19 Aliens Rescued From Locked Trailer on Train

HEBBRONVILLE, Tex. — Border Patrol agents freed 19 illegal aliens from a sweltering trailer on a railroad car Wednesday, preventing a second tragedy like the one that left 18 immigrants dead in West Texas last week, officials said.

The men had stripped to their shorts in the 120-degree heat and had lapsed into semi-consciousness in just four hours, but none required medical assistance, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Mario Ortiz said.

“In the wake of what happened in Sierra Blanca, this is pretty serious stuff,” Ortiz said.

As in the July 2 incident outside El Paso, a smuggler locked the men in the trailer just before the train left Laredo for Corpus Christi, Ortiz said.

“It’s the same thing,” he said. “They were latched in and couldn’t get out. It was 95 degrees outside, and easily 120 degrees inside by the time they were found at 11 a.m. If they had been in there much longer, they would have been dead.”

Border Patrol officers found the group during a routine inspection stop in Hebbronville, 60 miles east of Laredo. The trailer, of the type pulled by semi trucks, was being carried on a flatbed rail car.

“The men, who we believe to be Mexicans who came across the border from Nuevo Laredo, were taken to the Border Patrol station in Laredo,” Ortiz said. “They’ll be deported, but not before an intensive investigation.”

The smuggler in the Laredo case had tossed in some tools before he latched the trailer door shut, but the people inside never could have chiseled through the car’s metal walls, Ortiz said.

In the El Paso incident, the smuggler had left the men railroad spikes with which to chip through the airtight car’s heavy wooden floor, but only one of those aboard lived long enough to break through for air.