Death toll in Texas migrant smuggling horror climbs to 53

The death toll in this week’s human-smuggling horror in Texas climbed to 53 on Wednesday — as tragic new details emerged about the fatal victims, including two brothers searching for the “American dream.’’

Doomed Honduran siblings Miguel Andino Caballero, 23, and  Fernando Jose Redondo Caballero, 18, were with Miguel’s girlfriend Margie Tamara Paz Grajera when all three perished after being stuffed into a sweltering truck and driven to San Antonio on Monday.

The young men’s mom, Karen Caballero, told the Honduran newspaper La Prensa on Wednesday that she last talked to her boys by phone Saturday.

“They told me, ‘Mom, I’m fine,’” the mother said. “They told me, ‘Mamita, I love you, I miss you. They asked me, ‘How is [Grandpa]? How is everyone?’

“They were loving, obedient, goal-oriented and hard-working boys,’’ she added of her children, who she were hoping for the “American dream.

“I gave them my blessing and told them to succeed.’’

Paz Grajera, a student at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, had recently written to her boyfriend on social media, “I love you my baby.”

Doomed 28-year-old Adela Betulia Ramirez Quezada, also of Honduras, was on her way to join her mother and sisters in Los Angeles when she died in the smuggling tragedy, too, the outlet said.

Quezada left her country 25 days ago, after her relatives hired a smuggler to get her across the border, the paper reported.

Migrants typically pay between $8,000 and $10,000 a pop to smugglers, who get them across the US-Mexico border, jam them in trucks and drive them to San Antonio, Texas, where the immigrants then take smaller vehicles to their final destinations, said Craig Larrabee, the acting special agent heading Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, to The Associated Press.

The Bexar County, Texas, Medical Examiner’s Office said Wednesday that it was in contact with officials from Honduras, as well as from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, in an effort to continue the grim work of identifying the dead.

“As of this morning, a total of 53 bodies of victims are at the BCMEO,” the office said in a statement. “Forty of the victims are male and 13 are female.”

The ME’s office added that 37 of the dead migrants had been potentially identified and that work was ongoing to complete the IDs.

The father of two young Guatemalan sisters, Carla and Griselda Carac Tambriz, confirmed their death Wednesday, after the girls surfaced as possible fatal victims a day earlier, according to the investigative outlet Reveal.

Early reports indicated that many of those who died aboard the truck were carrying Mexican documentation. 

José Luis Vásquez Guzmán, a 32-year-old from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was among those hospitalized in San Antonio, local authorities said. The municipal officials in the town of San Miguel Huautla said Tuesday that they were talking with Guzman’s mother about possibly visiting her son in the hospital.

His cousin may have been among those in the truck, too, said local grocery-store owner Felicitos Garcia.

“Life is tough here,” Garcia told AP. “People survive by growing their own crops like corn, beans and wheat. Sometimes the land gives, and sometimes it doesn’t when the rains arrive late. 

“There is nothing in place for people to have other resources. People live one day to the next.”

Trying to ID victims has been tough, given that some of the migrants had no identification card on them, or used fake or stolen ones.

Mexico’s foreign-affairs secretary Tuesday had shared the identities of two people he said were hospitalized in the tragedy — only for it to later come out that one of them had had her ID stolen last year in the state of Chiapas and she was safely at home.

The woman, Haneydi Antonio Guzman, 23, said she realized what had happened when family and friends started contacting people thinking she’d been a victim of Monday’s horror.

“That’s me on the ID, but I am not the person that was in the trailer and they say is hospitalized,” she said. “My relatives were contacting me worried, asking where I was.”

While the medical examiner has yet to issue a formal cause of death findings for those killed, first responders said Monday that the survivors were hot to the touch and suffering from apparent dehydration.

Rubén Minutti, the Mexico consul general in San Antonio, said Wednesday that several of the survivors were in critical condition, with brain damage and internal bleeding.

The truck had apparently suffered a mechanical failure when it was abandoned in the midst of a triple-digit heatwave Monday.

Authorities said the truck crossed the border in Laredo, 150 miles south of San Antonio. The truck then passed through a border checkpoint on Interstate 35, said Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas. It is unclear whether the migrants were in the truck when it apparently cleared the checkpoint.

The spot where the truck was discovered — by a railroad track — is a well-known spot for migrants to be dropped off after being smuggled across the border, Harry Jimenez, former deputy in charge of the San Antonio ICE office, told The Post on Tuesday.

The truck driver, a US citizen, was apprehended by authorities in a nearby field and taken into federal custody, police said. Two other men also were arrested on weapons charges.

Additional reporting by MaryAnn Martinez