(The following story by Louie Gilot appeared on the El Paso Times website on August 31.)
EL PASO — Twenty-seven undocumented immigrants, including two children traveling with their mothers, were found in a locked train car in Santa Teresa on Sunday morning, Border Patrol officials said.
All migrants were in good physical condition despite the extreme temperature inside the car at 11 a.m., leading officials to believe the migrants had not been traveling for long.
“It sounds like an apprehension, but it is really a rescue because we don’t know what course it could have taken due to the conditions,” Doug Mosier, the Border Patrol spokesman in El Paso, said.
Officials with the Mexican Consulate in El Paso said 25 migrants, all from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, were returned to Mexico on Sunday afternoon and two were detained as the possible smugglers. Two more were from Honduras and Peru, Border Patrol officials said. The group included 11 women.
Union Pacific police called the Border Patrol on Sunday morning after they saw two migrants walking outside the train at a railroad crossing. Mosier would not say whether these migrants were the suspected smugglers.
Since October 2003, Border Patrol agents have rescued 29 people in the El Paso area and New Mexico, not including Sunday’s rescue. Eight of those people were rescued from confined spaces. During the same period, agents apprehended 96,110 undocumented immigrants in the area.
In March, El Paso police officers caught 23 undocumented immigrants boarding a train at 2 p.m. in Downtown El Paso. They, too, were from Hidalgo.
In 1987, a train smuggling incident turned tragic in Sierra Blanca when 18 men died in a sweltering boxcar left on a rail siding. The men, who had boarded the train in El Paso, suffocated in temperatures that reached 130 degrees. The only survivor breathed through a hole in the boxcar’s floor.