Mexican authorities have apprehended more than 200 migrants hidden in trucks in recent days — including dozens concealed in secret compartments and spotted by a large X-ray scanner.

An X-ray image shows a ghost-like truck filled with the brightened silhouettes of the migrants, some sitting and others lying down along two levels of the crowded compartments.

An additional 228 hidden migrants were found in a routine search of a soft-drink transportation truck in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico’s Security Ministry said in a statement.

The apprehensions come weeks after the appointment of former prisons chief Francisco Garduno as the head of Mexico’s immigration authority, the National Migration Institute (INM).

Under Garduno, the agency has made a number of high-profile captures of migrants smuggled in commercial vehicles. The weekend Garduno took office, the INM found 800 people in four trucks in the eastern state of Veracruz.

Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to stop record numbers of mainly Guatemalans, Hondurans and El Salvadorans reaching the United States follow a June 7 deal under which Mexico averted tariffs threatened by President Trump with a promise to use its own security forces to intercept more undocumented migrants.

In one video of an X-ray-assisted detention released by Mexican authorities, an official approaches the cargo vehicle at night to open the door to one of the crates.

Sobs emerge from the otherwise-quiet container while he identifies himself as a police officer and asks if migrants were in good health.

The migrants, from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Ecuador — 21 of whom were minors — are now in the custody of the INM, the Security Ministry said, adding that they will be returned to their home countries.

The truck, its driver and about $12,000 in cash found in the vehicle are now in police custody and will be subject to investigation, the ministry added.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the attorney general has about 11 open investigations into migrant smugglers.

“It is our strategic objective to end the impunity for human traffickers,” Ebrard said at a news conference on Monday.

The Mexican government’s release of the images came days after the White House released an X-ray image that American Border Patrol agents took of 33 illegal migrants — including 12 children and a pregnant woman — massed inside a stifling truck along the Arizona border.

“THANK YOU to our heroic Border Patrol agents, whose vigilance caught this smuggler and potentially saved lives!” the White House said in a message accompanying the photos.

The number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the southern border has soared since Trump took office as waves of asylum-seekers, many of them women and children, have set out for the United States.

More than 132,000 migrants were caught in May, compared with about 99,300 in April and 47,980 in January.

With Reuters