reported.
A large number of emergency personnel, including police, fire and ambulance services, can be seen around the large truck.
image source,Archyde.com
The local fire chief said more than 60 firefighters were involved in the rescue operation.
The department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has taken over the investigation. “People smugglers are ruthless people who, for profit, never consider the vulnerable people they exploit and harm,” he said.
Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the Mexican consul was on his way to the site of the incident and the two Guatemalans were taken to hospital. But he added that the nationalities of the other victims were unclear.
Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, blamed the death on U.S. President Joe Biden, saying it was the result of Biden’s “lethal open border policy.”
Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke, who runs against Greg Abbott, said the reports were devastating and called for urgent action “to dismantle people-smuggling gangs and expand legal immigration way to replace it.”
Immigration is a contentious political issue in the United States, with a record number of undocumented immigrants detained as they entered the United States from Mexico last year, many taking extremely dangerous and unsafe routes to the United States.
The number of arrests by U.S. law enforcement officials at the border is expected to surpass the record 1.73 million in 2021, with large numbers continuing to cross into the U.S. from Central American countries such as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Fleeing poverty and violence in Central America, many undocumented immigrants end up paying people smugglers huge sums of cash to cross the border into the United States with their help.
In recent years, there have been many similar instances of migrants dying crossing the border, but none as deadly as the one uncovered on Monday.
After the tragedy, San Antonio Catholic Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller tweeted: “May the Lord have mercy on them. They want a better life.”
“The lack of courage to address immigration reform is once again killing and destroying lives,” he added.
“Our understanding now is that if this were a people-smuggling incident, it looks like it would be the deadliest incident of its kind in American history,” Matt Houston, a reporter for local outlet KENS5, told the BBC in San Antonio. ”
Houston said families entering the U.S. face a huge risk — a heatwave that has battered the region in recent days.