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AUSTIN (AP) – U.S. authorities on Thursday announced the indictment of a Guatemalan national who they say helped coordinate a human smuggling effort that ended with 53 migrants dead in a sweltering tractor-trailer in Texas.

Rigoberto Román Mirando Orozco is charged with six counts of migrant smuggling resulting in death or serious injury in the deadliest attempt from the U.S. Mexico border. Authorities alleged he can be connected to four of migrants in the trailer, three of whom died.

Arrests related to the 2022 deaths in San Antonio have climbed to more than a dozen and now stretch to Central America after years of investigations into the deadliest smuggling attempt from the U.S.-Mexico border.

On Wednesday, Guatemalan officials announced the arrests of seven people accused of helping smuggle the migrants, including Mirando Orozco, the alleged ringleader whose extradition had been requested by the United States, Interior Minister Francisco Jiménez told The Associated Press.

Jiménez said the arrests were made possible after 13 raids in three of the country’s departments. Police also seized vehicles and cash and rescued other migrants during the operations, Guatemalan officials said in a statement.

“This is a collaborative effort between the Guatemalan police and Homeland Security, in addition to other national agencies, to dismantle the structures of human trafficking, one of the strategic objectives of the government President Bernardo Arévalo in order to take on the phenomenon of irregular migration,” Jiménez said.

Six people were charged previously, including Homero Zamorano Jr., who authorities say drove the truck, and Christian Martinez. Both are from Texas and were arrested shortly after the migrants were found. Martinez has since pleaded guilty to smuggling-related charges, while Zamorano pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Four Mexican nationals were also arrested in 2023.

Authorities say the men were aware that the trailer’s air-conditioning unit was malfunctioning and would not blow cool air to the migrants trapped inside during the sweltering, three-hour ride from the border city of Laredo to San Antonio.

When the trailer was opened in San Antonio, 48 migrants were already dead. Another 16 were taken to hospitals, where five more died. The dead included 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador.

Authorities allege that the men worked with human smuggling operations in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, and shared routes, guides, stash houses, trucks and trailers, some of which were stored at a private parking lot in San Antonio.

Migrants paid the organization up to $15,000 each to be taken across the border. The fee would cover up to three attempts to get into the country.

Guatemalan officials accuse the group of housing and transferring hundreds of migrants to the United States over several years.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Texans required a record amount of electricity Tuesday night to stay cool as triple-degree temperatures baked much of the state, according to unofficial figures from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s power grid operator. Power demand reached 85,559 megawatts in the 5 p.m. hour, according to ERCOT spokesperson Trudi Webster, exceeding the previous record of 85,508 megawatts set in August 2023. One megawatt can power 250 Texas homes during the hottest summer days. ERCOT is responsible for coordinating the flow of electricity across the state and ensuring power supply matches demand at all times. The new record is unofficial until final settlements occur on the wholesale electricity market, which is also managed by ERCOT.

Power demand on Wednesday was expected to remain below 84,000 megawatts, according to the ERCOT dashboard, though the gap between supply and demand does narrow around 8 p.m., when solar power generation declines with sunset. That gap was even narrower Tuesday, and ERCOT still had enough supply to meet demand without having to ask Texans to conserve electricity. ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said Tuesday that the grid operator has “had a very different experience” operating the grid this summer compared with last summer, when its system came the closest to outages since the infamous 2021 freeze. That’s partly because the weather has been more mild. Last year, ERCOT issued 11 requests for Texans to conserve electricity as record-breaking heat swept through the state for weeks. More than 15 gigawatts of power supply have also been added to the grid since last year, including 1.7 gigawatts of wind, 8.8 gigawatts of solar, 4.8 gigawatts of battery storage and 164 megawatts of gas. During Tuesday’s record-setting hour, natural gas power plants supplied more than 50% of power demand, while solar supplied more than 20%.

(ABC) – A 9-month-old child has died after being left in a car by the child’s grandmother for nearly eight hours in what authorities are investigating as a heat-related death.

The incident occurred in Beeville, Texas, some 100 miles southeast of San Antonio, on Wednesday when the Beeville Police Department said a child was found unresponsive at approximately 4 p.m. in the child safety seat of their grandmother’s car, according to a statement from the Beeville Police Department.

“Beeville police detectives are currently on the scene of what appears to be a temperature related death of a 9-month-old child,” authorities said in their statement on Wednesday. “A preliminary investigation has determined that the child’s grandmother had left the child in the rear seat of her car in the child safety seat since approximately 8:30 this morning. The child was found at approximately 4pm non-responsive by the grandmother.”

This comes just one day after a 22-month-old toddler was found dead in another alleged heat-related hot car incident in Corpus Christi.

“The incident is being worked as a criminal homicide,” police said. “The Beeville police are being assisted by the Department of Public Safety Texas Rangers. No charges have been filed in connection to this case at this time, but such charges are expected to be filed.”

According to Kids and Car Safety, there have been at least 25 other cases in which children in the United States have died in hot cars in 2024. Texas has the most child deaths caused by hot cars from 1990 to 2023 with a total of 156 deaths.

The investigation into this case remains open.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — The strange saga of how two Mexican drug lords were detained after landing in a plane in the United States in July just got stranger.

The Mexican government now says it is bringing charges against Joaquín Guzmán López, but not because he was a leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel founded by his father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Instead, Mexican prosecutors are bringing charges against the younger Guzmán for apparently kidnapping Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada — an older drug boss from a rival faction of the cartel — forcing him onto the plane and flying to an airport near El Paso, Texas.

The younger Guzmán apparently intended to turn himself in to U.S. authorities, but may have brought Zambada along as a prize to sweeten any plea deal.

Federal prosecutors issued a statement saying “an arrest warrant has been prepared” against the younger Guzmán for kidnapping.

But it also cited another charge under an article of Mexico’s criminal code that defines what he did as treason. That section of the law says treason is committed “by those who illegally abduct a person in Mexico in order to hand them over to authorities of another country.”

That clause was apparently motivated by the abduction of a Mexican doctor wanted for allegedly participating in the 1985 torture and killing of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena.

Nowhere in the statement does it mention that the younger Guzmán was a member of th e “little Chapos” faction of the Sinaloa cartel, made up of Chapo’s sons, that smuggles millions of doses of the deadly opioid fentanyl into the United States, causing about 70,000 overdose deaths each year.

The federal prosecutors’ statement also included an unusually harsh and revealing description about evidence presented by prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa that has since proved to be false.

Sinaloa state prosecutors were apparently trying to distance the state’s governor, Rubén Rocha, from the killing of a local political rival, Hector Cuén, who was at a meeting that was used as a pretext for luring Zambada to the abduction site. Zambada has said he expected the governor to be at that meeting; Rocha has said he made a trip out of the state that day.

To play down reports of the purported meeting, state prosecutors published a video of an apparent shooting during what they claimed was a botched robbery at a local gas station. They said Cuén was killed there, not at the meeting site, where Zambada said Cuén was murdered.

While federal prosecutors stopped short of saying the gas station video was a fake, they earlier noted that the number of gunshots heard on the video didn’t match the number of gunshot wounds on Cuén’s body.

On Wednesday, the federal prosecutors went further, saying the video “is unacceptable, nor does it have sufficient value as evidence to be taken into account.”

Zambada has said that Guzmán, who he trusted, had invited him to the meeting to help iron out the fierce political rivalry between Cuén and Rocha. Zambada was known for eluding capture for decades because of his incredibly tight, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.

The fact that he would knowingly leave that all behind to meet with Rocha means that Zambada viewed such a meeting as credible and feasible. The same goes for the idea that Zambada, as the leader of the oldest wing of the Sinaloa cartel, could act as an arbiter in the state’s political disputes.

The governor has denied he knew of or attended the meeting where Zambada was abducted.

The whole case has been an embarrassment for the Mexican government, which didn’t even know about the detentions of the two drug lords on U.S. soil until after the fact.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long viewed any U.S. intervention as an affront, and has refused to confront Mexico’s drug cartels. He recently questioned the U.S. policy of detaining drug cartel leaders, asking, “Why don’t they change that policy?”

(ABC) – Arrests following the 2022 deaths of 53 migrants in Texas who were left in a sweltering tractor-trailer have climbed to more than a dozen, and now stretch to Central America, following years of investigations into the deadliest smuggling attempt from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Guatemalan officials announced the arrests of seven people accused of helping smuggle the migrants. They included the alleged ringleader of a smuggling operation whose extradition has been requested by the United States, Interior Minister Francisco Jiménez told The Associated Press.

The Justice Department was scheduled to hold a news conference Thursday in San Antonio to discuss a “significant” arrest in the case but did not provide details.

Jiménez said the arrests were made possible after 13 raids in three of the country’s departments. Police also seized vehicles and cash and rescued other migrants during the operations, Guatemalan officials said in a statement.

“This is a collaborative effort between the Guatemalan police and Homeland Security, in addition to other national agencies, to dismantle the structures of human trafficking, one of the strategic objectives of the government President Bernardo Arévalo in order to take on the phenomenon of irregular migration,” Jiménez said.

Six people were charged previously.

They include Homero Zamorano Jr., who authorities say drove the truck, and Christian Martinez, who were arrested shortly after the migrants were found. Both are from Texas. Martinez has since pleaded guilty to smuggling-related charges, while Zamorano pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Four Mexican nationals were also arrested in 2023.

Authorities say the men were aware that the trailer’s air-conditioning unit was malfunctioning and would not blow cool air to the migrants trapped inside during the sweltering, three-hour ride from the border city of Laredo to San Antonio.

When the trailer was opened in San Antonio, 48 migrants were already dead. Another 16 were taken to hospitals, where five more died. The dead included 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador.

Authorities allege that the men worked with human smuggling operations in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, and shared routes, guides, stash houses, trucks and trailers, some of which were stored at a private parking lot in San Antonio.

Migrants paid the organization up to $15,000 each to be taken across the border. The fee would cover up to three attempts to get into the country.

The arrests in Guatemala include Rigoberto Román Mirnado Orozco, the alleged ringleader, who was arrested in the department of San Marcos, on the border with Mexico. The other arrests occurred in Huehuetenango and Jalapa departments.

Several of those arrested are related and carry the Orozco surname, officials said.

Guatemalan officials accuse the group of housing and transferring hundreds of migrants to the United States over several years.

___

Vertuno reported from Austin, Texas, and Pérez from Guatemala City.

FORT WORTH (AP) — American Airlines is suspending flights to Israel through late March, extending a break in service that started in the early days of the war in Gaza.

A spokesperson for the airline said Wednesday that customers with tickets for flights to Tel Aviv can rebook at no extra charge or cancel their trip and get a refund.

The airline said flights to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv will be suspended through March 29. The airline updated a travel advisory on its website over the weekend.

“We will continue to work closely with our partner airlines to assist customers traveling between Israel and European cities with service to the U.S.,” the spokesperson said.

Delta Air Lines extended its suspension of Tel Aviv flights through Sept. 30 from Aug. 31. United Airlines has suspended service indefinitely.

All three airlines stopped flying to Israel shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that started the war. Many other international airlines did the same, although some later resumed them.

Germany’s Lufthansa announced Monday that based on a “current security analysis” it would halt all flights to Tel Aviv, Amman, Beirut, Teheran and Erbil in Iraq through Monday.

About 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, died in the Oct. 7 attack, which was followed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. About 40,000 people have died in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry there. U.S. attempts to broker a cease-fire agreement have been unsuccessful.

HOUSTON (AP) — A breakdown in communication, a lack of training, inconsistent protocols and an ineffective records management system were some of the reasons that led to Houston police dropping more than 268,000 cases over nearly the past decade, a committee said Wednesday.

The cases, whose existence was made public earlier this year, were never submitted for investigation as officers assigned them an internal code that cited a lack of available personnel. Among these cases were more than 4,000 sexual assault cases and at least two homicides.

“It’s a new day in Houston dealing with public safety,” Mayor John Whitmire said after members of the independent committee, which he formed in March, detailed their findings to Houston City Council at its weekly meeting.

Christina Nowak, one of the committee’s five members, told city council that the group found “significant issues” within Houston police’s case management and operations, including understaffing and inadequate communications between divisions and executive leadership. There was also a lack of adequate training for supervisors at all levels.

The committee found the Houston police department’s various investigative divisions were “operating in near total autonomy, leading to inconsistent and outdated case management practices,” Nowak said. The department’s current records management system is outdated, with information on investigations scattered across multiple systems, making it difficult to analyze and share. A new, improved system is set to be operational next year.

The committee said the police department also does not adequately use technology to help officers with their investigations and has a shortage of civilian staff who could help officers in their casework.

The committee recommended Houston police standardize its case management procedures, implement its new records management system, increase training for officers and department leadership and increase and retain its civilian staff.

“The committee wants to acknowledge that (Houston police) has recognized the severity of these issues, and is taking proactive steps to prevent further recurrence,” Nowak said.

Ellen Cohen, the committee’s chairperson, said the recommendations are focused on enhancing the transparency, efficiency and effectiveness of the police department’s case management practices.

“We realize that these recommendations require significant, significant investments in resources, technology and infrastructure,” Cohen said.

Whitmire said it was still shocking to him that Houston police had used this policy of dropping cases for lack of personnel for nearly 10 years. “We’re going to improve (Houston police) based on the recommendations,” he said.

The controversy and criticism involving the dropped cases resulted in the sudden retirement in May of then-police chief Troy Finner. A new police chief, J. Noe Diaz, was appointed earlier this month.

Finner had first made public the existence of the dropped cases in February. An investigation revealed a code first implemented in 2016 to identify why a case was dropped later became a way for officers to justify decisions to stop investigating all manner of crimes, including when violence was involved.

Finner previously told the Houston Chronicle that he regrets failing to grasp the extent of the dropped cases earlier. He said the department and its leaders — himself included — were so busy, and the use of the code was so normal, that the severity of the issue didn’t register with anyone in leadership.

Whitmire said Houston police were still working through the backlog of dropped cases.

“I am currently reviewing the committee’s detailed report and am carefully considering its recommendations. We believe this report will help us become better servants to the community and improve our department for generations to come,” Diaz said in a statement.

TEXAS (AP) – A heat dome that has led to nearly 90 consecutive days of triple-digit high temperatures in Phoenix moved into Texas Wednesday, with high temperature records expected to fall by the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.

A major heat alert is in place for Texas, reflecting what the weather service called “rare and/or long-duration extreme heat with little to no overnight relief.” An extreme heat alert was issued for eastern New Mexico.

A heat dome is a slow moving, upper-level high pressure system of stable air and a deep layer of high temperatures, meteorologist Bryan Jackson said.

“It is usually sunny, the sun is beating down, it is hot and the air is contained there,” Jackson said. “There are dozen or so sites that are setting daily records … mostly over Texas.”

Record high temperatures were expected in cities such as Corpus Christi, San Antonio and Amarillo. In Phoenix, monsoon rains have provided brief respites since Sunday, although daytime highs continue to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius).

The dome was expected to move into western Oklahoma and eastern New Mexico beginning Saturday, then into the mid-Mississippi Valley, where it was forecast to weaken slightly, Jackson said.

About 14.7 million people are under an excessive heat warning, with heat indexes expected at 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) and above. Another 10 million people were under a heat advisory.

Hundreds have already sought emergency care, according to MedStar ambulance in Fort Worth, Texas. The service responded to 286 heat-related calls during the first 20 days of August, about 14 per day, compared to about 11 per day in August 2023, according to public information officer Desiree Partain.

Austin-Travis County EMS Capt. Christa Stedman said calls about heat-related illness in the area around the Texas state Capitol since April 1 are up by about one per day compared with a year ago, though July was somewhat milder this year.

“The vast majority of what we see is heat exhaustion, which is good because we catch it before it’s heat stroke, but it’s bad because people are not listening to the red flags,” such as heat cramps in the arms, legs or stomach warning that the body is becoming too hot, Stedman said.

“It’s been a hot summer, but this one does stand out in terms of extremes,” said Jackson, the meteorologist.

Earlier this month, about 100 people were sickened and 10 were hospitalized due to extreme heat at a Colorado air show and at least two people have died due to the heat in California’s Death Valley National Park.

Globally, a string of 13 straight months with a new average heat record came to an end this past July as the natural El Nino climate pattern ebbed, the European climate agency Copernicus announced Thursday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — An attorney who represented the far-right Oath Keepers pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges stemming from a mob’s Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including members of the extremist group.

Kellye SoRelle, who was general counsel for the antigovernment group and a close associate of its founder, is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 17 by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C.

SoRelle answered routine questions by the judge as she pleaded guilty to two charges: a felony count of obstructing justice and a misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds. The felony carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, but her estimated sentencing guidelines recommend a maximum of 16 months behind bars.

SoRelle was arrested in Junction, Texas, in September 2022. Her case remained suspended for months amid questions about her mental health.

More than a year ago, medical experts concluded that SoRelle was mentally incompetent to stand trial. In November 2023, she reported to a federal Bureau of Prisons facility for treatment. Last month, Mehta ruled that SoRelle had recovered to an extent that she could understand the nature of her charges and could assist in her defense.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is serving a 18-year prison sentence for orchestrating a plot to keep Donald Trump in the White House after the 2020 presidential election. After Rhodes’ arrest, SoRelle told media outlets she was acting as the president of the Oath Keepers in his absence.

SoRelle was photographed with Rhodes outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. The night before the riot, she joined Rhodes in meeting with other extremist group members in an underground garage in Washington, D.C. The meeting also included former Proud Boys national leader Enrique Tarrio, who is serving a 22-year prison sentence for his role in a separate plot to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden after the election.

Rhodes, a former U.S. Army paratrooper, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. The group recruits current and former military, police and first responders and pledges to “fulfill the oath all military and police take to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

During the trial for Rhodes and other Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy, jurors heard testimony that SoRelle had a romantic relationship with Rhodes. She was with him outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 but wasn’t accused of entering the building.

SoRelle pleaded guilty to obstructing justice for encouraging others to destroy electronic evidence of their participation in the plot. She was indicted on other charges, including conspiring with Rhodes and other Oath Keepers to obstruct Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote. But she did not plead guilty to the conspiracy charge.