U.S. border police have rescued almost 100 undocumented immigrants abandoned by smugglers in triple-digit heat without water in border desert, a newspaper report said on Thursday.

Police discovered the immigrants hiding in bushes late Wednesday after a search of the isolated desert region of Tonopah, Arizona which borders Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The immigrants said they spent three days in tripple-digit heat without any supplies and three people had died because of heat and hunger, but no bodies were found, said the report.

After a continued search, police discovered three additional survivors.

Federal immigration investigators were interviewing dozens of the immigrants, mostly Guatemalans, in an attempt to piece together what had happened.

Authorities were trying to determine how the immigrants got to the stretch of desert 10 and 110 miles from the border. One theory was that they were driven there by one team of smugglers and were supposed to be picked up by another crew.

U.S. Border Patrol has caught more than 445,000 people trying to enter the country illegally since October, according to immigration officials.

Source: Xinhua