Horror in Texas

The news reports were difficult to believe at first, an unimaginable horror. A semi-tractor trailer abandoned on the side of the road near San Antonio, Texas with 53 human beings inside, dead from heat exhaustion, having died in the sweltering 103 degree inferno of what amounted to a cattle car. These migrants from Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua had been picked up in Laredo, Texas by a human smuggler—crammed into the back of the truck in record high temperatures without ventilation or water, then abandoned on the side of the road when the truck experienced mechanical trouble. A local railroad worker heard a feint cry for help from inside the truck, where the gruesome discovery was made. Within hours of the discovery, political accusations began flying back and forth between our distinguished public servants.

I am not an expert on immigration policy. Although I’ve read a lot about it over the years, in all that reading I have learned that the problem is profoundly complicated, a toxic mix of greed, fear, human degradation, human striving for a better life, and political grandstanding. The purpose of this post is not to cast blame, but rather to try and get inside the heads of all parties involved in the grisly graveyard that was left abandoned next to a railroad track in Texas.

What on Earth would possess a migrant from Mexico to climb into the back of that truck? Surely, they could see what they were entering, they could feel the heat, would have noticed that there was no water. Why? How desperate would they have to be? What possible hell were they fleeing that could be worse than being packed like sardines inside a trailer on the hottest day of the year? My imagination is incapable of providing any satisfactory answer to that question.

What kind of black heart would you have to have beating inside your chest to agree to be the driver of that truck? What amount of money would be necessary to assuage the guilt of this inhumanity?

Who are the people to whom this shipment was destined? What companies or farms were planning on putting these 53 to work? Any discussion about human smuggling across the border has to consider the end consumer of the cargo. Any business that would knowingly hire migrants delivered to them in the back of a tractor trailer, is every bit as complicit in this horror as every other actor along the way.

All I know is that when I looked at the pictures my heart broke for our increasingly savage, broken world.