In the afternoon of December 9, 2021, in my third month as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, I received an urgent message from Mexico’s foreign affairs minister. That morning, there had been a terrible accident in southern Mexico involving migrants being smuggled north, one that required the urgent attention of Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States.

The foreign minister told me that in the southern Mexican city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, about 140 miles from the nearest Mexico-Guatemala border crossing, a tractor-trailer had crashed while carrying more than 160 Guatemalan migrants. I would soon learn that 56 people had died in the crash and over 100 were seriously injured. Reportedly, the smugglers, known as “coyotes,” had charged the migrants around $15,000 each to stuff them into trailers like cattle for days on end to transport them across Mexico to the United States. 

A few days later, I flew to Tuxtla Gutiérrez and headed straight to the hospital. Two patients in the corner of the ICU caught my eye: a young mother who suffered severe trauma to the entire side of her head and her toddler son, who was miraculously unharmed. Their names (which I’ve changed here to protect them) were Vanessa and Damián.

I spoke softly with Vanessa at her bedside, learning that she and Damián were trying to get to Wisconsin, where her husband had been working on a dairy farm. Vanessa had not seen him since he had left Guatemala for the United States, and Damián had never met his father. I couldn’t imagine the........

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