More desperate migrants travel to the U.S. inside deadly cargo trucks, a Noticias Telemundo special report found.
Telemundo News and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), together with other partners, detail the burgeoning and deadly illegal industry that smuggles thousands of migrants into the U.S. via cargo trucks.
Telemundo News and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), together with other partners, corroborated through official records the journey of some 19,000 people who attempted to reach the U.S. border inside cargo trucks through Mexican roadways, including some 3,000 children.
The heat inside the cargo truck was suffocating. The women were squatting against the walls holding the children on their legs; the men sat in rows, one behind the other, at the center. About 170 people were traveling in the container, in the dark and in forced silence.
Two weeks earlier, on January 4, 2019, Yanira Chávez had closed the reddish wooden door of her house in Armenia, a small town in northern Honduras. She had paid $5,000 — an amount she would have never been able to save with her salary at a banana packing house — to a local coyote (smuggler) who promised to take her to the United States along with her children, Samir, who was 9 years old, and Emely, 5. Her husband, Erling Rosales, had paid for the trip and was waiting for them in New Orleans, where he had been living for two years now.
Chávez was carrying two huge black suitcases “with little wheels” that she bought for 1,200 lempiras (about $48) in a nearby town because the coyote assured her that they were going to cross Mexico by plane and “they couldn’t look like immigrants” at the airports. Upon arriving in the United States, the family would have to pay the smugglers another $5,000.
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