A Guatemalan man who helped arrange the journey that ended with 53 migrants dead inside a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio was sentenced on Tuesday to 30 years in a United States federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia handed the sentence to Rigoberto Roman Miranda-Orozco, 39. He had pleaded guilty in July to conspiring to bring a migrant into the United States resulting in death, and to aiding and abetting the unlawful entry of migrants resulting in death and serious bodily injury.
The disaster unfolded on June 27, 2022, when emergency crews found the tractor-trailer abandoned on a remote road on the southern outskirts of San Antonio, near the I-35 corridor. Sixty-four migrants had endured a journey that began in Guatemala, wound through Mexico and crossed into the United States. Along the run from Laredo to San Antonio, the trailer’s air conditioning stopped working as outside temperatures approached 90 degrees, turning the sealed metal box lethal.
Forty-eight people were pronounced dead at the scene. Five more died in hospital from heat-related illness and dehydration — 53 dead in all, including six children and a pregnant woman. Twenty-one of the victims were Guatemalan nationals. Prosecutors said the migrants had paid as much as $15,000 each for passage, and investigators found evidence of the panic inside: some passengers had stripped off clothing against the heat, and scratch marks were gouged into the trailer’s interior walls where victims clawed at the metal trying to get out. “It was clear that they suffered tremendously in their last few hours on this earth,” U.S. Attorney Justin Simmons told reporters after the sentencing.
Miranda-Orozco admitted to arranging travel and accommodation for two of the migrants who died in the truck, and for a third who survived with grave injuries. He was arrested in Guatemala in August 2024 in a coordinated cross-border operation against the smuggling network, and extradited to the United States in March 2025.
His sentence is one piece of a prosecution that spans two countries. Nearly 20 people have been prosecuted in the United States and Guatemala over the 2022 tragedy. Felipe Orduna-Torres, identified by prosecutors as the leader of the U.S.-based smuggling cell, was sentenced to life in prison in June 2025, and his top assistant, Armando Gonzales-Ortega, received 83 years. Proceedings against other figures, including the truck driver, remain pending.
The San Antonio trailer remains one of the deadliest human-smuggling incidents ever recorded on the U.S.-Mexico border — and the case that federal officials continue to point to when they argue that the smuggling networks, not the migrants, are the ones profiting from the border chaos.
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