Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app.Learn MoreGet hyperlocal forecasts, radar and weather alerts.Please enter a valid zipcode.Victims have been found without any identity documents and, in one case, with a stolen identity document.Remote villages lack telephone service to contact relatives and determine the whereabouts of missing migrants.Fingerprint data has to be shared and collated by different governments.More than a day after the sweltering trailer in which 51 migrants were abandoned to die in sweltering heat was discovered in San Antonio, the identities of the victims have barely been made public, illustrating the challenges they face. the authorities to locate people who cross the borders clandestinely.As of Tuesday afternoon, medical examiners had potentially identified 34 of the victims, said Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores, who represents the district where the truck was abandoned.Those identities were yet to be confirmed pending additional steps, such as fingerprinting, and she described it as a challenge with no timetable for when the process might end."It's a tedious, tedious, sad, difficult process," she said.The bodies were discovered Monday afternoon outside San Antonio in what is believed to be the country's deadliest smuggling episode on the US-Mexico border.More than a dozen people were taken to hospitals, including four children.Three people have been arrested.The tragedy came at a time when large numbers of migrants have been arriving in the United States, many of them taking dangerous risks to cross rapid rivers and canals and scorching desert landscapes.Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, a third more than a year ago.With little information on the victims, desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America frantically searched for news of their loved ones.According to Rubén Minutti, consul general of Mexico in San Antonio, it is believed that 27 of the deceased are of Mexican origin due to the documents they carried.Several survivors were in critical condition with injuries including brain damage and internal bleeding, he said.About 30 people had contacted the Mexican Consulate looking for their loved ones, authorities said.The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry said late Tuesday that it had confirmed two hospitalized Guatemalans and was working to identify three possible Guatemalans among the dead.The Honduran Foreign Ministry said it was working to confirm the identities of four people who died in the truck and who were carrying Honduran documents.Eva Ferrufino, a spokeswoman for the Honduran Foreign Ministry, said her agency is working with the Honduran consulate in south Texas to match names and fingerprints and complete identifications.The process is thorough because among the pitfalls are false or stolen documents.The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday identified two people who were hospitalized in San Antonio on Tuesday morning.But it turned out that one of the ID cards he shared on Twitter had been stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.Haneydi Antonio Guzmán, 23, was safe and sound in a mountain community more than 1,300 miles from San Antonio on Tuesday when she started receiving messages from family and friends.There is no telephone signal there, but she has access to the Internet.Journalists began showing up at her parents' home in Escuintla - the address on her stolen identity document found in the truck - hoping to find her concerned relatives.In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, municipal officials from San Miguel Huautla traveled late Tuesday to the community of José Luis Guzmán Vásquez, 32, to find out if his mother wanted to travel to San Antonio to be with him in Hospital.Manuel Velasco López, municipal secretary of San Miguel Huautla, said that another cousin had traveled with Guzmán Vásquez and was now considered missing.Another cousin, Alejandro López, told Milenio television that his family was dedicated to agriculture and construction and that they emigrated because "we have nothing more than to weave hats, palms and handicrafts.""Growing corn, wheat and beans is what we do in this region and that causes many of our people to emigrate and go to the United States," he said.The governor of the neighboring state of Puebla, Miguel Barbosa, triggered an information race in the city of Izúcar de Matamoros on Tuesday when he publicly said that two of the dead were from there.In the city with a large number of immigrants, everyone wondered if their friends or neighbors were among the dead found in the cargo truck in Texas.Rumors abounded, but the city government said no deaths had been confirmed in Izúcar.But going to the United States is such a tradition that most young people here at least consider it.“All young people start thinking about leaving (to the US) as soon as they turn 18,” said migrant activist Carmelo Castañeda, who works with the nonprofit organization Casa del Migrante."If there are no more visas, our people are going to continue dying."Migrants typically pay between $8,000 and $10,000 to be taken across the border and loaded onto a tractor-trailer and taken to San Antonio, where they are transferred to smaller vehicles for their final destinations in the United States, he said. Craig Larrabee, Acting Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio.Conditions vary widely, including how much water passengers get and whether they are allowed to carry cell phones, Larrabee said.Authorities believe the truck discovered Monday had mechanical problems when it was left alongside a railroad track in an area of ​​San Antonio surrounded by car wrecks brushing up against a busy freeway, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.San Antonio has been a recurring scene of tragedy and despair in recent years involving migrants in semis.Ten migrants died in 2017 after becoming trapped inside a truck parked at a San Antonio Walmart.In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a suffocating truck southeast of the city.More than 50 migrants were found alive in a trailer in 2018, driven by a man who said he would be paid $3,000 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.Other tragedies have occurred before immigrants came to the United States.In December, more than 50 people were killed when a truck overturned on a highway in southern Mexico.In October, Mexican authorities reported finding 652 migrants crammed into six trailers held at a military checkpoint near the border.During a vigil Tuesday night in the rain at a San Antonio park, many of the more than 50 people who attended expressed sadness, frustration and anger over the deaths and what they described as a broken immigration system.Back in Puebla, farmer Juan Sánchez Carrillo, 45, freaked out when he heard the news of the deaths in Texas.He narrowly escaped death himself, when he and his friends escaped migrant rustlers dozing in the mountains near Otay Mesa, near San Diego.The criminals, who Sánchez Carrillo believes were in cahoots with the smugglers who brought him across the border, pointed their rifles at the group of 35 migrants and threatened to kill them unless they got $1,000 each.“For smugglers, migrants are not human,” Sánchez Carrillo said.“For them we are nothing more than merchandise.”