Inside the deadliest immigration-related disaster in U.S. history

The brothers were starting to wonder if their smugglers had left them to rot. For more than two days, Begaí and Mariano Santiago Hipólito had been holed up with roughly two dozen other migrants in a cramped stash house in the border city of Laredo. The single room had no furniture and had barely enough space for everyone to lie down. There was no place to bathe, and the only toilet was foul. The meager food rations and cases of bottled water the smugglers had given them were long gone. Anxious and confused, Begaí began peppering Mariano with questions. Why were they stuck here? How far were they from their final destination?

Mariano had been to the U.S. once before, nearly a decade earlier, but this was nothing like his previous trip. His first time crossing, there hadn’t been swarms of cartel thugs on the Mexican side of the border, and he hadn’t had to endure prolonged confinement in a squalid and sweltering stash house after crossing the Rio Grande. Now, drenched in sweat, he had taken off his T-shirt to fan himself. Every so often, he let out a long sigh.

“Tranquilo,” he told Begaí. “Chill out.” 

The brothers had been inseparable since they were kids, so when Mariano told Begaí he was leaving their hometown in southern Mexico to find work in the U.S., in part to pay for his ailing wife’s medical bills, Begaí reluctantly agreed to join him. Tall and lean with a neatly trimmed goatee, 33-year-old Begaí was the more serious older brother. One year younger, Mariano was stocky, outgoing, and always looking for a laugh. But Begaí noticed that his brother’s upbeat demeanor was beginning to crack. 

It was the morning of June 27, 2022. The migrants they shared their quarters with had come from all across Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. There were a few children and some women among them, but most were men in their prime working years. They had all paid extraordinary amounts—as much as $15,000—to be smuggled into the U.S. Now they were waiting for a ride out of the heavily patrolled border zone to San Antonio, where they would fan out and travel on separately.

Some were bound for nearby cities in Texas, and others were heading as far as Tennessee and California. Many had plans to reunite with loved ones they hadn’t seen in years—parents, romantic partners, siblings, cousins. Almost all of them had left their homes in hopes of landing a job. Some had a specific opportunity waiting for them. Others would take whatever they could find. Begaí and Mariano had family in Atlanta, where they planned to work construction.

Concerned that a local might spot them and tip off authorities, the smugglers had forbidden the migrants from leaving the stash house, even for a quick breath of fresh air. Their organization had lost two houses to local police and the U.S. Border Patrol earlier that month. Similar busts happened in Laredo all the time, sometimes several in a day, turning up anywhere from a handful of migrants to dozens, usually lodged in abysmal conditions. In most cases the stash-house operators got away. As for the migrants, they were expelled to Mexico, but many would be back in the U.S. within a few days. Still, busts were a costly disruption for the smugglers, and they did everything they could to avoid them.

Begaí Santiago Hipólito

When a white box truck finally showed up to pick up the migrants, Begaí and Mariano weren’t exactly relieved. The men who ushered them aboard wore masks and barked orders, confiscating their phones and the water bottles some of them had refilled from the sink. The truck’s cargo area was already jammed full of people who’d been staying at another spot. Despite their reservations, the brothers climbed in, and soon the truck was moving. It rattled along for about ten minutes until they felt it come to a stop. When the rear gate was rolled up, they saw that a tractor trailer had backed up to the box truck, its open doors forming a tunnel between the two vehicles. As they shuffled toward the trailer, Begaí hesitated. “What happens if we don’t get in?” he said. “Then you’ll stay here, in Laredo,” Mariano replied. 

They were among the last to leap across to the trailer, jostling in the semidarkness for a place to sit. They noticed a strange combination of scents, some kind of cooking seasoning mixed with the odors of more than five dozen people who had been living in filthy conditions for days. The brothers sank down along one of the walls somewhere near the middle. 

Among the dimly lit faces around them was a trio of young women from a small town in Guatemala, where many live in concrete-block homes with dirt floors and no running water amid small plots of maize. One of them, a 21-year-old with long black hair, had worked hard to earn an education degree, at great cost to her parents, but because of her country’s dysfunctional government, she couldn’t find work as a teacher. Determined to repay her parents, she was on her way to join a sister in a meatpacking town in Minnesota. 

The youngest in the trailer were two cousins from Guatemala, thirteen and fourteen years old, who had relatives in the U.S. and had convinced their parents that their futures would be brighter if they could attend school there. The older of the two was a fan of Lionel Messi and dreamed of playing professional soccer someday, but in the meantime he wanted to earn enough to help his mother care for his sister and younger brother. 

The oldest was a 55-year-old construction worker from Morelos, Mexico. He had lived in a small town in western Arkansas for more than two decades, just outside a county where Hispanic residents make up about a third of the population. He had traveled back to Mexico to visit relatives despite the risks of a dangerous return voyage. Now he was on his way home to his wife, three children, and four grandchildren. 

Near the rear doors of the trailer were a brother and sister in their twenties from a suburb of Antigua, Guatemala’s former colonial capital. The pair had all but adopted a teenage girl they’d met at various points along their journey north. The girl was now scared and crying, so when they sat down, the siblings placed her between them and tried to comfort her. A former Mexican soldier and his cousin were also caring for a younger traveling companion, an eighteen-year-old boy from Mexico City whose mother had asked them to keep an eye on him.

Somewhere nearby, a 27-year-old Honduran woman who was around twelve weeks pregnant did her best to get comfortable. That morning she had called her mom, who was already living near Los Angeles, to tell her she’d made it to the U.S. “We’ll see each other soon,” she’d said. They all spread out and made room for one another as best they could. It was nearly 100 degrees outside, and the air inside the trailer was already unbearably hot. Moments later, the doors swung closed, and they heard the unmistakable sound of the exterior latches turning and dropping into place. In complete darkness, they felt the truck lurch into motion just before 2 p.m. If all went according to plan, they would be in San Antonio in a little more than three hours.

“The U.S. Failed”

Everything did not go according to plan. The catastrophe that unfolded that day would result in the deadliest immigration-related disaster in modern American history. Fifty-three passengers perished, including 26 Mexicans, 21 Guatemalans, and 6 Hondurans. The incident briefly captured international headlines, but this story—based on more than two years of reporting—is the first full account of that awful event, its complex causes, and its wrenching aftermath. 

To piece it together, I traveled throughout Mexico and Guatemala, ultimately spending time with sixteen of the victims’ families. Eventually, I was also able to interview a survivor whose harrowing tale provided rare firsthand insight into a smuggling operation gone terribly wrong.

On a forensic level, there was little mystery about what happened inside the trailer. The more urgent questions were: Why did it happen? And who was responsible? During the trial of two of the smugglers, at a federal courthouse in San Antonio, jurors heard testimony from investigators, Border Patrol agents, other smugglers, and survivors that revealed the complicated inner workings of the smuggling organization, the cartel that dominates the Mexican side of the Rio Grande across from Laredo, and the formidable border-security apparatus on the U.S. side.

Charged with conspiracy to transport illegal aliens resulting in death, the accused faced a mountain of damning evidence. The defense attorney—whose long goatee, alligator cowboy boots, and theatrical delivery contrasted with the staid dress and demeanor of the prosecutors—made several attempts to blame the U.S. government for allowing the disaster to occur. Why didn’t the government take down the smuggling network sooner? Why had agents allowed a trailer loaded with more than sixty people to pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint north of Laredo? “The U.S. failed,” he said while cross-examining a Homeland Security Investigations agent. “Would you agree that somebody dropped the ball?” The judge had to repeatedly remind the jury that the U.S. government was not on trial.

In fact, as the trial revealed, a smuggling network composed of ordinary people who were often reckless and incompetent had managed to slip through one of the best-funded and most technologically sophisticated border-policing systems in the world. As with countless similar operations, the perpetrators had gotten away with their scheme over and over, succeeding far more often than they failed—until the day they failed in the most horrific way.

What happened in that trailer between Laredo and San Antonio is the only exceptional part of an otherwise commonplace narrative, and in the years since, no meaningful legislative progress has been made to reduce the mortal dangers that migrants confront en route to jobs in the U.S. Instead, Congress has continued to increase the budget for walls and fences, checkpoint expansions, surveillance technology, detention facilities, and law enforcement personnel. Every escalation of border militarization heightens the danger to migrants, but there’s little evidence that it will deter them or their smugglers over the long term.

The disaster was the worst of its kind but by no means the first. And unless something changes, it won’t be the last.

A Mysterious Ailment 

Begaí and Mariano’s journey to the back of the truck began in Tuxtepec, a bustling city on the humid plains of eastern Oaxaca, about fifty miles from the Gulf. They had grown up in Lázaro Cárdenas, a tiny Chinanteco Indigenous community in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. The brothers and their seven younger siblings were raised in a house made of palm leaves near the wide and gentle Usila River, where they fetched water before daybreak and learned to spearfish to supplement their mother’s sparse table—the family subsisted mostly on maize and beans. There were no roads leaving the village, only a narrow dirt path that they walked barefoot. To get to a hospital required an expensive trip by motorboat downriver and across the sprawling Lake Miguel Alemán. As soon as they were old enough to swing machetes, the siblings joined their father and uncles in the fields, felling trees and digging furrows by hand, returning at the end of the day soaked in sweat, their hands bloody from the thorny brush. 

Begaí, the eldest, dropped out of school when he was fourteen to help support his family. He left home for the first time at sixteen to work on a sugarcane plantation outside Tuxtepec, about an hour away by boat. It was punishing labor, but his wages helped Mariano become the first in the family to graduate from high school.

Armed with his diploma, Mariano set off for Mexico City, but whatever hopes he’d had of saving for his future and contributing to his family’s welfare were quickly dashed. The chaos of the capital was bewildering for Mariano, who spoke Spanish as a second language (his family spoke a variant of Chinanteco) and had never been away from home. He was lonely, and the only job he could find was in a pizzeria, where he barely made enough to pay rent. After a few years, he returned to Oaxaca with empty pockets. He trained his sights on the U.S., where one of his uncles worked construction, owned a house, and had settled down with an American wife. Mariano’s goals were similarly humble: He wanted to save enough money to build a house in Mexico and start a family. 

Around 2013, he met a woman at a religious gathering in Tuxtepec, where he and Begaí played guitar and sang in a worship band. Luz Estrella Cuevas Remolino was devout, like Mariano, and told him she also dreamed of starting a family. Soon after they met, he departed for the U.S., borrowing money from his uncle to finance the journey, crossing the border on foot somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, and eventually making his way to Atlanta. He kept in touch with Luz Estrella by phone, and the relationship grew serious. 

After three years of working as a plumber six days a week and saving almost every penny that didn’t go to food or housing, Mariano injured his hand on the job. He’d been so broke when he left for the U.S. that he’d had to borrow a pair of pants from one of his younger brothers. With a workers’ compensation payout padding his savings, Mariano saw no point in staying until he healed. He rushed back to Mexico to marry Luz Estrella. 

At the wedding, she carried white roses and wore a white dress with a veil that trailed on the floor behind her. He sported a gray three-button suit with a metallic sheen and a dark red tie. They lived with her parents in Tuxtepec while he began building a home in a new subdivision outside town. Begaí and three of their younger brothers pitched in whenever they could, and after about a year, the house was mostly finished. But the project depleted Mariano’s savings, so he started picking up construction gigs alongside Begaí. 

A bus makes its way north from Tuxtepec, where Mariano and Begaí Santiago Hipólito lived with their wives and children before heading to the U.S.

By then, Begaí had also gotten married. María Antonia Torres Morales, who went by Mari, was four years older than her husband. She wasn’t looking for a new relationship when he came along, but she was drawn to his earnestness and his desire to start a family. When she was in her early twenties, she’d had a daughter with a partner who’d abandoned her. She worried that when Begaí found out about her daughter, he would also flee, but when she told him, he promised to raise the girl as if she were his own. They were married in 2014, and Mari gave birth to a son later that year. They called him Jafet, after one of the sons of Noah.

Begaí enjoyed family life with Mari and the two kids. They lived with her parents in a house that had a lush garden, banana trees, chickens, pigs, and a small creek that ran along one side of the property. He and Mariano were both skilled at carpentry and plumbing, and sometimes they landed a long-term contract together and worked six days a week, making about $20 a day. But dry spells were frequent, so they took whatever they could get. 

One day in June 2022, they had just finished digging a septic pit when Mariano told Begaí some distressing news: He was so broke that he was barely able to put food on the table. Mariano’s finances had never recovered after he’d wiped out his savings building his house. With a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, he now faced the same financial stress that had plagued his parents and that he’d been so determined to avoid. 

Making matters worse, Luz Estrella needed an expensive diagnostic test to determine the cause of a strange pain in her chest. It didn’t cost much by U.S. standards—about $350—but it was more than Mariano could afford. Luz Estrella was also receiving treatment for a kidney stone and had been told she might need an operation to remove it, which could cost upward of $1,400, or about three months’ worth of full-time wages. Mariano had already borrowed from three of his younger brothers who were working factory jobs in Ciudad Juárez. He saw no other option than to trek north. “I’m going back to the U.S.,” he told Begaí, “and I want you to come with me.” 

Nieces of Mariano and Begaí Santiago Hipólito race down a dirt road next to their primary school.

Standing beside the septic pit, sweaty and caked with dirt, Begaí felt sick with worry. He told Mariano that he didn’t know the first thing about how to get to the border or how to pay for a trip like that. Mariano told him that he would handle everything. He had already talked to a friend who was still in Atlanta, and who had agreed to lend them the money to pay the smugglers and to cover the exorbitant tax the cartel charged to every migrant at the border. The only up-front costs would be plane tickets to Monterrey and bus tickets to Nuevo Laredo, the border city across the Rio Grande from Laredo. “It will only be for two years, and then I’ll come back with you,” Mariano said. 

Begaí’s first instinct was to say no. His family’s finances were relatively secure—Mari’s mother ran a food stall that was a reliable backstop when construction was slow—so he had no urgent reason to leave. What if something happened to him? Who would take care of Mari and the kids? Begaí told Mariano he needed to think about it, but Mariano said he was going either way. “I’ve already got the date.” 

Begaí broached the subject with Mari a few days later, and she pleaded with him to stay home. “You could fall into the hands of bad people, and they could hurt you. Then what would I do?” Begaí said he wanted to save money to build a house of their own and to help Mari’s daughter, now sixteen, finish high school. Mari became angry. Jafet was only eight, and she didn’t think it was a good time for him to be without his father. “We have everything we need here,” she said. 

Begaí confessed that he felt obligated for the simplest of reasons: “I don’t want my brother to go alone.”

A few days later, Mari was at home preparing dinner when Begaí burst in after work and started throwing clothes into a backpack. “I’m leaving,” he told her. 

“You’re not going to eat?” she asked. 

“I don’t have time,” he said. 

Stunned, Mari and the children followed him out the door and down the dusty street, begging him to come back, but he didn’t stop.

Smugglers Row

That evening, Begaí and Mariano boarded a flight to Monterrey. Begaí’s understanding of the gauntlet he was entering was as featureless as the darkness outside the airplane windows. He didn’t know that he was hurtling toward one of the most lawless regions in Mexico, where a powerful criminal organization exercised near-total control, or that an army of Border Patrol agents backed by helicopters, drones, thermal-imaging cameras, and scent-detecting dogs awaited them on the other side of the Rio Grande.

The Cártel del Noreste traced its origins to Los Zetas, a paramilitary group founded by former Mexican special forces soldiers. The Zetas began as an enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel before its leaders struck out on their own, creating one of the most brutal criminal organizations in Mexican history. Starting in about 2012, a series of arrests and assassinations of Zeta leaders unleashed a vicious power struggle within the organization. The Cártel del Noreste was one of several groups that formed from the fragments. By 2022 it dominated territory along the border in three Mexican states. Nuevo Laredo—the city of nearly half a million people where Begaí and Mariano were headed—was the base for its drug-trafficking and human-smuggling operations. 

Just as Prohibition gave rise to the illicit liquor trade and increased the power of the mafia organizations that controlled it, the U.S. war on drugs, launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon, had helped create the conditions for drug cartels to flourish. Today those same cartels and the smuggling organizations that operate in their territories are raking in enormous profits because of the near-total ban on migration across the roughly 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. 

People have been sneaking across the border for generations, but transporting them wasn’t always so lucrative. In the early nineties, guides known as coyotes charged as little as $20 to help a migrant cross on foot. The smuggling boom began in earnest in January 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, flooding Mexico with cheap, industrially produced American agricultural products. Squeezed out of their own markets, Mexican farmers began migrating to the U.S. in unprecedented numbers. Later that same year, a devaluation of the peso sent Mexico’s economy into free fall—unemployment nearly doubled, and masses of displaced industrial workers joined the farmers heading north.

An outlet mall on the Rio Grande in downtown Laredo, Texas, seen from the bank on the Mexican side of the river. Migrants regularly wade across the Rio Grande in Laredo on their way to destinations further inland.

Free trade did not mean freedom of movement for people, and President Bill Clinton sought to clamp down on the flow of undocumented workers by ordering the first major militarization of the U.S. southern border. A new approach known as “prevention through deterrence,” which debuted the same year that NAFTA kicked in, involved the use of fences, checkpoints, armed patrols, and other measures to push migrants away from common urban crossing zones and into harsh terrain. The idea was that migrants would then decide that the risk and discomfort of attempting to cross a hostile stretch of the border—the rugged mountains and scorching deserts of Arizona, for example—were not worth the reward. But migrants kept trying, and the number of apprehensions at the U.S. southern border each year rose from about 1 million in 1994 to nearly 1.7 million in 2000. 

The Border Patrol’s budget in 1993, the year before prevention through deterrence went into effect, was $363 million. Three decades later, it had swelled to more than $7 billion. Over that same period, the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border climbed from fewer than 4,000 to roughly 20,000. Yet no amount of militarization at the border has ever resulted in a long-term reduction in migrant flows. The policy’s engineers, and those who have continued to push for increased militarization under every successive Democratic and Republican administration, have repeatedly underestimated the migrants’ determination and the creativity of smugglers, who have found ways to circumvent everything the Border Patrol puts in their way. 

Immigrant labor, meanwhile, remains vital to every part of the U.S. economy. The result is a perverse system in which migrant workers determined to provide for their families continue to come north, and industries and small businesses across the country continue to rely on them. Rather than acknowledge that reality and pass legislation to address it—such as expanding the number of temporary work visas for sectors that already employ large numbers of undocumented people—Congress continues to pour money into the border-industrial complex and the deportation machine. 

Since 2003 the U.S. has spent an estimated $400 billion on the agencies involved in immigration enforcement—more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The primary beneficiaries of this buildup include the defense contractors that profited from the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, among others, have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to both political parties. 

Under Donald Trump’s current administration, immigration-enforcement spending has skyrocketed, and the number of troops on the southern border has nearly tripled. And while unauthorized crossings have decreased significantly from the December 2023 peak—a fact loudly proclaimed by Trump officials—it’s unlikely that intensified policing was the primary cause. More than two-thirds of the drop occurred during the year before Trump’s inauguration, and it appears to have been driven mostly by reduced labor demand in the U.S. and changes to refugee policy at official points of entry.

By the time Mariano and Begaí made their journey, migrants were paying an average of $6,000 to $10,000, with some smugglers charging more than $20,000.

The deterrent effect of escalating militarization is hard to gauge, but one thing is inarguable: It has added layers of complexity and risk that have made the smugglers’ services more valuable. One result is that human smuggling now rivals drug trafficking in profits. Another is that thousands of migrants have died attempting more dangerous crossings, and the U.S. southern border has become the epicenter of the world’s deadliest land-migration route. The Border Patrol has reported more than 10,500 migrant deaths on the border since 1994, but the true figure is likely much higher. Taking into account the migrants who die on the Mexican side and the many who go missing and are never found, some human rights groups believe the number could be as much as ten times greater. 

By the time Mariano and Begaí made their journey, the days of $20 crossings were history—migrants were paying an average of $6,000 to $10,000, with some smugglers charging more than $20,000. Those revenues are distributed across networks that stretch into Central and South America and throughout the world, divided among recruiters, drivers of all types, recipients of bribes, document forgers, stash-house operators, hotel owners, guides, and, of course, the cartels. In 1997 the U.N. International Organization for Migration put the value of the worldwide migrant-smuggling industry at $7 billion. By 2021 the Department of Homeland Security’s Operational Analysis Center estimated that human smuggling across the U.S. southern border alone was generating between $2 and $6 billion annually.

The cartels that control territory along the border don’t need to get involved in the logistics of moving people from their points of origin all the way up through Mexico. They leave that work to smaller organizations that have local ties and operate like independent contractors. The Cártel del Noreste simply sits in Nuevo Laredo like a troll beneath a bridge, extorting money from every migrant who shows up planning to cross. When Mariano and Begaí arrived in late June 2022, the going rate for the tax for Mexicans—known as a piso in Spanish and paid directly to the cartel by cash or bank transfer—was about $2,000. People arriving from farther afield paid more.

The cartel does not tolerate freelancers. Scouts keep a close eye on everyone entering and leaving the city, and all migrants who arrive from an out-of-town bus station are expected to have a code to prove that they’re linked to a smuggling outfit that’s in good standing with the cartel. The codes are simple words—Diablo, Ferrari, Demon—that help the smugglers keep track of their clients and that the cartel uses to maintain detailed accounts on the smugglers. Sometimes the smugglers also give their migrants colored armbands or matching T-shirts. Wandering the streets without a code—let alone trying to cross the river—can get you kidnapped, beaten, or killed. 

Mariano had kept his smuggler informed of their travel details, sending photographs of their Mexican identification cards, bus tickets, and bus numbers, and updating him as they made their way from Oaxaca to Nuevo Laredo. The smuggler relayed the photos to his cartel contact and texted Mariano his personal code—050 Flaco—which they would need to provide to cartel scouts at every stop. Mariano scribbled the code in red ink on a scrap of lined notebook paper, along with the name of the hotel where the smuggler had directed them to stay. 

As soon as the brothers got to the bus station in Nuevo Laredo, a cartel scout approached and asked for their code. Once they’d been cleared, they took a taxi to Hotel Calderón, a five-story brick building about three hundred yards from the Rio Grande. It was obvious that this was no normal hotel. Begaí and Mariano were struck by its filth and the disinterested attitudes of the staff. There was a table near reception heaped with belongings left behind by earlier migrants who had passed through—clothing, shoes, backpacks. They were under orders from their smuggler not to leave except to buy food, and in that case to return immediately. The brothers checked into a room with thin mattresses on aluminum frames and metal grates on the windows. At one point, an older man knocked on their door and confided that he was afraid. The three of them prayed together. “Cheer up,” Mariano told him. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Hotel Calderon, near the Rio Grande in downtown Nuevo Laredo, where the migrants involved in the Quintana Road disaster stayed on their way to the U.S.

The cartel granted each approved smuggling organization exclusive access to a stretch of the riverbank linked to its code. Local guides on the Mexican side communicated with lookouts on the U.S. side who monitored Border Patrol movements. Wide sections on both banks were undeveloped, covered with palms and riverine vegetation that offered concealment up to the water’s edge. On the night of June 21, Mariano and Begaí followed a guide to the river for their first crossing attempt. 

The guide asked everyone in the group of about a dozen if they knew how to swim. Though it’s shallow enough to wade in many places, the Rio Grande still has dangerous currents and deep holes that drowned 172 migrants in 2022 alone, according to Border Patrol data from that year. The brothers, having grown up beside the Usila River, said they were strong swimmers. “Each of you needs to choose someone who doesn’t know how to swim and help them,” the guide said. 

They crossed without incident, crawling out on the U.S. side into a clearing that smelled like livestock and appeared to Begaí to be a cattle corral. He barely had time to take in his surroundings when spotlights flooded the area, blinding him. He heard shouts and almost took off, but Mariano grabbed him. “They already saw you. There’s no point running,” he said.  

Agents handcuffed the brothers and loaded them into a truck with about twenty others, then photographed them and scanned their fingerprints using a mobile device. At about one in the morning, the Border Patrol dropped them off at one of Laredo’s international bridges and watched them walk back into Mexico. Soaked and exhausted, they found a few sketchy men hanging around on the other side who demanded their code. They then took a taxi back to Hotel Calderón.

Less than 24 hours later, they made their second attempt. Again, they got caught and dumped at the bridge. A third effort failed as well. Their experience was typical—about 60 percent of all apprehensions on the border that year were repeat crossers. Failure is so routine that smugglers guarantee multiple attempts without an extra fee.

On their fourth try, the brothers successfully evaded the Border Patrol and managed to rendezvous with an appointed driver who took them to the single-room stash house, where they waited for the truck that would take them to San Antonio.

Evading the Dogs

050 Flaco—the code that Mariano and Begaí had used—was associated with two smugglers: Felipe Orduña Torres, who lived in San Antonio, and José Martínez Olvera, based in Houston. Of the two, it was Orduña Torres who maintained direct contact with the cartel. Both were undocumented Mexicans who had been in the smuggling game for years. They ran separate operations, but they’d formed a partnership in 2019 to capitalize on a tactic referred to by the Border Patrol as bulk smuggling—moving large numbers of people in commercial vehicles, usually tractor trailers. 

Bulk smuggling first emerged as a response to the explosive growth of commercial trucking between Mexico and the U.S. after NAFTA came into force. It became more attractive when the shift in manufacturing from China to Mexico—which started gaining momentum in about 2012—caused an unprecedented traffic surge on the border. Laredo is the busiest of all U.S. land ports, and it saw more than 5.5 million commercial truck crossings in 2022. Every day that year, trucks carried about $800 million worth of agricultural and manufactured products across the Rio Grande, and some six thousand of them passed through a single checkpoint that straddles Interstate 35 about thirty miles north of the border. The Border Patrol refers to it as Checkpoint 29, or C29. For smugglers, it was the narrowest part of the funnel. Blending in with all the other big rigs was the most efficient way to get past it.

Daunting as it was, travel by trailer through the checkpoints north of Laredo was marketed to migrants as a safer and more comfortable option than slogging on foot across the desert in less populous areas. Heat is the number one killer of migrants on the U.S. southern border, where about nine hundred undocumented people died from exposure to extreme heat between 2018 and 2022; during the same period, fewer than two hundred died in vehicle-related incidents. Migrants forked over steep fees for a journey that included a spot in a trailer once they reached the U.S. side, what some smugglers called the VIP option. 

C29 has been in operation since 2006 and encompasses fifteen acres, with an on-site detention facility, a secondary inspection bay, and X-ray machines that allow officers to detect humans concealed inside closed trailers. Despite the checkpoint’s size, traffic volume has long overwhelmed its capacity. In 2022 there were only two dedicated commercial truck lanes, which meant long lines of idling rigs often stretched south onto I-35, slowing the flow of commerce and increasing the risk of accidents. The worse the traffic at the checkpoint, the better for the smugglers. They kept an eye on commercial truck activity and timed their movements to hit the checkpoint when things were backed up and agents would be under pressure to keep traffic rolling.

Smugglers like Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres took care to forge convincing bills of lading, the documents that describe the contents of the trailers. If there was one threat they worried about more than any other, it was the scent-detecting dogs. Smugglers used detergents, coffee, and meat seasonings to try to mask the smell of hidden passengers, but the dogs were almost impossible to fool. The only surefire way to get around them was to slide through while the handlers were busy elsewhere. 

There were usually six to eight dogs present at C29 but only two on duty at a time—one covering the three passenger-car lanes and another for the two commercial lanes. At risk of exhaustion from overexertion and heat, each dog worked forty-minute stints followed by eighty minutes of rest. Overworked and outnumbered, they still presented a formidable obstacle. Of the sixteen semi loads that Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres had attempted to move since November 2021, six had been busted by dogs. It was never a total loss for the smugglers: The truck and trailer would have to be replaced, and they’d have to find another driver, but unlike in a drug bust, the valuable cargo wasn’t permanently confiscated. The detained migrants—who usually paid the second half of the smugglers’ fee after arriving at their final destinations—would be back in Mexico in a matter of hours, ready to try again. 

A Meth-Fueled All-Nighter

By the time the brothers arrived at the stash house, Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres had successfully moved more than a thousand people in trailers through the checkpoints north of Laredo. They outsourced most of the hazards, overseeing a team of subordinates who took on the direct risks of smuggling, often low-wage workers lured by the chance to earn extra cash.

The man they relied on to maintain their fleet of trucks and trailers, which they kept at a storage lot surrounded by ranchettes and undeveloped scrubland east of San Antonio, was a 48-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant named Juan D’Luna Bilbao. He had been living in Texas for more than a decade after overstaying a temporary work visa, working as a mechanic at a local garage. He had fallen into the smuggling business more or less by accident after a friend found him a side gig working on Martínez Olvera’s personal vehicle. 

On days of smuggling operations, Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres often tasked D’Luna Bilbao with moving a semi from the storage lot to one of two truck stops at the junction of I-35 and I-410, southwest of San Antonio, within sight of an Amazon warehouse and a Toyota dealership. Later, when the truck returned from Laredo, D’Luna Bilbao would retrieve it. For every successful operation, the smugglers paid him $500.

D’Luna Bilbao harbored a major concern about the trailer that he was preparing that morning: Its refrigeration unit was malfunctioning.

At about five in the morning on June 27, 2022, D’Luna Bilbao’s phone rang. Martínez Olvera wanted him to take a red tractor hooked to a 53-foot white trailer to one of the usual truck stops. “The driver’s already on his way,” Martínez Olvera told him. D’Luna Bilbao drove to the storage lot, where he performed his usual maintenance checks and sprinkled meat seasoning inside the trailer. Then he snapped photos of the identification numbers on the truck and trailer that his bosses would need to forge a bill of lading.

D’Luna Bilbao harbored a major concern about the trailer that he was preparing that morning: Its refrigeration unit was malfunctioning. He’d bought the trailer for the organization six months earlier for about $8,000 and had been having trouble with it ever since. No matter what he tried, the unit wouldn’t cool. This was a problem for two reasons. For one, the bill of lading specified a temperature setting for the trailer, and a mismatch between the paperwork and the actual temperature could raise alarms at the checkpoint. Over the previous year, the Border Patrol had busted four of the organization’s loads partly because of temperature discrepancies. Worse still, it was June in South Texas, and without a functioning refrigeration unit, the passengers in the trailer would be at grave risk.

D’Luna Bilbao had been warning Martínez Olvera about the faulty compressor for months, saying he didn’t have the parts or the know-how to fix it. Just three days earlier, on June 24, he’d texted Martínez Olvera a video of the faltering unit. The boss said he would get someone out to look at it but never did. D’Luna Bilbao had been told not to question orders, so despite his concerns, he delivered the tractor to a Love’s Travel Stop southwest of the city, where he filled it with diesel and walked away.

Minutes later, a beat-up Chevy Tahoe arrived, and a man in a black golf shirt with white stripes jumped out of the passenger seat and climbed into the rig. This was Homero Zamorano, who was tasked with hauling the load of migrants from Laredo that day. 

The Tahoe’s driver, a six-hundred-plus-pound man named Christian Martinez, had been working for Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres since March of that year. Martinez’s primary role was to find and hire commercially licensed drivers who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents, because they had to be able to pass through interior Border Patrol checkpoints. Critically, they had to be willing to risk getting arrested with a load of migrants, which would probably mean a long prison sentence. For each operation, Martinez would shuttle one of the drivers to the designated truck stop, where an empty tractor trailer waited. Then he would manage communications between the driver and his bosses throughout the journey. (Martínez Olvera and Orduña Torres didn’t trust the drivers and preferred not to communicate with them directly.) 

Love’s Travel Stop, southwest of San Antonio, where the smugglers often gassed up and transferred the semis used to haul migrants north from Laredo.

Early that morning, Martinez had picked up Zamorano near Palestine, a small town some three hundred miles from San Antonio, in the Piney Woods of East Texas. When he arrived, he’d found Zamorano smoking meth with his girlfriend. There was nothing unusual about that. Both men used stimulants to stay awake on overnight hauls. Martinez preferred cocaine. Zamorano was Martinez’s third recruit, and this was their fourth run together. 

The air inside the trailer was already suffocating, but Begaí, Mariano, and the others had been warned to stay silent, lest the slightest noise tip off Border Patrol agents.

Martinez, who grew up in Palestine, suffers from severe cognitive disabilities and never learned to read. Because of his weight, Zamorano called him Gordito. Before he linked up with the smugglers, the closest Martinez had come to a steady job was working for his cousin selling ice cream. He was often homeless, living out of his Tahoe. All of a sudden he was pulling in money like he’d never seen. Every time a driver successfully made it to San Antonio with a load of migrants, the smugglers paid Martinez $5,000. In less than four months he’d earned $35,000. 

Things had not worked out so well for the drivers he’d recruited. The first was a childhood friend from Palestine. On his third run, that driver got busted at a Border Patrol checkpoint with 107 migrants in his trailer. The second driver Martinez recruited also went down on his third trip. For now, Zamorano’s luck seemed to be holding out.

“They’re Murdering Us in Here”

By around 11 a.m., Zamorano had completed the drive to Laredo and parked at a truck stop on the north end of town, where he awaited further instructions. As a rule, drivers were kept in the dark until the last possible moment. Rather than send them directly to the stash houses—which could draw attention and give the drivers information they might spill if they got caught—the organization had operatives on the ground gather migrants in another vehicle and move them to the site where they would be loaded into the trailer. 

Just before one in the afternoon, Zamorano received a Google Maps pin from Martinez directing him to a side street across from a steel supply warehouse in an industrial area east of town. When he got there, he found a white box truck—filled, as he knew, with the migrants he would carry to San Antonio. Nervous and worn out from his meth-fueled all-nighter, Zamorano struggled to turn the trailer around and back it into the tight space where the box truck sat waiting, flanked on one side by a chain-link fence overhung with mesquites. When he finally came to a stop, men on the ground quickly flung open the compartments of both vehicles. Fifty yards away, a steady stream of traffic flowed by on the highway. Anyone passing would have seen only shadows on the gravel as some sixty people moved between two unremarkable trucks. The loading process took about ten minutes. 

Roughly an hour after pulling out, Zamorano veered off the highway and toward the canopy of C29. The air inside the trailer was already suffocating, but Begaí, Mariano, and the others had been warned to stay silent, lest the slightest noise tip off Border Patrol agents. As Zamorano waited in the checkpoint line, they felt the vibrations of other trucks’ engines and heard the squeal of air brakes. When the truck briefly halted, they heard the driver talking to someone outside.

There weren’t any dogs working Zamorano’s lane when it was his turn to speak to an agent. Wearing a black H-Town baseball cap, he smiled as he leaned out of the truck’s window. According to the forged paperwork, Zamorano was hauling thirteen tons of blueberries, and the temperature in the trailer should have been below 66 degrees. The agent waved the truck through without checking the bill of lading or the trailer’s temperature display, and Zamorano pressed on toward San Antonio. 

As the truck continued north, the heat inside the trailer intensified. With no ventilation and the body heat of 64 people pumping out gallons of sweat, it’s likely the temperature soared above 140 degrees. The migrants’ composure soon broke. 

Mariano and Begaí listened to the frantic wails in the darkness all around them. Their eyes burned and their skin itched from the seasoning that D’Luna Bilbao had scattered. People began scrambling, tripping over each other trying to find an outlet for air, but inside the sealed container they only generated more heat and depleted precious oxygen. At one point, Mariano stood up and began sliding on the sweat-slicked floor. Begaí reached up and tried to pull him back down. “Don’t get up, just keep still,” he said, but Mariano slipped out of his grip. The younger brother made his way to the front, where he slammed the wall with his fists, desperate to get the driver’s attention. Somehow, he found his way back to Begaí’s side. “He didn’t hear me,” he said.

In fact, Zamorano had heard noises from inside the trailer. At about 3:20 p.m. he called Martinez to say that his phone had died and he’d stopped to buy a phone charger. He pulled over at least twice more, telling Martinez each time that he’d had to stop because he’d heard screaming and banging on the trailer walls. He tried to reset the refrigeration unit, which was mounted on the trailer’s exterior, but he’d unwittingly made things worse—the unit started blowing hot air.

Mariano squeezed Begaí’s hand. “I can’t take the pain in my chest,” he said.

The migrants heard Zamorano tinkering outside and felt the sudden rush of heat. “We’re almost there!” he shouted. At one point, they also heard someone fiddling with the latches of the back doors, but the doors remained sealed. 

At about 5:30 p.m., Zamorano linked up with a pickup on I-35 that would lead him to the designated drop-off spot on Quintana Road in south San Antonio. He called Martinez again, agitated. “They’re screaming and banging real bad,” he said. He asked what he should do. A few minutes later, Martinez called back with a message from the bosses: “What’s done is done. Don’t stop again.”

Inside, the migrants had grown desperate. Some clawed at the walls and tore out chunks of yellow foam insulation, a futile effort to reach fresh air. A group of women in the middle of the trailer formed a prayer circle, their voices rising above the din. Someone who’d managed to carry a phone onboard made a frantic call, pleading with the person on the other end to rescue them. A man begged for water for his dying wife. The brother and sister who had placed the young girl between them tried to comfort her, the brother fanning her with his pocket Bible. A woman who’d defied the smugglers’ orders to give up her water bottle shared her last drops with them.  

One by one, they began to die.

As extreme dehydration set in, they ceased sweating, their skin becoming hot to the touch. Electrolyte depletion can trigger a range of symptoms: muscle cramps, brain swelling, nausea, loss of coordination, delirium, and seizures. Then, as their body temperatures climbed above 105 degrees, their cells began to die and their organs began to fail. Their final moments before slipping out of consciousness were agonizing. 

Mariano squeezed Begaí’s hand. “I can’t take the pain in my chest,” he said. Begaí felt like he was submerged underwater, as if each labored inhalation was a smaller sip from the surface. “They’re murdering us in here,” he said to Mariano. His mouth and limbs twisted involuntarily. “We’re not going to die in here,” Begaí repeated over and over. 

“Stay strong, my brother,” Mariano said. 

The last thing Begaí remembers hearing from Mariano was a prayer: “My God, look after my heart, look after my soul.” 

A giant shadow appeared above Begaí. He was no longer in the trailer surrounded by the dead but all alone beneath a wide-open sky on a vast plain. He sensed an immense presence listening to him, and he offered his own prayer: “Give me one opportunity, just one opportunity.” There was no response.

Somewhere close by, he heard the unmistakable rumble of a train. 

Pocket Full of Prayer Cards 

The potholed stretch of Quintana Road that runs north from I-410 alongside the Union Pacific Railroad tracks was known to local police and the smugglers as a dumping ground for garbage and stolen cars. Its edges were overgrown with heavy brush, and spray-painted numbers on banged-up panel fences marked junkyards and construction depots. 

Parked at the drop-off point and still sitting in the cab of the red tractor, Zamorano watched in the side-view mirror as the various drivers who had arrived to retrieve groups of migrants converged on the rear of the trailer. One of them threw open the doors, but instead of the usual melee—drivers shouting codes and separating out their respective clients—everyone scrambled back to their vehicles and sped away. 

Zamorano was under strict orders to never leave the cab during loading or unloading. Panicked, he called Martinez, who told him to go look in the trailer. With Martinez still on the line, Zamorano climbed down and walked to the back. “There’s bodies stacked up,” he said, then hung up. 

His hands trembling, Martinez called one of Martínez Olvera’s lieutenants and asked what to do. “Go pick him up,” was the reply.

When Martinez arrived a few minutes later, he noticed a teenage girl sobbing near the semi, her sweat-soaked black T-shirt clinging to her skin. A handful of men whom Martinez didn’t recognize appeared to be helping her. Seeing no trace of Zamorano—who’d stopped answering his phone and responding to texts—Martinez fled the scene. 

Roberto Quintero worked for a nearby asphalt company, and he and a few coworkers had jumped in a company truck and rushed out to Quintana Road after hearing screams. That’s where they found the girl staggering near the semi. When Quintero approached the trailer, just before 6 p.m., he saw bodies piled inside, their faces swollen and their lips blue. Some appeared to have torn their clothes off. None were moving. Horrified, he dialed 911. 

Police and other first responders work the scene where 53 people died and multiple others suffered heat-related illnesses after a tractor-trailer containing migrants was found on June 27, 2022, in San Antonio. AP Photo/Eric Gay, File.

“There’s an eighteen-wheeler with about twenty dead people in the back,” Quintero told the dispatcher, the girl’s screams audible in the background. “There’s more than twenty people,” he then stammered. “There’s fifty people!” As he and his coworkers gave water to the girl, they noticed a man in a black cap and striped golf shirt take off running from beside the truck. The girl told Quintero that she’d seen the same man climb down from the driver’s side of the cab. Some of the asphalt workers gave chase but weren’t able to catch him.

There was a fire station less than a mile away, and police and emergency medical teams arrived within minutes. As they approached the trailer, they were hit with the sickening stench of sweat and fecal matter mixed with the odor of cooking seasoning. A tangle of corpses lay near the rear doors, limp limbs dangling over the edge. Ambulance personnel dragged bodies out by their arms and legs, arranging them in the dirt on the side of the road. From inside the trailer they began to hear moaning and gasping for air. “Got a live one!” someone shouted. 

Sixteen survivors were rushed to local hospitals, five of whom would later die. After the trailer was emptied, 48 people lay dead beneath yellow tarps, including two that police officers had found several hundred feet from the truck. Worried that there might be more victims scattered in the area, emergency personnel carefully swept both sides of Quintana Road. They soon came across an apparently unconscious man sprawled in the brush beside the railroad tracks, a black H-Town baseball hat and a Samsung Galaxy phone lying beside him. They assumed at first that he was one of the victims. But when a policeman picked up the phone, its unlocked screen revealed a text message in English, delivered only a few minutes earlier: “wya bro?” The message—an abbreviation of “where you at bro?”—was from a contact labeled Gordito. 

Zamorano startled when emergency personnel dumped a cooler of frigid water on him. Police quickly determined that he fit the asphalt workers’ description of the driver and detained him. Diagnosed with amphetamine intoxication and dehydration, he spent that night in a hospital bed under police supervision.

D’Luna Bilbao heard about what had happened from one of Martínez Olvera’s associates that afternoon while he was waiting at the storage lot for the order to retrieve the semi. The trailer’s registration led police straight to his home. Frozen by fear, he was there when police arrived to arrest him that night. 

Martinez, too shaken to drive, had holed up in a La Quinta Inn just outside San Antonio. He didn’t know that the police had seen his text and figured out that he was Gordito, but once he saw Zamorano’s mug shot on the news that night he had no doubt they would find him. He returned to Palestine the next day, where he visited his mother and sister, blew the last of his cocaine, and waited for the cops to show up. Police arrested him in the morning hours of June 29. 

The scale of the disaster overwhelmed the capacity of the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. Under the glare of emergency-vehicle headlights, five forensic pathologists worked through the night to process the bodies. They combed through the victims’ pockets, the interior of the trailer, and the surrounding area for identifying documents. Homeland Security agents identified some of them with a mobile fingerprint scanner. Once again, the migrants were loaded like cargo into the backs of large vehicles and hauled away—this time to the morgue. 

With the help of reinforcements called in from Dallas and Austin, Bexar County officials would take five days to complete the autopsies. The main cause of death was hyperthermia—basically, overheating—but the medical examiner determined that many may have also suffered asphyxiation from being smothered, crushed under the weight of other bodies, or simply unable to survive on the oxygen-depleted air.

Officials carefully collected and photographed the personal items that the deceased had in their pockets, which didn’t amount to much. Most had little more than loose change, and some traveled without any money at all. As a group, they had less than $2,500. The aspiring Guatemalan schoolteacher and one of her traveling companions carried fake Mexican identification cards to ease their passage through the country, where opportunists are known to prey on Central American migrants. The teenage boy from Mexico City carried three well-worn prayer cards. One of the men who’d promised the boy’s mother he’d look after him was also carrying prayer cards; he’d survived long enough to stagger several hundred feet from the trailer before collapsing. The pregnant Honduran woman died with two pregnancy tests in her pocket. 

One stocky male had a sweat-wrinkled scrap of paper in one pocket with a few notes scrawled in bleeding red ink, including the name of a hotel in Nuevo Laredo and a smuggler’s code: 050 Flaco. The man’s Mexican identification indicated that he was 32 years old and came from Oaxaca. His name was Mariano. 

His brother Begaí lay unconscious but alive in a hospital on the other side of town.

The Real Number of Victims

News of the disaster shot across the southern border. Families from all over Mexico and Central America watched the coverage on local channels and pored over social media posts, wondering if a loved one might be under the tarps on Quintana Road. It would take days for all of the victims’ families to be notified, and several weeks to repatriate all of the bodies. Saddled with debts they’d taken on to pay the smugglers, some families had to borrow still more for funerals. In some places—like the tiny Guatemalan village where the two youngest passengers grew up—entire communities poured out of their homes to follow the caskets to the cemetery.

Though the Bexar County medical examiner had concluded that the primary cause of death was hyperthermia, the manner of death was homicide. The investigation fell under the authority of Joint Task Force Alpha, a multiagency effort launched by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 to “enhance U.S. enforcement efforts against the most prolific and dangerous human smuggling and trafficking groups.” Seven of the organization’s drivers were already behind bars, including Zamorano, and cellphones confiscated from D’Luna Bilbao, Martinez, and Zamorano contained troves of data related to the organization’s activities, but it would still take a year for the authorities to close in on the more senior figures. 

The home Felipe Orduña Torres rented with his wife and daughter near Lackland Air Force Base, in south San Antonio, about ten minutes drive from the disaster site on Quintana Road. Orduña Torres was arrested here on June 26, 2023.

On June 26, 2023, federal law enforcement officers swarmed Orduña Torres’s rental home in a modest neighborhood near Lackland Air Force Base, about ten minutes from the crime scene on Quintana Road. They found a pearl 2015 Cadillac Escalade and a lime-green 2017 Ford F-350 with custom chrome rims and a lift kit so massive it was almost a monster truck. Orduña Torres, 28 by then, lived there with his wife and daughter. The interior was freshly painted, and in the backyard he had installed a small swimming pool, synthetic grass, and a covered patio. The government valued the improvements at $41,000 and concluded that he had financed them with his smuggling revenues. The same day, federal officers arrested three other men associated with the organization, including Orduña Torres’s father-in-law. (Martínez Olvera somehow managed to avoid arrest, probably by fleeing to Mexico.)

“Human smugglers prey on migrants’ hope for a better life—but their only priority is profit,” Garland said in a press release announcing the arrests. At Orduña Torres’s house, the agents found a portion of that profit—$30,000 in cash stuffed into the bottom of a Special K cereal box perched on top of his refrigerator and another $29,444 in various hiding places, including his daughter’s dresser. According to the government, he was involved in between 24 and 48 human-smuggling operations over the two-year period leading up to the disaster, which meant that his bulk-smuggling runs with Martínez Olvera were only part of his business. In total, the government estimates that Orduña Torres earned between $96,000 and $240,000 during that two-year stretch. The lower estimate would put his family slightly above San Antonio’s median household income. The upper figure would place him in the middle class but far from the kind of wealth that signifies kingpin status in Mexico, let alone in the U.S. 

Of the seven arrested, all but two—Orduña Torres and his father-in-law, who played a minor role—would plead guilty to human-smuggling charges. Last March, nearly three years after the disaster, Orduña Torres shuffled into a high-ceilinged courtroom with wood-paneled walls in the new federal courthouse in San Antonio. The pronounced limp that earned him the nickname by which all of the other smugglers knew him—Chuekito, from the Spanish word for “crooked”—was noticeable even in leg-irons. He wore a suit and tie, with his hair gelled and spiked. He’d lost so much weight that D’Luna Bilbao, who took the stand early in the trial, hardly recognized him. 

Two survivors testified. The first, Greysy Sanjay Bacajol, had comforted the frightened young girl she and her brother had met en route to the border. Greysy’s brother Oswaldo also survived, as did the girl, whose name was Sebastiana Morales Morales. It was her screams that had caught the attention of the asphalt workers. 

The other survivor who testified, José Luis Vásquez Guzmán, was the former Mexican soldier who was looking after the teenage boy. The boy, Marcos Antonio Velasco Velasco, had been headed to a job in Ohio that was originally offered to his mother, but he’d begged to go on her behalf. Marcos Antonio died, as did the soldier’s cousin, Javier Flores López. When the prosecutors displayed a photo of his cousin on a screen in the courtroom, Vásquez Guzmán wept for several minutes. Some of the jurors wept with him.

Martínez Olvera remains at large, as do legions of others who make up the decentralized smuggling economy—stash-house operators, guides, scouts, cartel henchmen, drivers of various kinds.

Juan D’Luna Bilbao, Christian Martinez, and another smuggler charged in the case gave detailed testimony about how the organization planned and carried out its bulk smuggling operations. Federal investigators took the stand to walk through reams of text messages, WhatsApp communications, photos, and tracking data that connected Orduña Torres to numerous bulk smuggling operations, including the fateful trip on June 27, 2022. 

Before sending the jury to deliberate, the judge reminded them of the pregnant Honduran woman who died. The real number of victims, he said, was 54. 

The jury found both men guilty on all charges, and the judge later sentenced them to life in prison. Shortly after U.S. marshals led the pair away in cuffs, top-ranking federal officials held a press conference to announce the verdict. “ Today is a momentous day in the department’s relentless fight against the leaders, organizers, and key facilitators of human smuggling networks,” said Matthew Galeotti, Trump’s recently appointed acting head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. “We’re not done—not even by a long shot.”

Mariano Santiago Hipólito’s homemade marker at the migrant memorial on Quintana Road in south San Antonio.

Recently the federal government has unleashed another immigration-enforcement spending spree. In July, Congress gave Trump a record-shattering $190 billion to expand the Department of Homeland Security, effectively doubling the agency’s budget over the next several years. Upward of $80 billion is allocated for the border, including more than $50 billion for wall construction and border infrastructure. Funding is already in place for an expansion that will make C29 the largest checkpoint in the country. 

Meanwhile, Martínez Olvera remains at large, as do legions of others who make up the decentralized smuggling economy—stash-house operators, guides, scouts, cartel henchmen, drivers of various kinds. As long as there is money to be made transporting people across borders, their ranks are unlikely to diminish.

Have You Seen My Brother?

It took Mari more than a week to reach her husband’s bedside. A representative of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed her that she was eligible for a special permit to visit Begaí in the hospital, but she had to first get to Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso. She couldn’t afford the airfare, but a former employer of Begaí’s got in touch and offered to finance her trip. 

Someone from the consulate in El Paso was waiting for her when she landed in Juárez and drove her to the Bridge of the Americas, where she walked over the dry concrete channel of the Rio Grande, past rows of idling cars and into the U.S. Customs and Border Protection station. She explained her situation to an agent, who asked her to fill out a form, took her photograph, and told her she could stay in the U.S. for thirty days. As he waved her through, he said, “God bless you, señora.” 

She traversed West Texas by bus in the black of night, worrying all the way to San Antonio about what she would find when she got there—how Begaí would react to seeing her and whether she would be able to keep herself together.

“Forgive me,” were Begaí’s first words to Mari. “I didn’t listen to you.”

Amós, one of Begaí’s brothers, who worked in a factory in Ciudad Juárez, had also gotten special permission to cross and was at the bus station to greet Mari when she arrived in San Antonio on July 5. Another consular representative drove them to Christus Santa Rosa Hospital, where a nurse briefed them on Begaí’s condition as they walked to his room. By then, he had been in the hospital for nine days. The nurse told them that Begaí had been unconscious when the ambulance delivered him to the emergency room, and the staff had thought he would probably die. His organs had shriveled like dried fruit, and he’d suffered two strokes. But eventually, after about three days in a coma, he awoke. Disoriented and with a debilitating pain along his spine, he had no memory of leaving Laredo. “The first thing he asked for was a Bible,” the nurse said. 

In the hallway, Mari heard Begaí’s voice before she saw him, and she recognized the words immediately: “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Begaí was reciting Psalm 91:1, which they both knew by heart. She wiped a tear from her cheek and listened for a moment. Steadying herself, she slipped into the room, where she saw Begaí with his head covered in bandages. An intricate web of wires and tubes connected his limbs to blinking machines and bags of fluid. His face was pale and sad, and he looked to Mari as if he’d aged many years. “Someone came to visit you,” the nurse said. “Do you know who this is?” 

Begaí looked up. “Forgive me,” were his first words to Mari. “I didn’t listen to you.” 

It didn’t take her long to notice that Begaí’s short-term memory was badly damaged. He would lose the thread of conversations, forgetting things she’d told him only moments before. But it was the hole in his memory from June 27 and his confusion about what happened that day that troubled her most. Somehow, Begaí had come to believe that Mariano had never gotten in the trailer. “My brother’s okay, right?” he asked. “Is it true that he went back to Mexico? Have you seen him?” 

At first she couldn’t bear to tell him the truth. She dodged his questions and encouraged him to focus on getting better, but the deceit troubled her. When she finally told him, he cried out in such agony that it sounded to Mari as if something within him was shattering. 

Under constant care, Begaí gradually improved. On July 12, his doctor discharged him with one prescription for opioid painkillers and another for antibiotics. That day, an agent from the Department of Homeland Security had Begaí sign a form stating that he had been arrested and placed into removal proceedings but that he was being released pending an appearance before an immigration judge three months later in Atlanta, where he still planned to work. The document and the entire process were confusing to Begaí, who was so physically weak and cognitively impaired that he had to be cared for like a small child. Later, he received a temporary work authorization from the federal government, and an immigration attorney helped him apply for a U visa—a special category for victims of crimes that occur on U.S. soil that was created in 2000 to encourage undocumented people to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. But the lawyer told him that approval could take as long as six years, and in the meantime his immigration status was unclear. 

Mari traveled with him to a suburb of Atlanta, where they stayed with his aunt and uncle. During those initial weeks, Begaí suffered severe back pain and sometimes got lost looking for the bathroom. Mari escorted him to a nearby clinic where a Spanish-speaking doctor offered low-cost services. She applied ointment to his back and comforted him when he woke disoriented in the middle of the night. She wrote a letter requesting an extension of her humanitarian parole and sent it to the Customs and Border Protection office in Atlanta along with a supporting letter from Begaí’s doctor. Her request was denied. She flew home when her thirty-day permit expired. 

It would take eight months for Begaí to regain the strength to begin working again. He helped his uncle on plumbing jobs and picked up the occasional floor-tiling gig from a guy he met at church. At first he could only manage a few hours before needing to rest. Working one or two days a week, he wasn’t able to send much home to Mari, which deepened his despair. 

Pioquinto Santiago (left) and Elodia Hipólito (right), parents of Mariano and Begaí Santiago Hipólito, at the family home with the brothers’ sister Nancy Santiago Hipólito.

Meanwhile, the health of Mariano’s wife, Luz Estrella, had deteriorated swiftly. Though Mariano had gone to the U.S. to help pay her medical expenses, it turned out his earnings wouldn’t have made much difference. About three months after Mariano died, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. To pay for her treatments, her family raised about $1,000 by selling tamales around the neighborhood, offloading Mariano’s motorcycle, and pooling what little savings they had. But the cancer spread, making its way into her bones. 

Before disease ravaged her body, Luz Estrella decided to preserve a memory of herself for her children. She dressed her five-year-old daughter, Jade, in an embroidered pink dress and her three-year-old son, Mariano, in a plaid button-down shirt. Wearing a lavender dress, her long black hair brushed back, she posed her children in front of her and placed her hands on their shoulders. They reached their own small hands up to grab hers, and she mustered a smile. The photo now hangs in her mother’s kitchen, next to a picture of Mariano beaming beside Luz Estrella on their wedding day. She died on July 31, 2023. 

American Purgatory

As of last year, all eleven survivors of the disaster were still living in the U.S., but their exact locations were unknown. I tracked down a few nonprofits and one attorney’s office that had aided some of them, but all declined to help me arrange an interview. During my reporting trip to Mexico and Guatemala, I managed to speak with relatives of five survivors. At the time, none were willing to put me in direct contact with their loved one. Still, I held out hope. Only the survivors could describe the horrors of that day and the difficulty of healing in a foreign country they had nearly died trying to reach—and where their legal status remains uncertain. 

Over the months, I kept in touch with many of the families I’d met, and during the trial I created a WhatsApp group to update them on everything that transpired in the courtroom. Mari was part of the group, along with Begaí’s mother and two of his siblings, and they passed my messages on to him. Then, a few days after the trial ended, my phone rang. It was Begaí.

Cristina Ramirez, seated left center, and Oslidio López, seated right center, the parents of Deisy Fermina López Ramirez, 24, who died in the Quintana Road incident, pictured with their surviving children at their home in Comitancillo, Guatemala.

On a warm day last April, we met in a public park near his home that was busy with picnickers and dog walkers. Begaí wore jeans, a gray T-shirt, and lace-up leather shoes. He was reserved and spoke in a voice almost too quiet to hear over the noise of nearby traffic and children on the playground. I asked whether he was afraid of being deported. “Why would I be afraid?” he said. “In some ways, it would be a blessing.” 

Almost three years since he said goodbye to his wife and children, Begaí is still living in the U.S., lonely and racked by grief. He suffers chronic pain behind his right lung and tires quickly from rigorous labor or heat exposure. When Mari talks to him on the phone, she notices that he sometimes forgets what they’d been discussing minutes earlier. With time, his recollections of June 27 have grown more vivid, but memories of the days leading up to it and the period after remain hazy. 

Begaí works in a food truck now, ten hours a day, six days a week. He’s finally making enough to improve his family’s finances, but the pain of being separated from his wife and children has pushed him to a breaking point. His inability to comfort and support Mariano’s children is a source of constant anguish. “What I want more than anything is just to give them a hug,” he told me. 

Begaí remains confused about his immigration status. More than halfway through the potentially six-year wait for his U visa decision, he has no indication that things are progressing and does not know where to ask for information about his case, or whether that’s even a good idea. Despite what he said about the potential upside of deportation, he understands that being arrested wouldn’t mean getting dropped off at a bridge and walking back to Mexico—it would likely mean a long detention in a private prison in the U.S. 

Delfina Bacajol, mother of Oswaldo Sanjay Bacajol and Greisy Sanjay Bacajol, siblings who survived the San Antonio tractor trailer incident in June 2022, at her home in Xenacoj, Guatemala.

When he was near death, Begaí had prayed for an opportunity to live, but he wound up in a kind of purgatory. Faced with waiting for a visa that may never come, he’s close to giving up. If he does return to Lázaro Cárdenas to visit his parents someday, he’ll take a footbridge across the Usila River and pass under an arcade of towering trees. New concrete homes, most of them built with money sent home by migrants working abroad, will add a layer of unfamiliarity to the homecoming.

Inside his parents’ house, filled with the commotion of his own children and many young nieces and nephews and the smell of woodsmoke from his mother’s kitchen, Mariano will be a haunting presence. Begaí will see the Bible verses his brother painted on the walls in neat, brightly colored script. In the windowless room where their mother sleeps on a mattress on the floor, Mariano covered an entire wall with Psalm 103. The lettering is faded now but still legible. One line may seem more enigmatic after all that Begaí has endured: “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.”  The notion of divine justice might offer some comfort to Begaí, but he may wait a long time for redress from the U.S. government, if it ever comes at all.

Reporting for this story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.