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For the second day in a row, death has befallen a Texas freight train, this time on Eagle Pass, where one person was found dead and three were injured, officials said Sunday.
Someone on a boxcar in a small border town called 911 to report distress on Saturday afternoon, and US Border Patrol agents who arrived to help found 12 people inside, the Pacific Railroad Union said.
According to the railway, one of the 12 people died, three more were hospitalized. Their conditions were not available.
Eight more people have been detained, according to the Union Pacific.
According to him, the stopped car was at the Union Pacific railway station. The discovery follows a separate report Friday of 15 suspected migrants aboard a freight train about 70 miles northeast of Saturday’s incident.
Friday’s report was made in Uwalde County, near the small town of Knippa, officials said. Two of the 15 died and 10 were hospitalized, Uvalde city police said.
Four of the 10 requiring hospitalization were injured urgently enough to be taken to San Antonio hospitals, the Union Pacific said in a statement Friday.
Two of them were men who ended up at San Antonio’s top-level trauma center, University Hospital, where one was in critical condition and the other in serious condition, a hospital spokesman said.
Someone on the train in Uvalde County also dialed 911 to report a medical emergency in which patients were “suffocating,” Uvalde police said in a statement.
The exact cause of the medical emergency on both trains on the same line from the US-Mexico border to San Antonio and beyond is unknown.
The weather in both Eagle Pass and Uwalde County was hot, with high temperatures predicted to reach around 90 degrees or higher on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.
The number of illegal border crossings in the Southwest remains as low as it has been since President Joe Biden’s first full month in office in 2021, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data for February.
The drop in numbers comes after the administration announced a new policy that would see Mexico host Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelan asylum seekers as part of a policy designed to limit U.S. contact with migrants with illnesses, including Covid-19.
It was not immediately clear whether the openings of the freight trains were accidental or represented a new wave of migration among those desperate to reach the United States from the south.
“These incidents serve as a grim reminder of why we are working hard to keep people from encroaching on our property and our trains,” the Union Pacific said in a statement Sunday.
Tragedies in recent months have also affected other modes of transport.
On March 11, two boats suspected of transporting migrants ran aground next to each other in the middle of rough and cold seas on Blacks Beach in San Diego, where rescuers found the bodies of eight people, officials said.
And on March 17, an 18-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of human smuggling and evading police after authorities allegedly led a car chase in El Paso that ended in a crash that killed a 26-year-old passenger from Mexico. While in the country illegally, El Paso NBC affiliate KTSM said.
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