The weekend’s human-trafficking horror in Texas must have been grimly familiar for Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Eight people were found dead and 30 more severely injured inside a roasting tractor-trailer early Sunday in San Antonio, Texas. Two more died after being hospitalized.
In 2003, Homan worked on a scene that was similar to Sunday’s in many ways. It became known as the deadliest human-trafficking incident in the United States.
Nineteen bodies were found in a tractor-trailer in Victoria, Texas. At least 73 people had been crammed into the unventilated trailer. One of the dead was a 5-year-old boy.
“People weren’t standing with me in Victoria, Texas, in the back of a tractor-trailer with 19 dead aliens including a 5-year-old child laying dead under his father that suffocated in the back of this tractor-trailer,” Homan told CNN in an interview last month.
Homan was defending himself after he received criticism for saying undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” under the Trump administration.
Haunted by earlier cases
“Why am I so strong in what I’m trying to do?” Homan said. “Because people haven’t seen what Tom Homan’s seen … They haven’t seen the dead immigrants on a trail that were left stranded. They weren’t in Phoenix, Arizona, when these organizations were holding people hostage, raping the women, molesting the children, killing people that couldn’t pay their smuggling fees, doubling their smuggling fees after they got to the United States.”
He recalled experiences in the field that still haunt him, like the Victoria case.
“It bothered me greatly — I had nightmares,” Homan told the Watertown Daily Times newspaper in February 2016.
Driver sentenced to life
The dead boy, Homan recalled, was “found under his father wrapped in his arms. Through interviews we were told it was so hot people were passing out and dying. They knocked out the back lights on the truck to try to draw attention from other drivers. They wanted to put the child out the hole but his father protected him.”
The driver was convicted of 58 counts and sentenced to life, but in 2011 was resentenced to almost 34 years in prison.
In a statement issued Sunday, Homan condemned the “total indifference” the smugglers showed to their human cargo. And he called this weekend’s deaths a “stark reminder” of why human trafficking must be stopped.