Slow Effort to Identify San Antonio Migrant Dead, Toll Rises to 53

A Texas official says two more migrants from the San Antonio trailer tragedy have died, raising the death count to 53.

A Mexican government official says most of the migrants found dead after being abandoned in a truck in the sweltering Texas heat were from Mexico.

The head of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said Wednesday that 27 of the victims were from Mexico, 14 were from Honduras, seven were from Guatemala and two were from El Salvador.

Efforts to identify the dead are being complicated by a lack of identification documents, the need to share fingerprint data across borders and even stolen IDs.

Authorities think the truck had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad track in an area of San Antonio surrounded by auto scrapyards that brush up against a busy freeway, said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.

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

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.

Other tragedies have occurred before migrants reached the U.S. In December, more than 50 died when a semitrailer rolled over on a highway in southern Mexico.

During a vigil Tuesday at a San Antonio park, many of the more than 50 people who attended expressed sadness and anger at the deaths and what they described as a broken immigration system.