On a frightening call to 911, a migrant tells dispatchers that he and about 80 other people are trapped in a white tanker, unable to breathe.
“We can’t see anything. We are inside a tanker. My God, we don’t have oxygen,” said the interlocutor to the dispatcher in Spanish. A man in the background can also be heard begging in Spanish: “Help! Blessed God!” while he struggles to breathe.
In the background, other people can be heard screaming for help in Spanish and saying they are out of breath.
The call, which took place on Monday but was obtained by NBC’s sister network Telemundo on Thursday, triggered a search for migrants in Texas. Surveillance images show the tanker truck in the San Antonio area.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official told NBC News in an e-mail that the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, along with local law enforcement partners, is still investigating the “possible smuggling event. “.
Authorities are now asking for public help to find the tanker truck, where some people may have already died, Telemundo said.
“I am only interested in whether these people are well. I am not interested in arresting the people inside the truck,” Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, whose jurisdiction includes San Antonio, told Telemundo in Spanish.
The investigation comes at a time when arrests of migrants on the United States’ border with Mexico increase after a sharp drop in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. In January, American officials found almost 78,000 migrants trying to cross the southern border illegally or who were denied ports of entry, an increase of 6% over the previous month.
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Reuters contributed.