Police and fire departments in the Texas border city of Brownsville said on May 7 that seven people were killed and 12 injured when a sport utility vehicle ploughed into a waiting crowd at a bus stop in the city that morning. The driver has been arrested.
Brownsville is located in southeastern Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. City Police Department Officer Martin Sandoval said the incident happened around 8:30 a.m. U.S. Central Time. The city’s fire department said on social media that 11 injured people were taken to a local hospital for treatment, and another injured person was taken to a nearby city hospital by helicopter.
According to US media reports, the driver, a male, was also injured in the incident. He has been arrested by the police and has undergone alcohol and drug tests. Preliminary police investigations suggest that the collision may have been deliberate.
The report said that across the road from the station where the incident occurred was a shelter, and most of the sheltered were cross-border immigrants. Victor Maldonado, head of the shelter, said after reviewing the surveillance video that the car crashed into the waiting crowd, overturned, and continued to slide for about 60 metres, injuring pedestrians near the station. Most of the dead and injured were immigrants from Venezuela.
According to reports, this shelter is the only one in Brownsville that provides temporary housing, accommodates illegal immigrants released from federal government immigration detention facilities, and provides them with transportation services. Over the past two months, the shelter has received two to three hundred migrants who crossed the border every day, but many left on the same day.
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, the U.S. federal government implemented a public health policy called “Article 42”, which authorised border law enforcement officers to quickly deport cross-border immigrants on the grounds of epidemic prevention and did not accept their asylum applications. This policy will end on May 11 this year. Recently, there has been another wave of cross-border immigrants on the US-Mexico border, and the number of illegal immigrants continues to increase.