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SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Police at a Georgia airport arrested an airline pilot on a DUI charge as he was making pre-flight checks aboard a Southwest Airlines flight with bloodshot eyes and reeking of what smelled like alcohol, according to a police report.

Passengers had boarded the Southwest Airlines flight from Savannah to Chicago and were awaiting takeoff Wednesday morning when police boarded the plane and took the pilot away in handcuffs.

Officers tracked down the 52-year-old pilot after an airport security officer reported that he “smelled of alcohol and appeared intoxicated” while checking in at a flight crew screening lane Wednesday morning, the Transportation Security Administration said in a statement.

An officer found the pilot “seated in the cockpit performing pre-flight checks,” the incident report by airport police said. It said the pilot gave off ”a strong odor of what seemed to be alcohol” and had “bloodshot, watery eyes and a flushed complexion.”

Police reported that the pilot said the odor came from nicotine patches. He told an officer that he had “a few light beers” to drink the night before.

The pilot was arrested after taking a field sobriety test that showed he had trouble staying balanced and other signs of intoxication, the police report said. He was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence after refusing a blood-alcohol test.

Southwest said in a statement that the pilot “has been removed from duty.”

“Customers were accommodated on other flights and we apologize for the disruption to their travel plans,” the airline’s statement said.

Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit pilots from flying within eight hours of consuming any amount of alcohol. Pilots also can’t fly if their blood alcohol concentration is 0.04 or higher. That’s half the legal limit for driving a car in Georgia.

The pilot was booked at the Chatham County jail in Savannah and released on a $3,500 bond. A phone number listed for him in New Hampshire was not in service Thursday. It was not immediately known if he had an attorney.

Texas officials discriminated against residents based on race and national origin in distributing $1 billion in Hurricane Harvey aid in 2021, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development affirmed on Wednesday.

Since the state General Land Office has shown a “sustained unwillingness” to voluntarily correct the unequal treatment, which HUD contends violates the Fair Housing Act, the agency has referred the case to the Department of Justice.

Additional fact-finding by HUD investigators since their preliminary finding of discrimination in 2022 only reinforced that conclusion, Christina Lewis, Region VI director of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, wrote Wednesday in a letter to GLO and two community groups who originally filed the complaint.

“GLO… focused Mitigation resources in communities that benefited smaller populations of rural White Texans over communities of urban Black and Hispanic Texans, particularly those closer to the coast and more prone to flooding from hurricanes and other natural disasters,” Lewis said.

Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham dismissed the move as a stunt by “political activists embedded in HUD by the Biden Administration.”

“The fact is, the HUD-approved plan overwhelmingly benefited minorities and there simply was no discrimination,” Buckingham said in a statement. “No other state has performed as efficiently and effectively as Texas in providing disaster recovery and mitigation funding to communities and residents.”

Buckingham said the Justice Department previously rejected “fake claims” from HUD because they lacked substance. Her spokesperson said she was referring to a 2023 letter in which the U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke returned a referral from the housing agency to HUD for further investigation.

The two community groups, Texas Housers and Northeast Action Collective, on Thursday praised HUD’s action and said in a statement that the findings “confirmed what communities of color in Texas have long suspected.” They called on the Justice Department to force Texas to comply with federal discrimination laws since the state had bucked a voluntary agreement with the housing department.

At issue is how the federal government says Texas misspent some of the $4.3 billion in disaster recovery aid it received from Congress in 2019.

The General Land Office in 2021, under then-Commissioner George P. Bush, distributed a $1 billion tranche via a funding competition it designed for local governments. But the governments of Houston and Harris County received $0 from the contest, despite the county having the most deaths and property damage from the storm.

A Houston Chronicle investigation found the aid disproportionately went to inland counties with less damage from the storm than coastal ones hit hardest. The newspaper also found the land office steered money away from coastal communities the state measured were at highest risk of natural disasters and toward inland ones with a lower disaster risk.

Under pressure from irate Houston politicians of both parties, Bush canceled a planned second funding competition and announced plans to award $750 million directly to Harris County. But that did not satisfy all his critics.

HUD soon launched its own investigation. The agency’s conclusions, released in 2022, confirmed the Chronicle’s findings and said the unfair doling out of funds “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin” and “substantially and predictably disadvantaged minority residents, with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents.”

The land office revised its plan to distribute a second $1.2 billion tranche. But a Texas Tribune investigation found that, too, routed aid disproportionately to more white, inland counties at less risk of natural disasters.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

What action the Justice Department may take is unclear with President Donald Trump, an ally of Abbott, returning to office next week. Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the original article, click here.

During his presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to launch “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America,” using the U.S. military and a 1798 law known as the Alien Enemies Act — a statute that gives the president the power to detain immigrants during times of war.

Trump hasn’t elaborated on his plan, but immigration attorneys, immigrant rights advocates and criminology professors say the Trump administration wouldn’t have to conduct large workplace raids or round up immigrants in the streets. Instead, it could begin immediately targeting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — including 1.6 million in Texas — by using the current deportation apparatus used by local police, jails and federal agents.

All immigrants — even if they have legal status — can face deportation if they’re accused of serious crimes like murder, domestic violence, drunk driving, sexual assault, or murder. Congress is now considering a bill that would let officials deport immigrants for less serious crimes like shoplifting.

In the past decade, at least 70% of arrests by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE — the federal agency in charge of deporting immigrants — have been handoffs by local police or federal prisons, according to an analysis by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit that provides legal training to people who work with immigrants.

“It is therefore states, and their internal law enforcement and criminal legal systems that power the mass detention and mass deportation system,” the group said in its analysis.

Here’s what you need to know about how deportations work in the U.S.:

Since the 1980s, Congress began to focus on deporting immigrants accused of crimes, passing a series of laws that expanded the U.S. government’s authority to detain immigrants as part of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs, according to “Immigration Detention as Punishment,” a legal article by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an immigration attorney and law professor at Ohio State University.

Congress at the time created what has become a central part of immigration enforcement, known as a detainer — when federal agents check the immigration status of a person being held in a local jail or federal prison and decide to take custody of them for deportation. Federal agents initially issued detainers for immigrants accused of drug-related crimes but have since expanded the types of crimes that can result in a detainer.

In 1986, President Reagan also signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided amnesty to an estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants but also made it illegal for employers to hire immigrants who didn’t have legal permission to work in the U.S. That provision allows federal agents to raid worksites and ask employees to prove their immigration status.

During the Clinton administration, Congress expanded the list of deportable crimes for both undocumented and legal immigrants. That law created the 287(g) program that lets ICE deputize local police to question jail inmates about their immigration status and train some local police to serve immigration-related warrants.

As of December 2024, ICE had 287(g) agreements with 135 police departments, sheriff’s offices and jails in 21 states, including 26 in Texas, according to ICE’s website.

Under the George W. Bush administration, ICE piloted a program known as Secure Communities, starting in Harris County. The data-sharing program allowed local police to send the fingerprints of anyone they arrested to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to check their immigration status. ICE would then decide whether to issue a detainer if agents believed the inmate was deportable.

The Obama administration expanded the program to all 50 states, according to the ICE website. President Obama would earn the sobriquet “the deporter-in-chief” for deporting the largest number of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history. About 34% of the more than 9 million deportations recorded between 1892 and 2022 happened during the Obama administration, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Since the early ‘90s, there’s been a series of shifts that have gotten more punitive toward immigrants — and more restrictive — that has led to increased deportation,” said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine.

Texas could serve as a model for how states could help Trump’s deportation efforts by finding ways to arrest more immigrants, said Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director at Detention Watch Network.

In the past four years, Texas has allocated over $3 billion to immigration enforcement by sending state police and the National Guard to different parts of the Texas-Mexico border to arrest, detain and prosecute people crossing the Rio Grande — many of whom say they are seeking political asylum in the U.S.

The state has also prosecuted thousands of migrants for misdemeanors such as trespassing, then handed them over to the federal government for deportation.

In 2017, Texas lawmakers passed a law to punish local and state government entities and college campuses that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials or enforce immigration laws. And in 2023 passed Senate Bill 4, which would make illegally entering the country a state crime. That law is currently on hold after the U.S. Department of Justice sued to overturn it.

“What’s going on in Texas could become a model around the country, like the way that they have weaponized the criminal justice system in Texas to target immigrants,” Ghandehari said.

Immigration attorneys said that among the people most vulnerable to deportation are those who currently have an order to leave the country and those with pending immigration cases.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, immigration judges ordered the deportation of 2.3 million people between fiscal years 2015 and 2024. About 35% of those cases were people who didn’t appear in court when a judge issued a deportation order, making them likely targets for Trump’s deportation efforts.

Roughly 3.5 million immigration cases were pending at the end of fiscal year 2024.

Some immigrants are seeking asylum; others seek to remain in the country on other grounds, such as having U.S. citizen family members who economically depend on them. Most did not have a lawyer to help them navigate the complex federal immigration system.

Currently, nearly 3 million people have legal permission to work and live in the U.S. under various federal programs that don’t provide a path to permanent legal status or citizenship. The programs can be renewed or scrapped at the discretion of each new presidential administration.

For example, as of now, more than 1.1 million immigrants from 17 countries are enrolled in Temporary Protected Status, a program Congress created in 1990 that allows immigrants from countries struck by natural disasters or deemed too dangerous by the government to live and work in the U.S. This program has been renewed by each president since then and protects people from countries like Haiti, Ukraine, Honduras, Nepal, Syria and Venezuela — which has the largest share of enrollees with nearly 600,000.

Immigrant rights advocates worry that Trump will cancel the program, making the people enrolled easy targets for deportation because the federal government already has their personal information.

But not every immigrant is deportable, even if they’re in the country illegally or lose legal protection. An immigrant’s home country must have diplomatic relations with the U.S. and be willing to accept deportees. Currently, Venezuela doesn’t have diplomatic relations with the U.S.

Still, Tom Homan, a Trump immigration adviser with the unofficial title of “border czar,” said the Trump administration will overcome that challenge.

“We’re hoping that President Trump will work with Venezuela, like he did with Mexico and El Salvador, and get these countries to take them back,” Homan said during a Sunday morning news show in early January. “If they don’t, they’re still gonna be deported. They’re just gonna be deported to a different country.”

Congress is currently debating the Laken Riley Act, which would require ICE to detain undocumented immigrants accused of less serious crimes such as burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting — and would significantly widen the deportation pipeline.

The bill is named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student killed in February 2024 by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border through El Paso in 2022. Months before the killing, Ibarra was arrested on a shoplifting charge at a Georgia Walmart but was later released.

The case received a lot of public attention, with many conservative lawmakers pointing to the case as an example of why the country needs to adopt even stricter immigration laws.

It’s unclear how many people could be deported if the act is passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump.

But it’s just the latest example of Congress expanding the criminal justice system to enforce immigration laws, said Rocio Paez Ritter, a sociology and criminology associate professor at the University of Arkansas. Paez Ritter said many studies show immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.

“But unfortunately, the public believes otherwise,” she said.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the original article, click here.

Seven state employees have been fired for improperly accessing — and in some cases, stealing money from — accounts of thousands of Texans who receive Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance, The Texas Tribune has confirmed.

Four of those employees were fired in December in what is believed to be the largest data breach in the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s history after officials say they had accessed the personal account information of 61,104 Texans without a clear business reason.

In separate cases earlier last year, one employee was fired after officials said she illegally possessed information on the public assistance accounts of 3,392 people and another two were fired after $270,000 was stolen from some 500 food stamp accounts, according to the health agency’s watchdog arm, the state’s Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. The office has referred those three individuals to local district attorney’s offices for prosecution.

The seven firings, from four separate incidents in the past year, are remarkable because Texas’ entire apparatus for investigating fraud in public assistance programs in the gargantuan $93.4 billion Texas Health and Human Services Commission was built to focus on outside actors, such as providers or retailers and clients themselves. These cases, however, show threats from within the agency, impacting the public benefits of several low-income and disabled adults and children who live in Texas.

First reported publicly by the Texas Attorney General’s Office on Jan. 6, the most recent breach impacted 61,404 account holders who had either applied or received assistance between June 2021 and December 2024 from the state’s Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that is commonly referred to as food stamps.

On Friday, the social services agency will begin notifying all 61,104 individuals by first-class mail of the breach and that the state will be offering two years of free credit monitoring to them. Those who believe they were affected by the breach can call 866-362-1773 with questions and use the reference number B138648.

“The Texas Health and Human Services Commission is notifying recipients of agency services that their protected health, personal identifying or sensitive personal information may have been inappropriately accessed, used or disclosed,” according to a draft of the news release the agency plans to publish Friday. “HHSC recommends that affected individuals carefully review their accounts and health care provider, insurance company, and financial institution statements to make sure their account activity is correct.”

So far, officials have not offered a price tag on the cost of this breach.

Because the investigation is ongoing, officials have not released the names of the fired employees and would not confirm on Friday if any personal information of the 61,104 was leaked to the public or if any of their funds were stolen.

Collectively, the cases are the latest reminder of how large of a target to criminals the state’s database of personal data involving its poorest residents is and raises new questions about TIERS, the decades old computer system where employee-accessed information was stored. The system houses applications for Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance programs.

The agency has asked the Texas Legislature for $300 million to update its eligibility and enrollment processes, including to the TIERS system, which was also at the center of problems during the resumption of Medicaid health insurance enrollment rules after the COVID-19 pandemic had ended. Texas removed, sometimes erroneously, more than 2 million individuals, mostly children, from the program once the emergency was declared over and the federal government resumed requirements that clients renew their Medicaid applications.

Nearly all — 8,386 — of the 9,500 staffers who work in the agency’s access and eligibility services division have access to personal account information, including dates of birth, home addresses, income and health information of people enrolled in various public assistance programs. But in all four major incidents that resulted in the seven firings, these division employees violated agency rules when they were caught either accessing client information without a legitimate business reason, state officials confirmed.

In the breach affecting the 61,104 Texans, a private contractor alerted agency officials on Nov. 21 of potential suspicious activity. Officials later connected the activity to eligibility division employees.

The case surfaced publicly on Jan. 6 when the agency, by law, notified the Texas attorney general’s office that a data breach had occurred. While the initial report to the attorney general’s office had indicated the private information of at least 250 beneficiaries had occurred, the agency updated that figure on Friday to 61,104.

Going forward, the agency insisted it is “strengthening internal security controls and working to implement fraud prevention measures, including enhanced monitoring and alerts to detect suspicious activity,” per its news release.

The agency’s office of inspector general continues to investigate the latest breach.

Created in 2003, the inspector general’s office is designed to concentrate on rooting out nefarious activities from outsiders. While it conducts internal affairs investigations of employees, the office has never been set up to focus primarily on state employees involved in security breaches that could result in fraud, according to the inspector general’s office.

The office also relies mostly on referrals from the public and agencies and while it has methods to investigate data activity, the office does not monitor various state databases on a daily basis to check whether state employees are properly handling data.

While agency employees have historically been investigated for violation of rules, three incidents last year have now alerted the inspector general’s office to focus more deeply at data-handling that has the potential to turn into public assistance fraud.

On Jan. 31, a member of the public reported that an employee in the eligibility division was changing personal identifying numbers, or PINs, on clients’ cards and selling the cards for half their worth in cash. Investigators found that the employee had changed PINs on 211 food stamp cards, leading to $81,638 stolen. The employee was fired and the case referred to local prosecutors.

Then in March, an internal investigation found that another division employee had emailed to her personal account a spreadsheet of people in the state’s community care program, which pays for attendant care for older and disabled Texans, a violation of the agency’s data-handling rules. She was fired and the case was referred to local prosecutors because the use or possession of such information is illegal in Texas.

Then last summer, the inspector general’s office found another division employee who had changed the PINs on 391 food stamp cards, using the benefits for illegal purchases resulting in a loss of $190,518. The employee was fired and the matter referred to a local district attorney.

With the latest large breach, the agency is warning all public assistance recipients to carefully examine their account activity, especially those with food stamp benefits.

“SNAP recipients, specifically, are being advised to check their Lone Star card transactions for potential fraudulent activity at YourTexasBenefits.com,” the agency release states. “Anyone who suspects they are a victim of fraud should call 2-1-1 and choose option 3 to report the fraud, contact law enforcement and visit a local agency office to have benefits replaced.”

The agency release also hinted that more employee terminations could be coming.

“As the agency’s internal review continues, additional affected individuals identified will be notified,” the release noted. “Employees involved in similar inappropriate and illegal conduct will be terminated and referred to the appropriate authorities.”

Texas Health and Human Services Commission accounts for nearly a third of the state’s budget, according to its latest strategic plan. About 91% of the agency’s expenses is for grants and client services.

The commission is one of two agencies under the health services umbrella. The other is the Department of State Health Services. Together the two employ about 50,000 people.

Of all the public assistance programs that the commission manages for Texans, the food stamp program is a frequent criminal target. In the fiscal year ending Aug. 31, the agency distributed more than $7 billion to Texans who qualified for grocery assistance, which can amount to roughly $200 to $1,500 per family depending on family size. In December, 3.6 million Texans received food assistance.

Food stamp assistance is fully funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. State dollars are used to pay for half of the state agency’s costs to administer the food stamp program and the other half is paid for by the federal government.

In its latest strategic plan, the agency lists as a goal to reduce waste in the food stamp program by 10% by focusing on employees more diligently evaluating applications. It does not mention employee-generated breaches or fraud, but instead focuses on impropriety among contractors of services.

“The OIG focus on high-risk providers protects against fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer funds and ensures that Texans receive the services they need,” the plan’s section on accountability states.

The most common fraud schemes the health agency’s inspector general’s office investigates involves clients selling their food stamp card balances “to a small store or food truck in exchange for cash,” according to the investigative agency’s December report. “A retailer typically gives cash to the (cardholder) at a discounted rate in exchange for their benefits. Then, the retailer uses the full amount of the benefits to buy inventory for their business.”

In the fiscal year ending in August, the inspector general’s office completed 17,075 investigations of retailers and clients, recovering $54.4 million. They referred 100 cases for criminal prosecution.

The original article was published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

AMARILLO(AP) – The Texas judge who previously halted approval of the nation’s most common method of abortion ruled Thursday that three states can move ahead with another attempt to roll back federal rules and make it harder for people across the U.S. to access the abortion drug mifepristone.

Idaho, Kansas and Missouri requested late last year to pursue the case in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling finding that abortion opponents who first filed the case lacked the legal right to sue.

The only federal judge based in Amarillo is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a nominee of former President Donald Trump who in recent years ruled against the Biden administration on several issues, including immigration and LGBTQ protections.

The states want the federal Food and Drug Administration to prohibit telehealth prescriptions for mifepristone and require that it be used only in the first seven weeks of pregnancy instead of the current limit of 10 weeks. They also want to require three in-person doctor office visits instead of none to get the drug.

That’s because, the states argue, efforts to provide access to the pills “undermine state abortion laws and frustrate state law enforcement,” according to court documents.

Meanwhile, Kacsmaryk said they shouldn’t be automatically discounted from suing in Texas just because they’re outside the state.

The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that the case should have been settled when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously preserved access to mifepristone last year, where the justices issued a narrow ruling finding that abortion opponents who first filed the case lacked the legal right to sue.

Kacsmaryk’s decision “has left the door open for extremist politicians to continue attacking medication abortion in his courtroom,” the ACLU said.

The ruling comes days before Trump begins his second term as president, so his administration will likely be representing the FDA in the case. Trump has repeatedly said abortion is an issue for the states, not the federal government, though he’s also stressed on the campaign trail that he appointed justices to the Supreme Court who were in the majority when striking down the national right to abortion in 2022.

In the years since, abortion opponents have increasingly targeted abortion pills, largely due to most U.S. abortions being carried out using drugs rather than through surgical procedures. So far, at least four states — Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire and Tennessee — have seen Republicans introduce bills aimed at banning pills. None take the same approach as Louisiana, which last year classified the drugs as controlled dangerous substances.

Previously, Kacsmaryk sided with a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations that wanted the FDA to be forced to rescind entirely its approval of mifepristone in 2000.

Yet the states are pursuing a narrower challenge. Rather than target the approval entirely, they sought to undo a series of FDA updates that have eased access.

But while the states’ leaders are pushing to severely limit access to the drugs, voters in Missouri sent a different message in November when they approved a ballot measure to undo one of the nation’s strictest bans. In Idaho, abortion is banned at all stages of pregnancy. In Kansas, abortion is generally legal up until the 22nd week of pregnancy.

Across the U.S., 13 states under Republican legislative control bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with some exceptions, and four more ban it after the first six weeks — before women often know they’re pregnant.

Some Democratic-controlled states have adopted laws seeking to shield from investigations and prosecutions the doctors who prescribe the pills via telehealth appointments and mail them to patients in states with bans. Those prescriptions are a major reason a study found that residents of states with bans are getting abortions in about the same numbers as they were before the bans were in place.

Mifepristone is usually used in combination with a second drug for medication abortion, which has accounted for more than three-fifths of all abortions in the U.S. since the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

The drugs are different than Plan B and other emergency contraceptives that are usually taken within three days after possible conception, weeks before women know they’re pregnant. Studies have found they’re generally safe and result in completed abortions more than 97% of the time, which is less effective than procedural abortions.

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Whitehurst reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) – A Texas truck driver charged in the deaths of 53 migrants who rode in a sweltering tractor-trailer with no air conditioning pleaded guilty Thursday over the 2022 tragedy that became the nation’s deadliest smuggling attempt across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Homero Zamorano Jr. pleaded guilty in federal court in San Antonio to one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death, causing serious bodily injury, and placing lives in jeopardy; one count of transportation of aliens resulting in death; and one count of transportation of aliens resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy.

The 48-year-old could face a maximum sentence of life in prison, the Justice Department announced. Zamorano is scheduled to be sentenced on April 24.

Mark Stevens, Zamorano’s attorney, said in an email that he was unable to comment on a pending case.

Authorities say Zamorano, who drove the truck, and other men charged in the smuggling attempt 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.

Temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit while migrants screamed and banged the walls of the trailer for help or tried to claw their way out, investigators said.

The truck had been packed with 67 people, and the dead included 27 from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, according to Mexican authorities. Prosecutors have said migrants paid up to $15,000 each to be taken across the U.S. border.

The incident happened on a remote San Antonio back road on June 27, 2022. Police officers detained Zamorano after spotting him hiding in nearby brush, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. A search of Zamorano’s cellphone showed calls concerning the smuggling run.

Surveillance video of the 18-wheeler passing through a Border Patrol checkpoint showed the driver matched Zamorano’s description, according to the indictment.

Also charged previously in the tragedy was Christian Martinez, also of Texas, who with Zamorano was arrested shortly after the migrants were found. Martinez has since pleaded guilty to smuggling-related charges.

Four Mexican nationals were also arrested in the case in 2023. And in August, a suspect arrested in Guatemala was charged with helping coordinate the smuggling attempt. U.S. authorities said they would seek the extradition of Rigoberto Román Miranda Orozco, who is charged with six counts of migrant smuggling resulting in death or serious injury. Authorities alleged he is connected to four Guatemalan migrants in the trailer, three of whom died, and faces up to life in prison if convicted.

According to the indictment against Miranda Orozco, the smugglers had forced the migrants to give up their cellphones before getting inside the trailer, leaving them no way to call for help. An unknown powder was spread around the trailer to prevent the smell of human cargo from being detected by patrol dogs at border inspection stations.

When the trailer was opened in San Antonio, 48 migrants were already dead. Another 16 were taken to hospitals, where five more died. President Joe Biden called the tragedy “horrifying and heartbreaking.”

Those who died were seeking better lives. News of the trailer full of bodies was met with horror in cities and villages accustomed to seeing their young people leave, trying to flee poverty or violence in Central America and Mexico.

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 U.S.

The incident is the deadliest among tragedies that have claimed thousands of lives in recent decades as people attempt to cross the U.S. border from Mexico. Ten migrants died in 2017 after they were trapped inside a truck parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a sweltering truck southeast of San Antonio.

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Weber reported from Austin and Baumann from Bellingham, Washington.