Armando Colunga was watching the news in San Antonio when he saw a report Tuesday night about authorities discovering 54 undocumented immigrants in the back of an 18-wheeler truck.
The men were being detained, sitting in a group on the ground, while they waited for authorities to interview and transport them.
Colunga felt compelled to act. The tow truck driver hopped in his vehicle and drove across town to help.
“My main motivation was, ‘Who knows how long they’ve been in there?'” he said.
When Colunga got to the scene, he noticed a Little Caesars nearby and bought seven pizzas.
He was worried authorities wouldn’t let him give the pizzas to the immigrants, but two detectives escorted him past the yellow crime scene tape, where a third detective handed the pizzas off to a fireman, who distributed them to the group.
As it turned out, the migrants had been given water, but had not been fed.
“I didn’t think about if it (the seven pizzas) would be enough — I just figured everyone would have something to eat,” Colunga told CNN.
He said officers told him he didn’t have to do what he was doing.
“No I didn’t have to, but they’re my people,” he said.
Colunga, who is of Mexican descent, sympathizes with the struggles many Latinos face in immigrating to the United States. But he said he would have taken action regardless of the group’s racial or ethnic background.
“If they were black or African people or white people coming from London … I would have done the same thing,” he said. “It’s not about race.”
Although Colunga didn’t get the names of the three detectives who helped him complete his mission, “I just want to thank them,” he said.