Migrants who nearly died in hot truck may still face deportation

A 10th immigrant found packed inside a sweltering truck in San Antonio died overnight Sunday, the day after police discovered the semi truck outside a Walmart store, with nine bodies and 30 survivors inside who’d been smuggled across the U.S. border in 100-degree heat.

But although the mostly Mexican immigrants were human smuggling victims in a high-profile case, legal and immigration experts say it’s anyone’s guess whether the survivors will be allowed to stay in the United States.

“Our biggest fear is the survivors will be sent to detention and face deportation without any guarantee that their rights will be protected,” said Amy Fischer, policy director for Raices, a Texas-based organization that provides legal aid to immigrants. Raices has offered to represent survivors, but so far has had no luck in reaching them. Deportation officials, Fischer said, “have not been communicative at all.”

A spokesperson for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement told VICE News that the agency hasn’t yet determined who may be able to stay and who will be forced to leave.

“As far as the aliens are concerned, that’s going to be done on a case-by-case basis,” spokesperson Carl Rusnok said, pointing out that “many, many different factors” — like the survivors’ countries of origin, and whether they’ll serve as material witnesses in the law enforcement investigation — will influence their eventual fate.

Rusnok did not immediately return VICE News’ request for comment on whether any of the victims found in the truck are currently in detention facilities.

As of Sunday, dozens of the surviving immigrants remained hospitalized. Fischer worries that deportation officials may detain them as soon as they leave the hospital, which, she said, is a tactic they have used before.

If the immigrants want to stay in the United States, legal analysts say, they can try to apply for a U visa, offered to victims of crimes, or try to seek asylum. They can also try to apply for a T visa, which is designated for trafficking victims who provided goods or services.

But experts say securing those visas isn’t exactly easy.

“We do see a number of U visa–eligible individuals who are in detention,” said Elissa Steglich, who teaches at University of Texas at Austin’s Immigration Clinic. “Since this administration has started, we’ve actually seen U visa–eligible folks be deported and told that they can wait out those seven years in their home countries before returning to the United States on a U visa status — which is not the intention of the law and really puts into question of humanitarian goals that Congress had in creating the U visa.”

Both the U and T visas also require applicants comply with law enforcement prosecutions. Though Texas victims told prosecutors that the deadly Zetas drug cartel oversaw their smuggling out of Mexico, the prospect of testifying might discourage potential visa applicants.

“You don’t want to turn on the smuggler, because then the smuggler’s operation will hurt someone back home,” explained Lenni Benson, an immigration law professor at New York Law School. That fear, Benson believes, leads many people to lose their chances at T visas, in particular.

Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, isn’t optimistic about the surviving immigrants’ chances of staying in the United States.

“I would not expect that this particular administration would be granting relief to all of them by any stretch,” Saenz told VICE News. “I’m sure there will be folks who will call for allowing them to stay, but when there’s been incidents like this in the past, I believe most of those who have been victims of the smuggling have been deported. The only ones who have been permitted to stay have been a handful of folks deemed necessary for prosecution.”

Steglich is more hopeful that, due to the incident’s intense media coverage, immigration authorities will try to be more empathetic to their plight and help them stay in the country. Still, she’s certain that current immigration policies will not stop incidents like this from happening in the future. While apprehension rates of unauthorized immigrants crossing the United States’ southwestern border are down significantly from past years, signaling that fewer people had been trying to cross, those rates started to tick back up last month.

“I fear as we continue to pursue more enforcement-focused policies that we will simply see more cases like this,” Steglich said. “And an alternative is to explore more open, safe, secure forms of migration, as well as trying to focus on the root causes and to provide a right to remain to folks so that they can live safe healthy lives in their home countries.”