Fifty migrants found dead inside abandoned Texas trailer truck

Fifty suspected migrants were found dead and at least a dozen others were hospitalized after being found inside an abandoned tractor-trailer rig on Monday on a remote back road in south-west San Antonio, officials have said.

The discovery in Texas may prove to be the deadliest tragedy among thousands of people who have died attempting to cross the US border from Mexico in recent decades.

A person who works at a building nearby was alerted by a cry for help shortly before 6pm on Monday, police chief William McManus said. Officers arrived to find a body on the ground outside the trailer and a partially opened gate to the trailer, he said.

At first, 16 of those in the trailer were taken to the hospital with heat-related illnesses, of which 12 were adults and four were children, said fire chief Charles Hood. The patients were hot to the touch and dehydrated, and no water or air conditioning was found in the trailer, he said.

Relaying information from the Mexican consul in San Antonio, Ebrard said the survivors had been taken to four hospitals around the city.

The tragedy took place as San Antonio sweltered through June temperatures that ranked among the highest on record. A law enforcement official told the Texas Tribune that many of the people found inside the vehicle appeared to have been sprinkled with steak seasoning, in what may have been an attempt to disguise the smuggling effort.

He said local police and border patrol officers were helping US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) investigate the deaths.

Ebrard said the Mexican consul was en route to the site on Monday.

Governor Greg Abbott said in a tweet the people were found in the back of a truck and blamed the deaths on political division and how borders are secured.

The city has been the scene of previous mass deaths of migrants. Ten people died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck that was parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, 19 others were found in a sweltering truck south-east of San Antonio.

Big rigs emerged as a popular smuggling method in the early 1990s amid a surge in US border enforcement in San Diego and El Paso, Texas, which were then the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.

Before that, people paid small fees to mom-and-pop operators to get them across a largely unguarded border. As crossing became exponentially more difficult after the 2001 terror attacks in the US, individuals were led through more dangerous terrain and paid thousands of dollars more.

Heat poses a serious danger, because temperatures can rise steeply inside vehicles. Weather in the San Antonio area was mostly cloudy on Monday, but temperatures approached 100F (38C).

Photos posted to Twitter by a KSAT reporter showed multiple police vehicles and ambulances surrounding a large truck.

Pope Francis expressed his sorrow on Tuesday over the deaths and those at the border between Spain and Morocco. At least 23 people died on Friday after some 2,000 migrants stormed the heavily fortified border of the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla.