The semi-truck driver who transported up to 100 migrants across the southern border before leaving them to die in the sweltering Texas heat tried to disguise himself as a victim of the tragedy.
Surveillance cameras captured Homero Zamorano, 45, driving the rig across the border hours before he allegedly abandoned it on a road in the outskirts of San Antonio.
Police say Zamorano, of Houston, was ‘very high on meth’ at the time of his arrest and tried to pose as ‘an irregular immigrant to avoid being detained.’
Mexican nationals Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez were also taken into custody at a home in San Antonio. They were charged in federal court Tuesday with possessing firearms while residing in the US illegally.
The incident, which left 51 dead, marks the deadliest human smuggling attempt in American history. Officials have identified 34 of the deceased, which included four Hondurans and two Guatemalan sisters.
Police say the smugglers treated the migrants ‘worse than animals’ throughout the voyage, leaving them no water or visible means of air-conditioning. Several survivors are in critical condition after suffering brain damage and internal bleeding.
Investigators suspect the migrants paid the smugglers around $10,000 for safe passage to the US.
Surveillance cameras captured Homero Zamorano, 45, driving the rig across the border hours before he allegedly abandoned it on a road in the outskirts of San Antonio
Police say Zamorano, of Houston, was ‘very high on meth’ at the time of his arrest and had attempted to disguise himself as a victim of the tragedy to ‘avoid being detained’
Zamorano was photographed driving the trailer through the immigration checkpoints in Encinal, Texas, about 34 miles from the Mexico border, around 2.50pm Monday.
The truck was founded abandoned near San Antonio, about 160 miles from the border, around 6pm. Investigators suspect the truck had suffered some sort of mechanical problem.
The driver and suspected human smuggler pretended to be an illegal migrant when authorities confronted him, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador revealed during a news briefing Wednesday.
‘The driver tried to pass himself off as one of the survivors,’ Obrador said, noting the National Institute of Migration had no data on Zamorano.
‘ICE reported that three people are already detained as allegedly responsible for human trafficking and homicide,’ the president added.
Zamorano was arrested Monday in a desolate area near Lackland Air Force Base after having tried to pass himself off as a survivor.
‘He was very high on meth when he was arrested nearby and had to be taken to the hospital,’ a law enforcement official confirmed to The San Antonio Express News.
He was taken to a local hospital for treatment and is expected to charged soon.
D’Luna-Bilbao and D’Luna-Mendez were arrested at a residence in the 100 block of Arnold Drive after officers traced the semi’s registration to the property.
The residence was placed under surveillance and both men were arrested as they attempted to leave the property.
The driver who abandoned a semi-truck in the sweltering Texas heat, leaving at least 51 migrants dead, was ‘very high on meth’ when police arrested him
The incident left 51 migrants, including five children, dead. Officials have identified 34 victims
Officials believe the migrants were loaded into the truck in Laredo on Monday and then abandoned on the outskirts of San Antonio, next to a railroad track in an area surrounded by auto scrapyards, around 6pm
Stolen identity documents lead to slow effort to ID victims
More than a day after the discovery of a stifling trailer in San Antonio where 51 migrants who died were abandoned in the sweltering heat, few identities of the victims have been made public.
Stolen identification documents have further challenged authorities trying to tracing the victims.
Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary identified identified two people Tuesday who were hospitalized in San Antonio on Tuesday morning.
But it turned out that one of the identification cards he shared on Twitter had been stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.
Haneydi Antonio Guzman, 23, was safe and sound in a mountain community more than 1,300 miles away from San Antonio on Tuesday when she began receiving messages from family and friends.
Haneydi Antonio Guzman was misidentified as a hospitalized victim after authorities found a migrant carrying her stolen ID
‘That’s me on the ID, but I am not the person that was in the trailer and they say is hospitalized,’ she she told reporters who showed up at her home in Escuintla.
‘My relatives were contacting me worried, asking where I was. I told them I was fine, that I was in my house and I clarified it on Facebook.’
Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard deleted the original tweet identifying her without further comment.
The other hospitalized victim Ebrard identified Tuesday – 32-year-old José Luis Guzmán Vásquez – turned out to be accurate.
Obrador also confirmed that Zamorano had been driving a semi with a stolen registration, saying: ‘The plates, logos and license were cloned.’
Officials had first linked Zamorano’s rig to an Alamo resident. However, investigation proved the Alamo man’s truck had been out hauling grain in another part of Texas at the time of the incident.
Isaac Limon, whose father-in-law owned the truck whose data was cloned, told Washington Post: ‘It was a perfect setup.’
‘His DOT Number was illegally copied onto the truck…’ he added. ‘He is not the owner of the truck in San Antonio that is involved in this tragic event.’
‘Sad to say, but he’s a bit of a victim, too, because people believe it was him.’
Law enforcement officials believe Zamorano was transporting around 100 migrants in the rig, but the exact number remains unclear.
Homeland Security Investigations agents confirmed migrants typically pay $8,000 to $10,000 to be taken across the southern boarder, loaded into the tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio.
Once in San Antonio they are transferred to smaller vehicles to be taken to their final destinations across the US.
Medical examiners have potentially identified 34 of the victims, said Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores, who represents the district where the truck was abandoned.
But she says the identification process has proven to be a ‘tedious, tedious, sad, difficult process’ as many victims have been found with stolen IDs or no identification documents at all.
Officials have identified 34 of the deceased, but the identification process has proven slow as victims have been found with stolen IDs or no identification documents at all.
The deceased migrants included 39 men and 12 women. County officials told WOAI-TV five of the victims were under the age of 18. Investigators said they were not young children, but possibly teenagers.
The Honduran government on Wednesday released the names of several victims: Margie Tamara Paz Grajera, Fernando Jose Redondo Caballero, Alejandro Miguel Andino Caballero, and Adela Betulia Ramirez Quezada.
Grajera studied at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, according to local news outlet La Prensa. Her social media accounts revealed she was well-loved by family, friends and boyfriend, Alejandro Caballero.
‘I love you my baby,’ she wrote in a recent post to Caballero.
Sisters Carla and Griselda Carac-Tambriz, of Guatemala, were the first victims to be named in wake of the tragedy. Immigration consultant Fernando Castro Molina confirmed their identities to Guatemalan-based newspaper El Metropolitano on Tuesday afternoon.
‘Let’s achieve our dreams and also help our family,’ one of the sisters reportedly said before the pair embarked on their journey to the U.S.
Guatemala’s foreign ministry told DailyMail.com late Tuesday officials were working to identify three possible Guatemalans among the dead. The governmental agency had confirmed the identities of two hospitalized Guatemalans.
Sisters Carla and Griselda Carac-Tambriz, of Guatemala, were among the 51 migrants left to die in an abandoned semi-truck trailer in the sweltering Texas heat on Monday. The sisters came to America to ‘achieve our dreams and also help our family’
José Luis Guzmán Vásquez, 32, of San Miguel Huautla, Mexico, has been identified among the hospitalized survivors. His current condition remains unknown
Among the dead, 27 are believed to be of Mexican origin based on documents they were carrying, according to Rubén Minutti, the Mexico consul general in San Antonio.
More than a dozen survivors were transported to area hospitals for treatment of heat stroke and exhaustion, including four minors.
Several of the survivors were in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding.
Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary identified a hospitalized victim on Tuesday as José Luis Guzmán Vásquez, 32, of San Miguel Huautla, Mexico.
His current condition remains unknown.
Officials in Mexico traveled to Guzmán Vásquez’s community late Tuesday to find out if his mother wanted to travel to San Antonio to be with him in the hospital.
Manuel Velasco López, San Miguel Huautla’s municipal secretary, said that another cousin had been traveling with Guzmán Vásquez and was now considered missing.
Authorities believe the migrants were loaded into the semi-truck in Laredo, a border city, on Monday afternoon.
It appeared the migrants had recently crossed the border and were picked up by the truck to be taken to where they would work, according to a Mexican official, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official and another U.S. official, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the matter.
They were driven 150 miles to San Antonio before smugglers abandoned the vehicle after it suffered mechanical problems.
‘They had just parked it on the side of the road,’ Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, the county’s top elected official told reporters on Tuesday. ‘Apparently had mechanical problems and left it there. The sheriff thinks it came across from Laredo.’
Authorities were alerted to the truck through an emergency-911 call from a passerby flagged down for help by a migrant who had escaped from the truck.
Police Chief William McManus said responding officers had to ‘separate some of the deceased’ from the survivors as they ‘tried to find who might still be alive’
Residents of San Antonio cry as they attend a Tuesday night vigil for the victims found in an abandoned truck
Carlow Eduardo Espina places roses on a make-shift memorial at the site where officials found dozens of people dead in a semi-truck trailer
A vigil is held Tuesday night honoring the victims found in abounded truck in San Antonio
A city worker found the truck parked beside some railroad tracks around 6pm Monday after hearing a faint cry for help emanating from the truck. Temperatures had soared to as high as 103 degrees Fahrenheit.
Police recalled finding the rear door to the trailer open with ‘stacks of bodies’ inside, while other victims were strewn collapsed nearby.
Some of the victims were hot to the touch and there were no signs of water or visible means of air-conditioning inside the truck. First responders said the migrants were ‘treated worse than animals.’
‘The heat was torrential. There was no air in that vehicle. There was no water,’ San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood explained Wednesday morning on GMA. ‘They suffered. They lost consciousness and then they ended up dying.’
Police Chief William McManus said officers had to ‘separate some of the deceased trying to find who might still be alive.’
Authorities were alerted to the truck through an emergency-911 call from a passerby flagged down for help by a migrant who had escaped from the truck
Shoes and clothes are seen in the area where an abounded truck carrying migrants was found
Body bags lie at the scene where a tractor trailer with multiple dead bodies was discovered, Monday, June 27, 2022, in San Antonio
The victims were found sprinkled with a pungent substance, possibly steak seasoning, officials said. The practice is commonly used by smugglers to mask the scent of human cargo and evade canine detection.
Police suspect several migrants may have jumped or started falling out of the back of truck before the traffickers abandoned it along the roadway.
At least three bodies were found scattered down road, with the furthest one located about 75 yards from the truck, law enforcement sources confirmed to The New York Times.
Officials also said it was possible that those found along the road had died inside the truck, but fallen out when its doors opened.
Some of the victims staggered out of the trailer before dying and were found several blocks away, police told The Texas Tribune.
‘It’s unspeakable,’ San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said on MSNBC, noting that his community depends on migrants in the midst of a labor shortage. ‘It’s a tragedy beyond explanation.’
The surviving migrants will likely be released into the U.S. to pursue asylum or other forms of humanitarian relief, the CBP official and two other law enforcement officials told Reuters. Some survivors of human smuggling in the past have been taken into American custody to testify as witnesses.
President Joe Biden, in a statement Tuesday, called the incident ‘horrifying and heartbreaking.’
‘Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful,’ Biden said, vowing to crack down on multibillion-dollar criminal smuggling enterprises that have helped fuel a record number of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border since he took office in January 2021.
The deaths highlighted the challenge of controlling migrant crossings for Biden, a Democrat who came to office pledging to reverse some of the hard-line immigration policies of his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.
Republicans have criticized Biden’s border strategy ahead of the midterm congressional elections in November. They also attacked Biden in wake of Monday’s tragedy, blaming the deadly incident on his administration’s lax approach to border control.
At a press conference outside one hospital on Tuesday, Rebeca Clay-Flores, a local Democratic official in Bexar County, sharply criticized Republican Governor Greg Abbott for a tweet on Monday night blaming Biden’s border policies for the incident even as the emergency unfolded.
‘While bodies were still being removed, and others being taken to local hospitals, he chose to be heartless and point the finger,’ Clay-Flores said.
Big rigs emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid a surge in U.S. border enforcement in San Diego and El Paso, which were then the busiest corridors for illegal crossings. Prior to that, people paid small fees to mom-and-pop operators to get them across a largely unguarded border.
As crossings became exponentially more difficult after the 2001 terror attacks, migrants were led through more dangerous terrain and paid thousands of dollars more to smugglers.
An ambulance leaves the scene where dozens of people were found dead in a semitrailer in a remote area in southwestern San Antonio on Monday
A man pays his respects at the makeshift memorial created at the site where San Antonio officials found 51 migrants dead in a tractor-trailer
Members of the community take part in a vigil for the dozens of people have been found dead Monday in a semi trailer in San Antonio
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck that was parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, 19 migrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of San Antonio.
Other incidents have occurred long before migrants reached the U.S. border.
Last December, more than 50 died when a semitrailer filled with migrants rolled over on a highway in southern Mexico.
In October, Mexican authorities reported finding 652 migrants packed into six trailers near the U.S. border. They were stopped at a military checkpoint.
Migrant crossings, rescues and deaths along the southern border have hit record levels under the leadership of the Biden Administration.
Authorities have expelled migrants – largely from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – more than 2 million times under a pandemic-era rule in effect since March 2020 that denies them a chance to seek asylum but encourages repeat attempts because there are no legal consequences for getting caught.
People from other countries, notably Cuba, Nicaragua and Colombia, are subject to Title 42 authority less frequently due to higher costs of sending them home, strained diplomatic relations and other considerations.
Border Patrol performed 14,278 ‘search-and-rescue missions’ in a seven-month period through May, exceeding the 12,833 missions performed during the previous 12-month period and up from 5,071 the year before.
Border Patrol reported 557 deaths on the southwest border in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30 2021, more than double the 247 deaths reported in the previous year and the highest since it began keeping track in 1998. Most are related to heat exposure.
The International Organization for Migration, which documents migrant deaths, alleges that the number of people who died crossing the border in 2021 was actually more than 650. CBP has not published a death tally for 2022.
How Joe Biden has presided over RECORD levels of migration, deaths and rescues at the southern border
Migrant crossings, rescues and deaths along the southern border have hit record levels under the leadership of President Joe Biden.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is on pace to record more than 2 million arrests this year as hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. travel from South and Central America up through Mexico.
Migrant crossing levels have been on the rise since Biden took office with Border Patrol having tallied a record 1.73 million arrests at the border in 2021.
Death incidents have also skyrocketed with the number of migrants fatalities reported in 2021 more than doubling those recorded in 2020.
Biden argued Tuesday that authorities need to take action against the ‘multi-billion dollar criminal smuggling industry’ that he claims preys on migrants and causes ‘far too many innocent deaths.’
The president’s push to tackle the border crisis came after authorities found at least 51 migrants dead in an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas on Monday.
The incident marks the deadliest human smuggling on American soil since 2003 when 19 migrants died after riding inside the rear compartment of sweltering 18-wheeler while they traveled from South Texas to Houston.
The number of migrant arrivals along the U.S.-Mexico border have hit record levels under the leadership of President Joe Biden
CBP data published earlier this month revealed immigration arrests rose to the highest levels ever recorded in May 2022.
Agents made 239,416 arrests along the border last month, a two percent increase from the number reported in April.
The agency claims it is preparing for a potential increase in migration levels.
Death incidents at the southern border more than doubled last year, compared to the numbers recorded in previous years.
The agency recorded 557 migrant deaths along the southwest border in 2021. There were 254 recorded deaths in 2020 and 300 in 2019.
The International Organization for Migration, which documents migrant deaths, alleges that the number of people who died attempting to cross the border in 2021 was actually more than 650.
CBP has not published a death tally for 2022 but recorded data shows at least 87 migrants have died while trying to come into the U.S.
Death incidents at the southern border more than doubled last year, compared to the numbers recorded in previous years
Additionally, CBP revealed the number of rescues across the southern border to date for 2022 also outpaces the number recorded in 2021.
Since October Border Patrol has performed 14,278 ‘search-and-rescue missions’ in a seven-month period through May.
These numbers already exceeding the 12,833 missions performed during the previous 12-month period and up from 5,071 the year before.
The latest CBP data showed a large number of migrants are coming from Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Haiti. There is also a growing number of migrants arriving from Turkey, India, Russia and other countries outside of the Western Hemisphere.
CBP revealed the number of rescues across the southern border to date for 2022 also outpaces the number recorded in 2021
Border agents attribute the higher-than-usual number of repeat crossings in May due to the fact that migrants expelled under Title 42, a pandemic-era restriction currently tied up in court, face no legal repercussions if they try to cross again.
The number of unique individuals attempted to cross in May was 177,793, and 25 percent of those stopped by agents had attempted to cross at least once before in the prior 12 months, according to CBP. The average re-encounter rate prior to Title 42 was 15 percent.
Most migrants attempting to cross in May were not families but single adults – 69 percent.
And unlike previous months, Title 42 is no longer the main authority under which migrants are expelled, only 42 percent of migrants were removed under the CDC’s health order.
Most of the migrants expelled under Title 42 were single adults – only about one in six who came in families with children under 18 were subject to Title 42. Unaccompanied children are exempt from the rule.
Fifty-eight percent were expelled under Title 8. Under Title 8, a U.S. immigration policy used when migrants who try to cross unlawfully cannot establish any ‘credible fear’ basis for being in the country. DHS has said it will expand use of Title 8 once Title 42 is gone.
The Biden administration planned to end Title 42 on May 23 but a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the move three days before.