We cannot comprehend the agony that engulfed more than 50 migrants trapped and left to die in an overheated tractor-trailer in Texas. Every detail that emerges in news reports only compounds the horror.
There was no trace that migrants had been given water, and some of them were reportedly sprinkled with steak seasoning to mask their smell as smugglers transported them. Authorities said many migrants jumped to their deaths in an attempt to escape the sweltering trailer.
The word “crisis” gets bandied about often for political gain, but if there is a situation that meets that bar, this is it. We’re looking at a mass murder, with patterns that suggest the work of an international smuggling or trafficking operation that abandoned its cargo of Mexican and Central American citizens, including children, on an industrial road in San Antonio.
What these smugglers or traffickers allowed to happen to the migrants is unconscionable. Our leaders at the state and federal level, who rarely agree on anything, should at the very least voice the need to work together to find and prosecute these criminals to the fullest extent of the law.
This might be the deadliest smuggling operation across the southern border in recent memory, but it is not the first time such a thing has happened. And we can expect more mass deaths unless U.S. authorities make it harder for smugglers to do business.
That is why we must demand more than finger-pointing and deflection from our leaders in Austin and Washington, D.C. We cannot grasp all that was lost inside that tractor-trailer in San Antonio, even as some of our politicians treat the deaths as points on a scoreboard.
An investigation by federal authorities has to determine whether the tractor-trailer cleared U.S. checkpoints on its way to San Antonio and when the migrants boarded the vehicle. Border Patrol sometimes catches smugglers at these checkpoints, as the agency did in April when it flagged a trailer driver and discovered 48 migrants inside who were sweating profusely.
But smuggling networks have found workarounds, and some have been known to load up migrants north of checkpoints to avoid detection. How can federal authorities thwart more of these operations?
We’re also looking to Gov. Greg Abbott for more productive leadership. The governor has poured billions of dollars into his border security initiative Operation Lone Star, and he must explain to taxpayers what this operation has accomplished to fight and dismantle smuggling organizations.
If anything, these deaths must be a jolt to Congress about the urgency for comprehensive immigration reform. Desperate people will continue to pay smugglers for passage into the United States, but our country can reduce that flow by redesigning its immigration system to be more efficient and humane. Asylum-seekers take their chances with all sorts of conflicting policies at the border, while visa applicants who have the sponsorship of employers or relatives sometimes have to wait a decade or more for papers that allow them to stay here permanently.
Smugglers gamble with the lives of hopeless people looking for safety and stability. We cannot allow these criminals to set the price for coming within reach of the American dream.