In San Antonio Smuggling Case, a Fatal Journey in a Packed and Sweltering Truck
July 25, 2017 by admin
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They banged on the trailer’s walls, to get the driver’s attention, but the truck did not stop. The driver later told federal investigators what the immigrants may have soon discovered: that the trailer’s cooling system did not work and its four vent holes were probably clogged. But the immigrants found a small vent hole that was open, and took turns breathing through it to get some air.
The driver finally put the brakes on, and the immigrants were so weak that they fell over. The door opened again, this time in the parking lot of a San Antonio Walmart early Sunday, revealing a horrific scene of bodies upon bodies.
Ten people died during the journey or later at hospitals. Nearly 30 others were hospitalized.
The descriptions of the immigrants’ journey, as told to federal investigators, were revealed in a criminal complaint as the driver of the truck was arraigned in federal court on Monday in San Antonio. The driver, James M. Bradley Jr., 60, of Clearwater, Fla., was charged under a federal law against knowingly transporting people who are in the country illegally — a law that provides for an unlimited prison term or capital punishment, if the crime results in a death.
Even as President Trump has made it clear that he will not tolerate illegal immigration, the tragedy illustrated the extremes people will go to to sneak into the United States and opened a window into human smuggling at the border, a clandestine world of drug cartels, rafts, “stash houses” and empty promises.
It quickly became a political issue in Texas. The Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who has long denounced illegal immigration, took to social media to link the case to the state’s new and highly controversial law banning so-called sanctuary cities — those that do not cooperate with immigration agencies.
“Sanctuary cities entice people to believe they can come to America and Texas and live outside the law,” Mr. Patrick wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday. “Sanctuary cities also enable human smugglers and cartels. Today, these people paid a terrible price and demonstrate why we need a secure border and legal immigration reform.”
State Representative Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat, said the comments went “too far.”
Mr. Rodriguez said in a statement that when “10 people from any background perish under such horrific circumstances, it is an occasion deserving of solemnity and respect, not self-indulgent cheerleading.”
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Much was still unanswered on Monday, including exactly how many people had been in the truck, and how they managed to get to San Antonio undetected, since it was likely that the driver passed through a Border Patrol traffic checkpoint at some point after leaving Laredo.
Survivors who were interviewed by investigators said they had been loaded into the trailer from various locations in or near Laredo. Many of the details in the criminal complaint came from an immigrant who was hospitalized and who was referred to by the initials J.M.M.-J.
He was from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and with a group of 28 others had crossed the Rio Grande by raft in three trips. In addition to $5,500 he would owe his smugglers when he got to his final destination in San Antonio, people with ties to the Mexican criminal organization known as the Zetas cartel were paid in pesos for protection and for the raft crossing.
The Mexican man and the others in his group then hiked through the South Texas brush until the next day, when they were picked up by a vehicle and driven to the trailer. Another immigrant described waiting in a stash house in Laredo for 11 days with 23 other people before being loaded into the trailer.
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A third survivor, who was identified in the complaint by the initials H.L.-C. and was headed to Minnesota, told investigators that he and his brother crossed through in Laredo. “He stated he thought there were approximately 180 to 200 people in the tractor-trailer when he got in,” the complaint said.
By the time the police came to the truck Sunday morning, alerted by a Walmart employee, a number of immigrants had already fled, either in vehicles that picked them up before the police arrived or on foot.
The bodies of the 10 dead, all adult men, have been taken to the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office, which is working with other agencies to determine their identities, a spokeswoman said. Officials with the Mexican Consulate are also assisting. The men’s bodies will be returned to their families once their identities are established, a process involving fingerprint and DNA checks and other forensic tools that could take considerable time.
One man was a Guatemalan who had previously lived in the United States as a so-called Dreamer, one of the young immigrants protected from deportation by an Obama administration policy. But he had lost his protection because of a conviction for larceny and aggravated assault, said Silvia Mintz, a lawyer working for the Guatemalan Consulate in Houston.
How the survivors’ immigration status will be handled in the coming weeks remained unclear. All were in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Immigration lawyers said they should be regarded as crime victims, and as witnesses to a crime, which in some cases can protect them from deportation.
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“We are exploring every avenue, and hopefully we can get them some immigration relief,” Ms. Mintz said.
On Monday morning, the driver, Mr. Bradley, made a brief appearance in Federal District Court, answering, “Yes, I do,” when Judge Betsy Chestney asked if he understood the maximum penalties. It was unclear whether prosecutors would seek the death penalty, which is infrequently used in federal court.
Mr. Bradley told federal authorities that he was unaware of his human cargo. According to court documents, Mr. Bradley said when he stopped at Walmart to urinate, he heard movement in the trailer and opened it.
He said he was knocked down by fleeing immigrants and said “he then noticed bodies just lying on the floor like meat,” according to the criminal complaint.
Mr. Bradley said he tried to administer aid, but he did not call 911.
Mr. Bradley’s remarks to investigators raised a host of questions, including why he ended up in San Antonio at all. He told investigators that his ultimate destination was Brownsville, where he was supposed to deliver the trailer to its new owner. Mr. Bradley told investigators, however, that he was not given a delivery address in Brownsville. In addition, if the truck was in Laredo and bound for Brownsville, San Antonio is in the opposite direction.
Court records from Colorado and Florida appear to show a criminal history for Mr. Bradley. Those records belong to a James Bradley with the middle initial B., rather than M., of the same age and general physical appearance.
In 1996, James B. Bradley was arrested by the Aurora, Colo., police and charged with menacing with a deadly weapon and assault. He pleaded guilty in 1997 to a single felony charge and was sentenced to two years’ probation, but records show that the probation was revoked multiple times, putting him back in jail. In 2004, he was arrested in Tampa, Fla., while driving a car that had been reported stolen, and was charged with grand theft auto. State records do not make clear how the case was resolved.
Mr. Bradley’s nephew, Alton C. Bradley, 50, said he was shocked by the news of his uncle’s arrest.
“When I was talking with my aunts and sister, we couldn’t believe it was him pulling those immigrants behind in that trailer,” he said by telephone from Land O’ Lakes, Fla., adding that his uncle was always hauling produce, meat, seafood and more all over the country.
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“Just regular stuff that you haul from state to state, but nothing that was ever illegal,” he said. “So that’s why this is pretty shocking.”
Correction: July 24, 2017
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect description for the sentence for Tyrone Williams, a truck driver who was convicted in the deaths of 19 people in 2003. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole, but in 2010, a federal appellate court overturned his 19 life sentences. He was resentenced to 34 years in prison.
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Trump shames Sessions amid shake-up speculation
July 25, 2017 by admin
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President Donald Trump continued his public humiliation of his attorney general on Monday, and West Wing aides wondered whether other senior officials would exit the administration following a shake-up in the communications department.
Trump’s dressing-down of Jeff Sessions continued with a morning tweet labeling his top law enforcement official “beleaguered,” and aides and advisers said Trump was considering whether to make a change.
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Sessions, an Eagle Scout, was noticeably absent on a West Virginia stage as Trump spoke to a Boy Scout jamboree, flanked by other scouts in his administration.
And some White House and national security officials continued to speculate about the jobs of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,national security adviser H.R. McMaster and chief of staff Reince Priebus.
No one was publicly fired on Monday. In a White House in which rumored exits rarely materialize, it was unclear if anyone else was leaving the administration soon. Still, the uncertainty has distracted the White House at times from its legislative agenda and kept it from presenting a united front against investigations involving the 2016 Trump campaign.
The president has been frustrated since Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russia’s activities during the 2016 election, and Trump recently began airing those feelings in public. But replacing Sessions might not be easy. Some potential choices, like Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, once were keen on the job but have grown concerned about working in this administration, people close to them say. And the Senate would have to confirm any replacement pick.
One adviser said Trump would see firing Sessions as a way to have more control over special counsel Bob Mueller, who he has decided he cannot fire — at least for now.
Sessions was in the West Wing on Monday, though he didn’t meet Trump, a White House spokeswoman said. New communications director Anthony Scaramucci told POLITICO the president remained upset. Sessions was one of Trump’s first Capitol Hill supporters, but Scaramucci suggested the two men needed to have a serious conversation.
“The president remains disappointed in some of the ways the attorney general has handled certain situations,” Scaramucci said.
Scaramucci, whose arrival prompted the exit of press secretary Sean Spicer, said Sessions’ fate would be up to the president and Sessions. The attorney general has said he intends to stay in the job. Trump ignored a question from a reporter about the subject during a public appearance Monday.
One longtime business associate said Trump rarely fires employees but prefers to make their jobs unpleasant, as he’s done with Sessions.
“I worked with him for 16 years. I never saw him fire anybody. The issue about firing people only came when he went on the TV program ['The Apprentice'],” said Louise Sunshine, a longtime executive in Trump’s real estate company. “He would make it extremely clear you had made him angry, and you would go on his list. He would have a long memory and make your life miserable.”
“Maybe it’s easier if Jeff Sessions gets the message and resigns,” Sunshine said.
Talk that Trump and McMaster have been on the outs was fueled over the weekend by a Bloomberg View article reporting on multiple headaches for McMaster at the White House, as well as a POLITICO story detailing how Trump has been dismissive of McMaster’s views on Afghanistan policy.
A National Security Council aide in the George W. Bush administration who remains in touch with the White House and a Trump transition aide separately said that, should he leave, McMaster would likely be replaced either by CIA Director Mike Pompeo or by Bush’s former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. A reported early candidate to be Trump’s secretary of state, Bolton is a regular visitor to the White House, where he has developed a strong rapport with the president, the former NSC aide said.
Several White House officials on Monday denied that McMaster was on his way out, though they acknowledged he has a contentious relationship with Trump. Rather, they said, McMaster is in the cross hairs of senior West Wing aides, who they said had tried to oust him by leaking damaging — and, McMaster allies say, false — information to the media.
NSC staffers threw a surprise birthday party for McMaster early Monday evening on the balcony of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It was standing room only and paid for by the staffers, one White House official said. Top aides Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Tom Bossert attended the gathering, where there was singing and chocolate cake for the general, who turned 55 on Monday.
“The president would like the leaking to stop about getting rid of McMaster,” Scaramucci said. A spokesman for McMaster declined to comment.
Meanwhile, not only McMaster’s fate but also that of Tillerson was a hot conversation topic among attendees at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado last week.
Tillerson has grown increasingly frustrated in his job and even lost his temper with White House aides as he battles with Trump aides over personnel and policy matters — from State Department nominations to the U.S. position on a dispute between Qatar and its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. (Tillerson has defended Qatar from its neighbors’ charges of supporting terrorism, but Trump has repeatedly contradicted that position.)
One source familiar with conversations Tillerson has had recently with associates said Trump’s top diplomat feels he is “not being allowed to do his job” and is reconsidering how long he is willing to stay. Tillerson initially planned to stay for at least a year, the source said, but now “he’s no longer wedded to that idea.” Some Tillerson allies believe that, like McMaster, he is the target of a whisper campaign intended to undermine his stature.
“Thought never crossed his mind,” R.C. Hammond, a State Department spokesman, said of the idea Tillerson might leave early. “Plenty of work to do.”
In the West Wing, aides openly mused about the fate of Priebus. With Scaramucci’s hiring, Priebus no longer controls the communications department — which is “the most important to Trump,” one person said — and has seen his role diminished in political and policy decisions too.
Scaramucci told POLITICO Monday he wanted a positive relationship with Priebus and that comments on his job standing “have to come straight from the president.” Priebus has told others he wants to make it one year before leaving.
Scaramucci said there would be changes in his communications shop — but he was still evaluating the landscape.
“Senior people have gone to the comms people and said, leak this or leak that on this person or that person,” Scaramucci said.
“The comms department reports to me. I report to the president. It has to stop, and I’ve told them that. If it doesn’t stop, I’ll fire all of you.”
Nancy Cook contributed to this report.