Smugglers sentenced to decades in prison three years after 53 immigrants found dead in Texas trucks.

Two smugglers who have committed federal charges with Deaths of 53 immigrants Decades of imprisonment were found Friday in the back of a sultry trailer in Texas in 2022.

Felipe Orduna-Torres, 32, and Armando Gonzales-Ortega, 55, will be the first of several defendants sentenced in the San Antonio tragedy, which remains the country’s deadliest human smuggling attempt across the U.S.-Mexico border. In March, the jury reviewed About an hour Death and harm are caused before convicting part of a conspiracy to smuggle humans.

Orduna-Torres, who Prosecutor’s description According to CBS affiliates, the leader of the smuggling operation was sentenced to two life sentences and a third sentence of another 20 years. Gonzales-Ortega was sentenced to 87.5 years in prison. Prosecutors described Gonzales-Ortega as Orduna-Torres’ top assistant.

The two were also fined $250,000.

According to the prosecution in the case, 64 immigrants in the truck were from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, each paying between $12,000 and $15,000 to smuggle them to the United States. When they were placed in a trailer trailer, the air conditioner broke down and headed for San Antonio three hours away, they placed it in the Texas border city of Laredo.

Investigators said as the temperature inside the trailer rose, people inside screamed and hit the trailer’s walls for help or to try to grab their own way out. Most people eventually fainted. When the trailer opened in San Antonio, 48 people had died. Another 16 people were taken to the hospital, where five people died. The deceased included six children and a pregnant woman. Only 11 people survived in the car.

Shortly after the incident, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus described the scene as “verbal transcends words.”

“I don’t understand how anyone could be so cold that it would allow it to happen and run from the scene,” McManus explain.

Three years after the tragedy, Orduna-Torres and Gonzales-Ortega were sentenced.

Investigators say Orduna-Torres and Gonzales-Ortega work with human smuggling operations in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, sharing routes, guidelines, hiding houses, trucks and trailers. Orduna-Torres provided an address in Laredo where they will be picked up, where Gonzalez-Ortega met them there.

Five other people previously pleaded guilty to felony charges in smuggling cases, including truck drivers Homero Zamorano Jr. Zamorano faced his life when sentenced in December. this Other defendants It is scheduled to be sentenced later this year.

This incident is the deadliest of a tragedy that has claimed thousands of lives in recent decades as people try to cross the border from Mexico. Ten immigrants died in 2017 after being trapped in a truck at a store in Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 immigrants were found in a sultry truck southeast of San Antonio.