SAN ANTONIO -- The number of migrants dead in a suspected smuggling operation rose to 51 on Tuesday, federal immigration authorities said, a day after dozens of bodies were found lifeless in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio.
The driver of the truck and two others were arrested, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, told The Associated Press.
Cuellar 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.
Two Mexican nationals appeared in federal court Tuesday on weapons charges in the case after officials said they traced the tractor-trailer's state registration to a house in San Antonio. City police found multiple weapons inside, including several handguns and a multi-caliber rifle.
Authorities said they arrested Juan Francisco D'Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D'Luna-Mendez after they left the house in separate trucks. Officials said in court records both men admitted to being citizens of Mexico who had overstayed their visas.
The men did not enter a plea and information about their lawyers was not immediately available. At a first appearance Tuesday at U.S. District Court in San Antonio, they understood the charges but otherwise did not speak.
The dead include 39 men and 11 women, Bexar County's top elected official Nelson Wolff said. With 11 still hospitalized, officials asked the public to pray for those still fighting for their lives.
By Tuesday afternoon, medical examiners had potentially identified 34 of the victims, but they were taking additional steps, such as fingerprints, to confirm the identities, said Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores.
Among the dead, 27 are believed to be of Mexican origin based on documents they were carrying, according to said Ruben Minutti, Mexico consul general in San Antonio. Several survivors were in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, he said.
At least seven of the dead were from Guatemala and two from Honduras, Roberto Velasco Alvarez, head of the North America department in Mexico's Foreign Relations Department, said on Twitter.
The death count was the highest ever from a smuggling attempt in the United States, according to Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio.
"This is a horror that surpasses anything we've experienced before," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. "And it's sadly a preventable tragedy."
San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood said Monday that 16 people pulled from the truck were alive, including four teenagers, and transported to various hospitals.
Temperatures in San Antonio have been in the triple-digit range for weeks, and inside the refrigerated trailer, there was no air-conditioning unit or water.
"This incident underscores the need to go after the multi-billion-dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths," President Joe Biden said.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei described the tragedy as "unforgivable" in a tweet. He called for hardening penalties, including extradition to the United States, against those involved in human trafficking and smuggling across Latin America.
The Mexican government is sending a team to the Texas city to investigate, help identify and notify families and, eventually, repatriate the victims' bodies.
Authorities in San Antonio said they were alerted to the scene after a worker from a nearby building heard a cry for help and went to investigate. The trailer door was ajar when law enforcement arrived, but those inside were too weak to get themselves out, Hood said.
Some of the migrants found dead inside the trailer were reportedly sprinkled with steak seasoning in a possible bid by smugglers to cover up the stench. A law enforcement officer revealed the detail to the Texas Tribune on Monday.
Authorities think the truck discovered Monday had mechanical problems when it was left behind, Wolff said.
The truck was found on Quintana Road, a sparsely populated road that runs alongside a set of railroad tracks and a handful of automotive businesses. Police searched the area near the vehicle and used helicopters.
Interstate 35, one of the country's busiest trucking arteries, is a well-known smuggling corridor, near where the truck was found Monday.
SMUGGLING METHODS
The deaths come amid a record migration influx across the Mexico border, with the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures showing that immigration arrests there in May rose to the highest levels ever documented. Authorities are coping with a major increase in all types of smuggling, not only in trucks, as people flee violence, corruption and poverty.
Those seeking to evade detection by hiring smugglers are typically adults from Mexico and Central American countries who are far more likely to be deported or "expelled" under the pandemic-era Title 42 public health order.
U.S. authorities discover trucks with migrants inside "pretty close" to daily, Larrabee said.
Criminal organizations regularly pack together scores of people who pay thousands of dollars to be sneaked past highway checkpoints across South Texas. In recent years, there have been several deadly human trafficking incidents on U.S. soil.
"As horrific as this is, it is not the only time," said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who ran the nation's immigration system from 1993 to 2000 when it was under the Justice Department. "It will not be the only time."
In recent months, authorities have made multiple arrests in tractor-trailer smuggling operations.
In April, 67-year-old David McKeon of Laredo, Texas, was arrested along Interstate 35 after Border Patrol agents said they found 124 migrants, including two minors, in the back of his tractor-trailer.
Central American migrants traveling to the United States in smugglers' trucks face peril in Mexico as well. In December, 57 were killed when a tractor-trailer crammed with migrants rolled off the highway and crashed in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas.
Millions of other adults have boarded overloaded panga boats racing for Southern California beaches, navigated choppy seas on crude vessels, followed smugglers known as "coyotes" into the punishing desert, traversed rugged, wild mountains and risked drowning in the Rio Grande.
With the surge has come more deaths. Authorities have reported dozens who have died while trying to cross the Rio Grande.
U.S. Border Patrol agents across the Southwest are spending more time responding to 911 calls from migrants in distress.
More migrants are falling from 30-foot segments of the border wall than ever before in the El Paso and San Diego areas. And the number of migrants found dead from heat exhaustion and exposure, primarily in Arizona and South Texas, has also jumped.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 557 deaths on the Southwest border in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, more than double the 247 deaths reported in the previous year and the highest since it began keeping track in 1998. Most were related to heat exposure.
"It's a lot of strain for us to be doing all this type of work, it's unbelievable," said Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, whose deputies found six dead, two women drowned in the river and four men on a remote ranch Monday. "Sometimes, all they find are bones."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, was quick to blame the president for the tragedy, writing that "these deaths are on Biden" in a tweet. He and other GOP candidates have been hammering Democrats over border security issues.
Later Tuesday, Biden called out "political grandstanding around tragedy," promising to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers.
But some advocates drew a link to the Biden administration's border policies. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, wrote that he had been dreading such a tragedy for months.
"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.
The border's ports of entry have been closed to most asylum-seekers since 2020, giving families seeking protection few other options for entering the country.
"There's a direct relationship between U.S. deterrence strategies at the border and migrants dying at the border," said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. "The numbers will go higher."
Other advocates slammed Abbott and other Republicans for blaming Biden's policies for the tragedy, noting that smuggling deaths have plagued the nation's borders for decades. The U.S. government has spent billions on a border wall and heightened enforcement, but advocates say the buildup has spurred migrants to take more dangerous routes.
Information for this article was contributed by Arelis R. Hernandez, Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti, Eva Ruth Moravec and Silvia Foster-Frau of The Washington Post, by Jessica Schladebeck of New York Daily News (TNS) and by Eric Gay, Paul J. Weber, Elliot Spagat, Acacia Coronado, Ken Miller and Terry Wallace of The Associated Press.