JAKARTA - The death toll from human trafficking immigrants due to hot temperatures inside trucks in Texas, United States has risen to 50, with 22 of them Mexicans, with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador expressing his condolences.
Migrants died inside a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas, where temperatures soared to 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4 degrees Celsius). It was one of the deadliest people-smuggling incidents recently along the US-Mexico border.
Local and US authorities said there was no sign of water and no working air conditioning in the truck.
"I would like to extend my condolences to the relatives of this disaster," Mexican President Lopez Obrador said.
In this regard, immigration officials from Mexico are also assisting the families of the victims and the transfer of bodies, said President Lopez Obrador.
President Lopez Obrador added that he would meet with US President Joe Biden in Washington on July 12 to discuss migration.
About 22 Mexicans, seven Guatemalans, and two Hondurans were identified as among the dead, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Twitter on Tuesday. There was no information on the nationalities of the other 19, Mexican officials said.
A Honduran foreign ministry spokesman told Reuters the country's consulates in Houston and Dallas would investigate the incident.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said the Homeland Security Investigations division was conducting a criminal investigation into "suspected people-smuggling events" in coordination with local police.
Meanwhile, a San Antonio Fire Department official said they found a "pile of bodies" and no sign of water in the truck, which was found next to a railroad track in a remote area on the city's southern outskirts.
Sixteen people found in the trailer were transported to hospital with heat stroke and exhaustion, including four minors, but no children were among the dead, the department said.
"The patients we saw were hot to the touch, they were suffering from heat stroke, exhaustion," San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood told a news conference.
"It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer but there was no working AC unit on the rig."
Separately, the city's police chief, William McManus, said this was the largest incident of its kind in the city and said three people were detained after the incident, although their involvement was unclear.
"The people who are responsible for subjecting others to these conditions should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said in an interview on CNN on Tuesday.
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From the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden had been briefed and would continue to receive updates on the situation.
"Too many lives have been lost on this dangerous journey. We will continue to take action to disrupt people smuggling networks, which don't care about lives. They exploit and harm for profit," he said aboard Air Force One.
To note, the I-35 highway near where the truck was found extends from San Antonio to the Mexican border, a smuggling corridor popular because of the volume of truck traffic, according to Jack Staton, a former senior official with ICE's investigative unit who retired in December.
Staton said migrants have been regularly intercepted in the area since the 2017 incident. "It's only a matter of time before a tragedy like this will happen again," he said.
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