In one of the deadliest border-related crashes in decades, many who died illustrate a new dynamic on the border: more migrants from Mexico.

A group of mourners at a vigil for the 13 undocumented migrants who died when an S.U.V. and a tractor-trailer collided near Holtville, Calif., last month.Credit…

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By Miriam Jordan

Photographs by Ariana Drehsler

HOLTVILLE, Calif. — The maroon Ford Expedition was so heavy its wheels spun at first in the soft desert sand as it cleared a breach in the border wall. It then sped down a dirt road as Mexico disappeared in the rearview mirror. Twenty-five people held on inside, many jammed on the floor, others hunched half-standing between them.

Near the front was José Eduardo Martinez, 16, who had hitched onto the outlaw ride in hopes of joining his uncle in Utah to work construction. Crammed farther in the back, where the seats had been removed, were Zeferina Mendoza, 33, and her cousin, Rosalia Garcia Gonzalez, 34, who had leads on jobs in California’s strawberry fields. At the wheel was Jairo de Jesus Dueñas, 28, who planned to earn money to buy a car to drive for Uber in Mexico.

They made it 15 miles up a desolate country road in California’s Imperial Valley, 110 miles east of San Diego. Perhaps the driver was distracted, or could not see the stop sign in the dawn light. Perhaps he did not realize how long it would take to stop a vehicle loaded with 25 people. The vehicle lurched into the path of a Peterbilt tractor-trailer rig barreling down State Route 115.

Few of the survivors have been able to describe what happened next: the crunch of metal and glass, the bodies flung dozens of feet across the pavement. Twelve people died on the spot, a 13th at a nearby hospital.

José, the teenager, remembered none of it. “When I woke up, I was in the hospital,” he said softly, struggling to speak with 10 inches of surgical staples stretched down his stomach and several more around his waist. Two days had passed by the time he regained consciousness.

The lonely farm road that on March 2 became the scene of one of the deadliest border-related crashes in recent decades is one of hundreds of illicit corridors into the United States. The people who died there became a tragic portrait of an explosion in migration that has begun overwhelming the U.S. government.

Apprehensions of migrants by the authorities along the southwest border in March reached 170,000, the highest point in 15 years, up nearly 70 percent from February, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection data. Thousands of children and families arriving daily from Central America, driven by violence, natural disasters and the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, have flooded processing centers and created an urgent humanitarian challenge on the border. Children are being kept in detention longer than the law allows, and most families are now being released into the United States because there is often nowhere to hold them.

One major factor in the surge has been a marked jump in the number of single adults coming from Mexico, as the pandemic stalled the country’s economy and left millions without livelihoods. So in the cool predawn darkness of a Tuesday morning in March, 17 Mexicans, along with eight Guatemalans, packed into an S.U.V. in hopes it would be the last leg of their perilous journey.

This account is based on interviews with survivors and family members, agents with the California Highway Patrol, the U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations, as well as a police report and the federal complaint last week against a Mexican man accused of organizing the deadly trip. The man, José Cruz Noguez, was charged with human smuggling that caused serious injury.

Before piling into the S.U.V. on that fateful morning, they had converged in Mexicali, a sprawling border city of a million people separated from the United States by a rust-colored steel-beam fence that soars up to 30 feet high in some places.

Peer through the slats and the promise of America beckons: Calexico, the adjacent American town of 40,000, lies just on the other side. Border Patrol vehicles prowl the terrain, a big reason the migrants had placed their lives in the hands of smugglers — at a going rate of $7,500 to $10,000 each — to help penetrate the American fortress.

‘There is no future in Mexico’

José, the oldest of two boys raised in a one-room dry-mud hut in the violent southern Mexican state of Guerrero, was becoming impatient with his family’s situation.

With no computer, José was having to follow classes at school during the pandemic on his cellphone, a frustrating exercise.

“There is no future in Mexico,” he said. “I told Mama I wanted to work in America to support her and my little brother.”

José had grown up hearing about his Uncle Pablo, who had made it to America 16 years ago and had become an expert in framing houses. He had sent money regularly to his children, enabling them to acquire nice clothes, electronics, a new car. Now José was saying he wanted to try his luck.

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