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The dramatic discovery on Monday of the bodies of 46 immigrants inside a truck parked on the outskirts of San Antonio, on the Texas-Mexico border, is one of the deadliest of its kind in recent years. The bodies were found along with 16 other people who needed urgent medical assistance.
Cases in which the bodies of immigrants trying to cross borders are hidden in trucks are seen with some frequency in the country.
Several of these events have occurred in the southern state of Texas, bordering Mexico, the country through which many immigrants from Latin America try to enter the United States.
In the case of the United States, several of these events have been recorded in the southern state of Texas, bordering Mexico, the country through which many immigrants from Latin America attempt to enter the U.S.
In May 2003, police found 17 bodies in a trailer truck that had been abandoned at a gas station near Victoria, Texas, about 250 kilometers from the Mexican border, carrying 70 immigrants.
The deceased died as a result of the high temperatures, which reached 78 degrees inside the truck. Several of the survivors had to be hospitalized, and two of them subsequently died. In 2007, the driver of the truck was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In July 2017, police found 8 deceased, also from asphyxiation or heat stroke, among the 39 undocumented immigrants they found in the cargo part of a truck parked in the parking lot of a department store in San Antonio, Texas. All 31 survivors were taken to the hospital, seventeen of them in critical condition, and two of them died. Among the deceased were two minors.
In March 2021, a van carrying 25 people that had entered the United States through a hole in the border fence crashed into a truck some 30 miles (ca. 48 km) from the border in the Imperial Valley, California, in an accident that left 13 dead, ten of them Mexicans.
