Archbishop of San Antonio on the immigrants who died in the trailer: "We are all responsible for those lives"

Locked in a trailer, overcrowded, dehydrated, on the verge of suffocation.

In their last moments, the migrants all turned towards the center of the vehicle in a prayer, "trusting in God and giving their lives," according to one of the survivors of the tragedy to the Archbishop of San Antonio, Texas, Gustavo García-Siller. .

The archbishop presided over a mass in Spanish this Sunday morning at the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, in memory of the 53 migrants who died in a trailer last Monday, the survivors and their families.

"Faith plays a very important role in the lives of migrants," he said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.

[“Monday morning I spoke with her.

She said she was doing well”: the mother of a young Honduran woman who died in the Texas truck speaks]

García-Seller offered details of the conversations he has had with the survivors, who, although they are in better health, "their situation remains very serious."

"The ones I've been able to talk to are patients who are doing much better," he said.

The group of migrants were in the vehicle in which more than 60 people were traveling in total.

"We began to prepare to die," one of the survivors told the archbishop of Mexican origin.

Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller.Damià Bonmatí / Telemundo News

Some of the survivors suffered from memory loss and are gradually recovering it.

Others shared with García-Siller what they experienced.

"It was a very dramatic situation, very desperate. And it is very easy to imagine a closed truck [...] It is a box without protection in terms of weather, be it hot or cold. No window. No water. No food. They had to doing their physical needs there [...] is a horrible thing," said the priest.

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The Archbishop of San Antonio described the business of the coyotes that transport undocumented people between Mexico and the United States as a "culture of death", in which people's lives do not matter, but money does.

He also asked Congress to pass a reform to regulate immigration to the United States and said that the lives of migrants are in everyone's hands.

"As long as we don't regulate migration, as long as congresses don't have the guts, they don't have the strength, the will, the courage, the strength to address the immigration part. We, in the United States: Americans, residents or citizens, we are responsible for those lives ", said.

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He also questioned whether illegal immigration is really a crime and said that the United States has resources and could allow people who come to work to enter legally.

"Our economy is doing very well, there is a need for workers."

The death of the 53 immigrants in the truck is one of the deadliest events on record on a route fraught with danger for people seeking a better life in the United States.

The group was traveling without water or food, crammed in extreme heat and covered in meat relish to outwit police dogs.

[He was the first to reach the truck and cries as he remembers the migrant girl he helped]

In a trailer, he was on the road for at least four hours, between Laredo and San Antonio, without the driver knowing that the air conditioning had failed.

He passed a Border Patrol checkpoint but agents let him through.

Three hours later, a neighbor found the trailer, with dozens of dead inside.

Archbishop García-Siller explained that the community in San Antonio is helping affected immigrants and family members who have traveled to collect the bodies of the deceased.

"We already receive several at Catholic Charities and we are helping. We are going to continue helping their relatives as much as we can. If they come, they are lodging, because we accommodate them. If they need some expenses, too," he said.