Investigators with the Medical Examiner’s office in the border city of Laredo, Texas, said on Monday that at least one of the six people found dead inside a train boxcar was from Mexico.
The ghastly discovery occurred at around 3 p.m. local time on Sunday when an employee for Union Pacific Railroad responsible for loading and unloading train cars at a rail yard came across the bodies of six people, said the investigator Jose Baeza, a spokesman with the Laredo Police Department.
Dr. Corinne Stern, the Medical Examiner for Webb County, which includes Laredo, said her investigators came across five men and a woman at the scene.
Some of the victims carried identification cards and cellphones, which local investigators turned over to immigration officials. Dr. Stern said that one of the victims was a 29-year-old woman from Mexico and that she died from hyperthermia, or overheating. A cause of death has not been determined for the men, but Dr. Stern suspects they died in similar circumstances.
“The consul, as we speak, is working on contacting her family and making arrangements for her to be repatriated,” she said.
The medical examiner’s office is also in contact with consul offices in Honduras to determine if the rest of the victims have family in that country, Dr. Stern said.
“We believe that some of the individuals are from Mexico and Honduras,” Dr. Stern said.
Law enforcement officials in Laredo were trying to determine if the victims were unauthorized migrants trying to evade immigration authorities.
While it is not uncommon for migrants to hide in vehicles and freight cars to reach the U.S., area officials said casualties were rare.
The city’s mayor, Victor Treviño, said on Monday that the close-knit community, where people cross between the two countries with ease, is still trying to make sense of the tragedy. Laredo borders Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and is about 160 miles southwest of San Antonio.
“As the investigation continues into the identities of the six individuals found inside a train boxcar in Laredo, this tragedy strikes at the center of our humanity,” Mr. Treviño said. “Our hearts are with the families and loved ones affected. We don’t want to see any incidents like this. We’re all humans.”
A spokesman with the Union Pacific, one of the largest freight-hauling railroad companies in the nation, said the company was cooperating with the authorities.
“Union Pacific is saddened by this incident and is working closely with law enforcement to investigate,” Mike Jaixen, a spokesman for Union Pacific, said in a statement.
Cities near the border have experienced similar tragedies where people were found dead in train cars, shipping containers or trucks in recent years. Many of the victims were migrants lured by human smugglers who appeared unaware of how hot temperatures can get inside. High temperatures in Laredo reached 90 degrees on Sunday.
In 2022, 53 migrants — 47 adults and six children — were found in a tractor-trailer without a functioning cooling system on the outskirts of San Antonio. That summer temperatures soared above 100 degrees in the area, resulting in many of the victims dying of heat exhaustion or dehydration. It remains one of the deadliest migrant smuggling cases in U.S. history.
A year later, the bodies of two people believed to be migrants, along with five others who were badly injured, were found inside a shipping container on a train in Uvalde County, Texas.
More recently, in 2024, Border Patrol agents in Laredo rescued 23 migrants stowed in a locked train compartment as temperatures neared 100 degrees, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Overall, the number of border crossings has declined significantly in the second Trump administration.
There were more than 2 million border crossings in each of the last two years of the Biden administration, according to data from the agency.
At the time, many migrants who were fleeing authoritarian nations surrendered at the border and asked for asylum. But many others from countries like Mexico, Guatemala or Honduras, who do not usually qualify for a legal immigration pathway, turned to smugglers known as coyotes as a way to evade immigration authorities.
For decades, the coyotes, informal networks of human traffickers, bribed members of the drug cartels that control areas along the border with a fee or a tax so they could transport the undocumented migrants. But as the volume of people trying to cross into the United States grew under President Biden, drug cartels took over the human smuggling business.
Through March of this year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 63,000 people at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.
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