A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer and his canine companion inspect a tractor trailer at the Otay Mesa, Calif., port of entry in 2016.Damià Bonmatí, Noticias Telemundo
The authorities found 46 migrants inside the trailer, including several from Mexico who said they had crossed the border days before. John pleaded guilty in court to transferring undocumented persons and was sentenced to 41 months in prison. Laredo, a border city of 256,000 and the largest port by volume of commercial land traffic in North America, is the epicenter of these operations.
On June 27, 2022, weeks before John was released from prison, 53 people died trapped in a truck traveling from Laredo to San Antonio,The driver, Homero Zamorano Jr., pleaded not guilty and will be tried in September. Image taken by an X-ray machine that reveals the presence of people inside a trailer. Experts believe that it is necessary to equip checkpoints on border roads with more technology.“We had to get to Nuevo Laredo,” he said, “They had ropes and people were standing. That trailer had ventilation. But I don’t know what happened. ... That air went out. ... People began to despair, to jump, to want to break the roof of the trailer. We reached and we couldn’t break through the roof.
Balli believes that there are now fewer Texan drivers willing to do this type of work, the result of an aggressive deterrence campaign by authorities who have warned truckers they could lose their commercial licenses — which are expensive and difficult to get — if they're convicted of transporting migrants illegally.