LAST UPDATE | 29 Jun 2022

MEDICAL EXAMINERS HAVE potentially identified 34 of the 51 victims after the discovery of an abandoned lorry trailer in Texas.

Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores, who represents the district where the truck was abandoned, said the identifications are a “tedious, tedious, sad, difficult process”.

The identities are not yet confirmed, pending additional steps such as fingerprints.

The commissioner described it as a challenge with no timeline on when the process might be finished.

The bodies were discovered on Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio in what is believed to be the nation’s deadliest smuggling episode on the US/Mexico border.

More than a dozen people were taken to hospitals, including four children.

Three people have been arrested.

The incident occurred at a time when huge numbers of migrants have been coming to the US, many of them taking perilous risks to cross swift-running rivers and canals and scorching desert landscapes.

Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, up by one-third from a year ago.

With little information about the victims, desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America sought word of their loved ones.

Among the deceased, 27 are believed to be of Mexican origin based on documents they were carrying, according to Ruben Minutti, the Mexico consul general in San Antonio.

Several survivors were in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, he said.

About 30 people had reached out to the Mexican Consulate looking for loved ones, officials said.

Guatemala’s foreign ministry said late yesterday that it had confirmed two hospitalised Guatemalans and was working to identify three possible Guatemalans among the deceased.

Honduras’s foreign relations ministry said it was working to confirm the identities of four people who died in the truck and carried Honduran papers.

Eva Ferrufino, spokeswoman for Honduras’s foreign ministry, said her agency was working with the Honduras consulate in south Texas to match names and fingerprints and complete identifications.

The process is painstaking because among the challenges are fake or stolen documents.

Migrants typically pay around $8,000 to $10,000 to be taken across the border and loaded into a tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they transfer to smaller vehicles for their final destinations across the United States, said Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in the area.

Conditions vary widely, including how much water passengers get and whether they are allowed to carry mobile phones, he said.

Authorities think the truck discovered on Monday had mechanical problems when it was left next to a stretch of railway in an area of San Antonio surrounded by vehicle scrapyards that brush up against a busy road, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.

San Antonio has been a recurring scene of tragedy and desperation in recent years involving migrants in lorry trailers.

Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck parked at a San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of the city.

More than 50 migrants were found alive in a trailer in 2018, driven by a man who said he was to be paid $3,000 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.