“The trailers have always been used, but not as much as now,” said Tubbs.
Balli believes that there are now fewer Texan drivers willing to do this type of work, the result of an aggressive deterrence campaign by authorities who have warned truckers they could lose their commercial licenses — which are expensive and difficult to get — if they’re convicted of transporting migrants illegally.
But smugglers take advantage of drivers’ economic situations. In December 2021, Crispín de la Rosa, a driver who was stopped in Sarita, Texas, with 24 migrants in a trailer that was also carrying watermelons, told agents that he agreed to drive the truck to Houston for $600 because he had been unemployed for months and needed to help his elderly mother, according to court documents.
Smugglers typically seek out U.S. drivers or drivers with green cards who are licensed to drive commercial vehicles, presuming that this will make it easier for them to pass through highway checkpoints, according to Balli. They’re often recruited at truck stops. However, given the shortage of willing drivers, they’ve also turned to foreign drivers, even some without licenses or with suspended permits or who don’t even know how to drive trucks.
Most drivers who are arrested are making the smuggling trip for the first time, Balli said. “I think it’s not easy to do. … They get into this kind of trouble and lose everything. They lose their family, their home, they suffer many consequences for this. And if they have good luck there are no injuries or deaths.”
According to Estrada, sometimes smugglers load several trucks with migrants hoping that if one is stopped at a checkpoint, the agents will divert their attention so that the other two can pass. “Usually they load one as bait,” he said.
Most trucks are intercepted by border agents or local police at night. For the most part (42% of the time), trained dogs sniff out the people inside the trailers, though sometimes smugglers use ploys to confuse the smell. In the case of the 53 migrants who died in San Antonio last year, police reported that they wore meat seasoning on their skin to hide their scent.
The Border Patrol inspection post on Interstate 35 north of Laredo has six primary inspection lanes, but only three for large trucks. The lack of space causes long lines and in recent months has led the Border Patrol to make sporadic closures to expedite traffic, allowing vehicles to move freely without being checked.
Border Patrol did not respond to questions about the quick inspections it conducts to ease the long lines of vehicles on I-35.
The truck in which the 53 migrants suffocated a year ago avoided that checkpoint and went undetected.
The same thing happened with a truck inwhich 10 people who were being smuggled died in San Antonio in 2017. Manuel Martínez Esparza, one of the survivors of that tragedy, told Telemundo News that all the migrants were awake when they passed the I-35 checkpoint, but agents did not search the trailer’s interior. Shortly after, conditions got really bad.
“They began to faint, people shouted that it was better that they open up for us and that the migra (immigration authorities) catches us, that they take us out of the truck, that they open the door,” Martínez said in a phone call from Zacatecas, Mexico, where he lives. “A person was going with a knife hitting the truck to make a hole. People were shouting that their relatives had fainted, the ladies crying for their fainted children.”
The truck was left in a Walmart parking lot, where an employee discovered them. Martínez was in a coma and woke up in the hospital weeks later. His brother Ricardo died in the sweltering trailer.
When the 53 people died in San Antonio last year, Martínez began to “relive” the similar incident that resulted in his brother’s death. “It is something very sad, very ugly. That’s something you always have in your mind.”
Pushing for changes
In an April 2018 congressional hearing, Kevin McAleenan, then Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Donald Trump, acknowledged the need to improve conditions at the I-35 checkpoint.
However, until June of last year, when the 53 migrants in San Antonio died, the border post’s modernization was still pending.
The Biden administration recently pledged funds to expand the checkpoint, $165 million of the project’s total budget. But it’s not clear when the expansion could be ready, according to Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, whose congressional district includes Laredo.
Following the death of the 53 people in the San Antonio truck, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced the creation of new checkpoints on Texas highways. These random checks are sometimes effective in detecting trucks that have bypassed checkpoints. On January 11, 2022, a Texas patrol car parked on the side of highway I-35, one mile north of the inspection booth, discovered 28 migrants during a traffic stop.
Strengthening the I-35 inspection point is one of the main points in the fight against people smugglers, but it is far from being the definitive solution to the problem, which may not have one, according to the authorities and experts consulted.
Balli believes that there will always be drivers willing to drive a truck full of people, even if prison sentences increase. “There will always be someone who is going to be more desperate, who is going to need more money,” he said.
“If we are looking for a magical solution, in my opinion, there is none,” said Cuellar. He’s proposing a series of measures that range from expanding inspection points and investing in technology — he spoke about machines that detect heartbeats from a person hiding in a truck — to sending more officers onto the roads and bolstering police intelligence work.
Former Laredo Mayor Pete Sáenz said comprehensive immigration reform would help. “We know we need workers, especially in the area of agriculture — the ideal would be laws that allow people to pass legally,” he said. “Both parties have had enough opportunities, but it’s not done.”
In the meantime, the quick money will continue to tempt drivers.
“I got used to the double life — one feels a need to make more money,” said Juan from prison.
As for John, he said his wife forgave him after his conviction, but he regrets having accepted the smuggling job because prison time is a “stigma” that will drag down the rest of his life.
“I look in the mirror and I can’t look myself in the eye,” he said, calling himself an as—-. “Everyone thinks you are a thug.”
An earlier version of this story was originally published in Noticias Telemundo.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
