Federal prosecutors announced charges Tuesday against four Mexicans they say helped orchestrate last year’s smuggling tragedy that saw 53 illegal immigrants die after being trapped in a tractor-trailer on a 100-degree Texas afternoon.
Smugglers knew that the air conditioner had given out, but they went ahead with the three-hour trip from the border to San Antonio anyway, prosecutors said in a new indictment with ghastly details of the journey.
Some migrants screamed and pounded on the walls of the trailer. Others clawed at the sides, trying to break through. Still others had passed out from the heat.
By the time authorities reached the scene, 48 migrants were dead, including a pregnant woman. Five more would die at the hospital, in what analysts labeled the worst single migrant catastrophe in border history.
“Dozens of desperate, vulnerable men, women, and children put their trust in smugglers who abandoned them in a locked trailer to perish in the merciless south Texas summer,” said U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza for the Western District of Texas, which is prosecuting the case.
The arrests were announced on the one-year mark of the incident, giving authorities something to point to after they promised to run down the smuggling ring.
But a year after the deaths, experts said the underlying factors that fueled the tragedy remain.
“Nothing has changed. Tomorrow as we hit the summer months we could have another tractor trailer full of dead migrants and nobody would be surprised,” said Mark Morgan, who was acting commissioner at Customs and Border Protection in the Trump administration.
He said the cartels continue to dominate the border, deciding on tactics and procedures and forcing the U.S. to react.
Arrested this week were Riley Covarrubias-Ponce, 30; Felipe Orduna-Torres, 28; Luis Alberto Rivera-Leal, 37; and Armando Gonzales-Ortega, 53,
The Justice Department said they helped organize smuggling routes from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico into the U.S., sharing smuggling routes and guides and stash houses to hold migrants, and maintained a fleet of tractors and trailers to ship them deeper into the U.S. The men coordinated to save costs and maximize profits, prosecutors said.
The truck was driven through the Border Patrol’s checkpoint on Interstate 35 near Laredo, but agents there didn’t detect the migrants. According to the indictment, smugglers used a powder to conceal the smell of the migrants from the dogs that man the checkpoints and that are trained to sniff out smuggled people or drugs.
Prosecutors said the migrants paid between $12,000 and $15,000 apiece to be smuggled in. It came with a three-time guarantee, meaning that if they were caught and sent back across the border they could try again, without paying more.
Authorities say there were at least 66 migrants in the trailer, including the pregnant woman and eight children.
The smugglers met the trailer at the remote location in San Antonio, where the migrants were supposed to be moved to other vehicles. Instead, the smugglers were met with a morgue.
The smugglers spirited away at least two of the migrants, according to the indictment. Forty-eight were already dead and 16 were taken to the hospital.
Also found at the scene was Homero Zamorano Jr., whom authorities have fingered as the driver. Investigators also quickly tracked down Christian Martinez, who they said was coordinating the smuggling trip.
They were both charged last year.
One person covered by the indictment remains unnamed in court documents.
Smuggling resulting in death carries a potential sentence of death, but the Justice Department announced Tuesday that it will not seek execution in these cases. It had previously said it wouldn’t seek the death penalty for Mr. Zamorano and Mr. Martinez.
The case shook the immigration world last year, exposing ongoing holes in border security and putting a gruesome point on what was the deadliest year on record at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Guatemala’s president called for tougher penalties for human smugglers.
Immigration experts renewed those complaints this week as they marked one year since the tragedy.
“Let’s remember the 53 lives lost on June 27, 2022, and honor their memory by calling on our communities and elected officials to take urgent action to guarantee a compassionate, fair and just immigration system,” said Dolores K. Schroeder, CEO of RAICES, a Texas nonprofit that offers legal services to refugees and migrants.
But action on immigration remains gridlocked on Capitol Hill, much as it has for the last two decades.
The result is that cartels continue to rake in cash on the misery of migrants.
Initially, it seemed as if there might be a change in cartels’ behavior.
Two weeks after the San Antonio case, agents at a highway checkpoint in Texas busted a truck trailer with 70 illegal immigrants and found they had been given a radio to contact the driver and two hatchets to bash their way out in case they got trapped inside.
That does not seem to have caught on as a general practice, however.
The Washington Times smuggling database, which tracks border cases, has recorded a drop in prosecutions involving large truckloads of migrants, but Mr. Morgan said that may be a result of smugglers getting smarter about avoiding charges rather than a drop in truck activity.
The Times has reached out to Customs and Border Protection for comment for this article.
Among other tactics agents have smugglers use to get people deeper into the U.S. are railways and aircraft.
Authorities near Laredo also reported this week that they had snared an attempt to smuggle 20 illegal immigrants behind a fake plywood roof in a portable barn that was being hauled on a flatbed truck through a Border Patrol checkpoint.
Mr. Morgan, who is now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said there’s also been a longer-term trend toward recruiting children to drive smuggling loads. The kids are recruited on social media and told that if they’re caught, they’ll be let off with a warning. Usually that’s exactly what happens, Mr. Morgan said.
Last year’s tragedy also highlighted another tactic of using cloned trucks. A Texas trucking company said the rig the smugglers used was painted to look like one of theirs, which may have helped ease its passage through the Border Patrol checkpoint.
After the deaths, Texas’s Department of Public Safety set up a new safety inspection checkpoint for commercial vehicles along the route the truck took. DPS said that checkpoint and others that were already operating have helped recover more than 1,770 migrants from trucks since March 2021.
In one odd sidebar to the tragedy, authorities trying to track down the origins of the truck served a search warrant on a home in San Antonio and found two illegal immigrants living there in possession of firearms. That is a violation of the law.
The Justice Department initially linked the two men to the smuggling incident, but prosecutors have since acknowledged they weren’t involved.
Damage was already done, however.
Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez, through his lawyer, told the judge in his case that the publicity around the case and being linked, wrongly, to the deaths, has put him and his family in danger. It also is tainting the jury pool, the lawyer argued.
The lawyer got the judge to agree to bar a television station from airing courtroom sketch artist pictures of Mr. D’Luna-Mendez.
Mr. D’Luna-Mendez also has argued he had a Second Amendment right to possess a firearm, and says the law barring illegal immigrants from obtaining or possessing a gun is unconstitutional. His lawyers say illegal immigrants are included in the “people” the Second Amendment says have “a right to keep and bear arms.”
