Five days after a semi-truck trailer was discovered in a San Antonio parking lot with over 30 Mexican and Central American citizens trapped inside, the parents, wives and siblings of those migrants are fighting to cross the U.S. border and find their missing family members.
To date, 10 people have died and more than 20 others rescued from the rig have been hospitalized in dire condition, many with extreme dehydration and heatstroke, officials said.
Meanwhile, at the border, community activists and everyday citizens have united to help the families of the victims, many of whom hail from situations of extreme poverty in Mexico and Central America, to reach the U.S. hospitals where their loved ones are being treated.
It was the lack of jobs, poverty and hunger that drove their loved ones to leave their home countries and risk their lives traveling in a tractor-trailer that was later confirmed to have had no source ventilation, several family members told Hoy.
From Chicago, Julie Contreras, of the Latino civil rights organization League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is working to process and deliver humanitarian visas to Immigration authorities at the Laredo, Texas border checkpoint, as well as coordinate funding to transport the families from their homes across Mexico to the border, and then onwards to U.S. hospitals, she explained.
A chain of volunteers have come forward to assist Contreras, offering shelter and other aid on both sides of the border, to help impoverished families reach the U.S.
Yesterday morning, the families of five of the hospitalized migrants arrived in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where a volunteer was waiting to transmit them safely to the crossing point.
“Lending a hand is our obligation as humans. I left my job to come be with them,” the woman said.
At the border, Customs and Border Patrol officials were waiting to help them across, where the families were received by U.S. volunteers who helped them reach the hospitals.
Among the family members who arrived seeking loved ones was Ema Moreno, mother to Jose Luis Gomez, 33. All she knows, she said yesterday, is that her son is in serious condition at a military hospital.
She believes her son was on his way to Florida, she said, with hopes of finding work “to give a better life to his children,” who are 5 and 10 years old, she said.
“In Mexico there’s desperation, because there’s no work. The only thing we have is poverty,” Moreno said.
If the “coyotes,” the human traffickers who help people cross the border illegally, had told her son that he would travel under such conditions. “Maybe he wouldn’t have risked it… but they don’t tell you that,” she said.
“The U.S. government is partly to blame,” Moreno said. “They need workers but they don’t give them visas so that they can avoid this.”
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Traveling with Moreno was Sergio de Santos Aguilar, 38, who hoped to find his brother, Jorge, still alive. All he knows, he said from the border, is the the 42-year-old “is in serious condition, in intensive care.”
It was “desperation” that motivated Jorge to journey towards Houston, his brother said. “In Aguascalientes [central Mexico] he didn’t have a job and he came looking to support his family,” a wife and four children, Santos Aguilar explained.
Now, Santos Aguilar himself feels hopeless, he said. He never imagined coming north under these circumstance. “I hope Sergio gets better so we can go back home together,” he said.
In Mexico, life is difficult, Santos Aguilar said. “There’s no jobs. People are desperate to find work. People are hungry. It’s a tough situation,” he said.
To those contemplating crossing the border, Santos Aguilar offered a warning: “Think about it very carefully. Don’t leave your families, because you never know how things might go.”
“My brother only wanted to help his kids. You’ve got to value your life. It’s more important to live than to pursue the American Dream,” Santos Aguilar said.
Jorge de Santos Aguilar considered President Donald Trump’s tough immigration rhetoric, promising ramped-up enforcement at the border, before making his journey, but “his desperation won out,” his brother said.
According to Nuria Olascoaga Rosas, a spokesperson for the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio, 34 of the 39 passengers in the tractor-trailer were Mexican citizens, of whom seven are confirmed dead, while the other 27 are hospitalized.
Two of those under medical supervision are minors, Olascoaga said.
Seven others have agreed to testify against James Bradley, 60, the driver of the truck, who faces charges that include illegally transporting immigrants for financial gain, resulting in death, although Bradley has maintained he did not know he was transporting human cargo.
According to Olascoaga, the Mexican Consulate together with charity organizations and community activists, is coordinating legal assistance for the undocumented migrants.
“So far, the information that we’ve received from Immigration authorities, who have promised to consider [the migrants] on a case by case basis, is that none of them are in deportation proceedings so far,” Olascoaga said.
Coordination has also begun with the Mexican government to repatriate the bodies of the deceased, said Reyna Torres Mendivil, the Consul general of the San Antonio Consulate, though the immediate focus is, “processing the humanitarian visas for those who want to come visit their hospitalized or deceased family members in San Antonio,” she said.
Ten of the Mexican migrants are originally from the Mexican state of Aguascalientes, while the rest include natives of the states of Veracruz, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Michoacan, San Luis Potosi, Jalisco, and Mexico state.