According to local reports, 39 of the victims were men and 12 were women. While authorities are still trying to determine the identities and nationalities of many of the dead, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard stated that at least 22 of the deceased migrants were Mexican, seven were Guatemalans and two were Hondurans. Five children are among the dead.
San Antonio reached a high of 103 F on Monday; officials at the scene said the victims’ bodies were hot to the touch.
Federal officials arrested Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez after tracing the truck’s registration to a home they were spotted leaving. They were both charged with illegal possession of firearms while in the United States after law enforcement found numerous weapons inside the home.
According to The New York Times, a third man was arrested, suspected of being the driver of the tractor-trailer. His name and the charges brought against him have not yet been reported.
The truck also apparently had been a “clone” of another truck owned by a South Texas trucking company. The truck in San Antonio had the same color and identification numbers as a truck owned by Betancourt Trucking and Harvesting, a company based out of Alamo, Texas.
The owners of Betancourt Trucking and Harvesting say their truck has not been near San Antonio recently. “Our [truck] is sitting right in the yard,” Felipe Betancourt Jr. told local media. Authorities were able to use forensic techniques to determine that the truck did not belong to Betancourt Jr. and had falsified its identification numbers.
Authorities say that the tragedy was the worst migrant smuggling mass fatality case to occur on United States soil in recent memory.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his condolences to the families of the victims and promised to help get their bodies home.
“This is bitter proof that we must continue to insist on supporting people so that they do not have to leave their villages to look for a life on the other side of the border,” López Obrador said.
President Joe Biden called for a crackdown on the smuggling industry in a written statement. "This incident underscores the need to go after the multi-billion dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths," the president said.
With increasing border security and the continuation of Title 42, experts say that migrants are being forced to take increasingly dangerous routes.
“There’s a direct relationship between U.S. deterrence strategies at the border and migrants dying at the border,” Fernando Garcia, executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights told the New York Times. “The numbers will go higher.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott used the tragedy to take a shot at his political opponents, blaming Biden’s “open border policy” for the deaths on Twitter.
“Nobody in Texas can seriously believe that Greg Abbott cares about immigrant families,” Greg Casar, a Democratic nominee to fill a congressional seat that represents parts of San Antonio and Austin, told The Times. “Governor Abbott has been pushing immigrant families into the shadows and that results in people dying, trying to go across the river, it results in people burning to death inside of trucks like this.”