Transporting undocumented migrants across America can seem like easy money – until everything goes wrong
ll James Matthew Bradley junior had to do was drive. He had been a trucker for 46 years and that was the only job he knew how to do anyway. On July 22nd 2017 he sat parked in a cul-de-sac in, a border city in Texas, and watched from his truck’s side mirrors as a series of vehicles pulled up to the back of his trailer, unloaded their contents and drove off. He wasn’t allowed to approach his cargo – there were strict rules around smuggling people, after all.
Bradley, who surrendered peacefully, had just presided over the deadliest smuggling attempt the nation had seen in 14 years. Ten people – migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, four of them teenagers – lost their lives. Or at least ten. Investigators never determined how many people had been packed into the trailer in Laredo – one survivor estimated 200 – or what happened to those who were driven off before the police arrived.
I first heard about the tragedy days after visiting Laredo to report on an evangelical pastor who was rumoured to be collaborating with smugglers. I returned several times over the following months. Driving up I-35 from the border to my home in Austin, I frequently found myself stopping outside that San Antonio Walmart.
As a boy, he would sit on the front porch and wait for the logging truck to go by. “This was when I was a little bitty guy,” he said. “I could hear that truck coming around the curve and I would run out in the yard and want him to blow that horn.” In his decades on the road, he was always searching for a horn that sounded just like that truck’s, but he never found one. Whenever Bradley’s teachers asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d say a truck driver.
Bradley came of age on the road when the figure of the American truck driver was steeped in the myth of the frontier. It is a rugged identity to which he still clings tightly. He refers to himself as a “Black cowboy” and an “outlaw” and describes bar fights and other tales from his decades in trucking as “like old Western stuff”. I often felt as if I was speaking with an actor playing a 1970s Hollywood version of a trucker.
The itinerant life turned Bradley into a loner, but he had friends from the road. One of them was Paul Terry. They were both black men who had started trucking in the early 1970s, when only 3% of long-haul truckers were black, and lived in Colorado, where they would meet for barbecues on breaks from driving. Terry, who is 75 years old and still works as a long-haul trucker, described Bradley as a loyal friend. But he was “not on top of the programme”, as he put it.
In Laredo, truckers have to wait a long time to pick up freight – often hours, occasionally days. Long-haul drivers get paid per mile or per load, so downtime generally goes uncompensated. This means that the city is home to a large transient population of idle and cash-strapped workers. Organised crime takes advantage of them. Laredo’s truck stops, strip clubs, motels and parking lots are known as places where you can find work in the shadows – or where the work will find you.
He told himself to remain calm as he drove. About 20,000 trucks pass through the I-35 Border Patrol checkpoint every day, only a fraction of which are flagged for further inspection. One of the things agents look for is what they call “nervous behaviour”. And Bradley was extremely nervous the first trip. “I had butterflies in my face,” he told me. But he made it through to the destination – a motel parking lot in San Antonio – without incident.
In recent years, Peña has seen more trucker clients rationalise smuggling as a pseudo-humanitarian endeavour. They would never smuggle marijuana or cocaine, they say, and convince themselves they’re helping migrants – who are fleeing poverty, violence, or both – “live the American dream, or whatever.” But drivers have no control over what is happening inside the trailer – the temperature, the number of people onboard, the availability of water.
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