A tornado raged through a city on the US-Mexico border today, destroying homes, flinging cars like matchsticks and ripping an infant from its mother's arms.
At least 13 people were killed, authorities said.
In Texas, 12 people were reported missing in flash flooding from a line of storms that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.
The baby was also missing after the twister that hit Ciudad Acuna, a city of 125,000 across from Del Rio, Texas, sent its infant carrier flying. Rescue workers began digging through the rubble of damaged homes in a race to find victims.
The twister hit a seven-block area, which Victor Zamora, interior secretary of the northern state of Coahuila, described as "devastated."
Three hundred people were being treated for injuries at local hospitals, and 400 houses were fully or partially destroyed, said Edgar Gonzalez, spokesman for the city government.
"There's nothing standing, not walls, not roofs," Gonzalez said, describing some of the destroyed homes in a 3-square kilometer (1 square mile) stretch.
Family members and neighbors gathered around a pickup truck where the bodies of a woman and two children were laid out in the truck's bed, covered with sheets. Two relatives reached down to touch the bodies, covered their eyes and wept.
Photos from the scene showed cars with their hoods torn off, resting upended against single-story houses. One car's frame was bent around the gate of a house. A bus was seen flipped and crumpled on a roadway.
The twister struck not long after daybreak, around the time buses were preparing to take children to school, Zamora said.
In the US, the weather system dumped record rainfall on parts of the Plains and Midwest, spawning tornadoes and causing major flooding that forced at least 2,000 Texans from their homes. A vacation house in Texas was swept away by a rain-swollen river.
The storms were blamed for three deaths Saturday and Sunday, including two in Oklahoma and one in Texas, where a man's body was recovered from a flooded area along the Blanco River, which rose 26 feet in an hour and created huge piles of debris.
The line of heavy weather was expected to linger over a large swath of the region today.
Among the worst-affected communities were Wimberley and San Marcos, which are in Central Texas along the Blanco River in the corridor between Austin and San Antonio.
