Police are investigating after a train boxcar was found with six bodies in a rural Texas town near the Mexican border.
A Union Pacific train worker found the bodies in a train yard in Laredo, Texas, on Sunday afternoon.
It’s not clear how the victims died, but Laredo Police are investigating the grim discovery.
It’s unclear if the victims are migrants, but a similar instance in 2022 saw 46 people found dead in the back of a trailer in San Antonio, Texas.
Police were called and arrived to find one body on the ground and a partially opened gate to the seemingly abandoned tractor-trailer.
Body bags were soon spread across the surrounding ground in a grim symbol of the sheer scale of the tragedy.
A team from U.S. Homeland Security opened an investigation into ‘an alleged human smuggling event’ in coordination with local police.
The trailer where the bodies were found was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no working air conditioning.
San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said the 46 people who died had ‘families who were likely trying to find a better life.’
‘This is nothing short of a horrific human tragedy,’ he added.
South Texas has long been the busiest area for illegal border crossings.
People travel through in vehicles past Border Patrol checkpoints to San Antonio, the closest major city, from which point they disperse across the United States.
In 2019, the UK saw a similar tragic incident when 49 people were found dead in a lorry container which crossed the Channel twice in one week.
It visited Belgium three times, stopping off in Dunkirk and Calais, which are both hotspots for migrants trying to get to the UK.
The victims arrived in the UK in Purfleet, a port in Essex, where it was driven to an industrial estate.
Police were called, and the driver of the lorry, Mo Robinson, from County Armagh, was arrested on suspicion of murder.