ABSTRACT
On the morning of May 14, 2003, sheriff deputies from Victoria County, Texas, made a macabre discovery. The remains of 17 irregular migrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Dominican Republic-including those of a 5-year-old boy-lay inside and next to a trailer that had been abandoned by its driver, along with 46 other survivors, in the parking lot of a gas station in a desolate stretch of Interstate highway 77. Those who had perished died of suffocation and hypothermia after having spent close to four hours riding in the back of a locked trailer with no ventilation as they attempted to reach Houston, Texas, undetected by U.S. immigration authorities.
