"A Deadly Passage: 'Stay Strong, My Brother'"
the burl osborne award — SHOWCASE gold winner
Texas Monthly
Elliott Woods
02/24/2025
After news broke that 53 migrants had died in the back of a tractor trailer in South Texas—the deadliest immigration-related disaster in modern American history—the story briefly captured international headlines. But as interest diminished, several pressing questions remained: Why and how, exactly, did it happen? Who were the migrants and smugglers involved? And who was ultimately responsible?
Elliott Woods, a multi-time ASME nominee, devoted nearly two and a half years to turning up answers. He traveled throughout South Texas, Mexico, and Guatemala, building a source list that exceeded ninety people. He mined thousands of pages of evidentiary documents and dug into three decades worth of U.S. Border Patrol databases to document trends related to funding and personnel as well as migrant rescues, deaths, and encounters. He was the only reporter to attend the duration of the two-week federal trial for two of the smugglers involved. He cultivated relationships with sensitive sources for months, gradually gaining the trust of a family that eventually connected him with one of the disaster’s eleven survivors—now the first survivor to be interviewed at length about the experience.
Together, "A Deadly Passage" and "Among the 53" represent the first complete account of the historic June 2022 disaster. At a moment when the federal government is supercharging its immigration-enforcement and border-security apparatus, this reporting is profoundly urgent. These stories expose the brutal harms caused by a U.S. system that is largely ineffective but has nevertheless been expanded by both political parties for decades—and continues to put migrants at grave risk.
These accounts also reveal the consequences for the families of the migrants involved. In the first piece, “A Deadly Passage,” Woods chronicles the stories of five of the victims’ families, laying bare the financial and emotional toll of the disaster while also exploring the broad geographical scope and deep historical roots of what is often reductively referred to as a border crisis. Getting access to these families was itself a feat. Woods first scoured various government reports, including from the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to compile a definitive list of victims and their hometowns; read local social media postings and Spanish-speaking news outlets to try and identify surviving family members; and then turned to old-fashioned gumshoe journalism by simply showing up in their cities and villages and asking around.
The second piece, “Among the 53,” focuses on the experience of a survivor, Begaí Santiago Hipólito, and his younger brother Mariano. Their story provides rare and remarkable insight into the inner workings of migrant-smuggling networks, which have only become more professionalized, resourceful, and profitable as border militarization has hardened. Woods weighs the influence of global economic policies that have allowed these networks to flourish, raising timely questions about who bears responsibility when tragedy inevitably strikes.
Ultimately, though, this is a wrenching personal tale told through restrained yet powerful prose made possible by the relentless efforts of a reporter determined to do justice to a historic, awful event.
LINK to Part One online
LINK to Part Two online
Links to online episodes:
Submitted by Josh Alvarez.