A 20-year-old migrant from Guatemala City, Yenifer Yulisa Cardona Tomás, managed to survive a deadly voyage to the United States that killed 53 others.
The Daily Mail reported that she told the Associated Press on Monday that it was already hot on June 27 when she left a warehouse on the Texas side of the Mexico border where she had been waiting for the truck and climbed into the back of the trailer. According to US Rep. Henry Cuellar, Homeland Security investigators believe the warehouse is near Laredo, Texas.
Yenifer survived after deciding to stay near the door to keep cool.
‘I told a friend that we shouldn’t go to the back and should stay near [the entrance], in the same place without moving,’
Cardona Tomás credits this piece of life-saving advice to a friend who had warned her and told her the air around the doors would be cooler.
After she climbed into the trailer, she said the smugglers took away their cellphones and coated the trailer’s floor with what she thought was powdered chicken bouillon in case there were dogs used at the checkpoints. The powder stung her skin as she rode in the unbearably hot trailer.
Her parents said they did not know she would be traveling in a tractor-trailer,
‘She told us it would be by foot,’ said her father, Mynor Cordón.
They worried for their daughter’s life after hearing about the abandoned truck outside of San Antonino and the 53 people who had died of heat exhaustion.
Mynor was aware of the perils of the border crossing and that many who attempted it went missing. So he decided to help finance his daughter’s trip, paying $4000.00 for a smuggler, roughly half the cost.
Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio explained that migrants generally pay $8,000 to $10,000 to be taken across the border. They are loaded into a tractor-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they transfer to smaller vehicles for their final destinations across the United States.
‘The people were yelling, some cried. Mostly women were calling for it to stop and to open the doors because it was hot, that they couldn’t breathe,’ Yenifer said, laboring to speak after being intubated at the hospital.
She said the driver or someone else in the cab yelled back that ‘we were about to arrive, that there were 20 minutes left, six minutes.’
‘People asked for water; some had run out, others carried some,’ she said.
The truck would continue stopping occasionally, but just before she lost consciousness, it was moving slowly. She woke up in the hospital.
Unfortunately, this story is one of many in a growing number of atrocities committed at the Southern border.
Many, including Ted Cruz have been calling out the humanitarian crises at the border for some time.
There is a humanitarian crisis at our southern border.
Vulnerable people are dying at the hands of human traffickers.
President Biden hasn’t done anything to stop the carnage.
#BidenBorderCrisis.
https://t.co/5tc0Npj615— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) July 1, 2022
But Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to turn a blind eye to the lawlessness and resulting horrors taking place under their leadership.