“We Are Going to Die In Here”
Sometime after ten o’ clock on the night of May 13, 2003, at least 74 illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Dominican Republic crowded into the airtight container of an eighteen-wheeler in Harlingen, bound for Houston and a better life. Along the way, seventeen of them succumbed to dehydration, hyperthermia, and suffocation; two more would perish a short time later. In this excerpt from the just-released Dying to Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History, Jorge Ramos describes what it was like inside the sweltering trailer on that horrible night.
