Border Patrol agents have found many more migrants hidden inside tractor-trailers this year than last, suggesting smugglers are increasingly relying on the practice to move people throughout the country after they elude capture at the Mexican border.
Since the start of the government fiscal year last October, agents have found and rescued more than 3,000 people packed inside commercial trucks, often without air conditioning or water.
“The over 3,000 subjects encountered in tractor trailers represents a nearly 40% increase over this time last year,” a Border Patrol official wrote in a text message to the Washington Examiner.
Most rescues are happening at Border Patrol-operated highway checkpoints set up 20 to 100 miles north of the border. The intent of the checkpoints is to seize drugs, contraband, and people who made it past agents on the actual border and are now being moved further into the country.
CBP said Tuesday a trailer carrying 31 people between ages 15 and 40 was discovered at one such checkpoint near Amado, Arizona, last week. Agents at the inspection stations use a large drive-through X-ray machine to scan the truck without opening it. They will open the back if the scan reveals that people or suspicious items are inside. Adults will be arrested.
The smuggling attempts are classified by Border Patrol as rescues because of the conditions inside the trucks that have led to hospitalizations and deaths.
In April 2018, a Kentucky man was sentenced to life in federal prison for transporting dozens of illegal immigrants in a scorching hot tractor-trailer. Ten people were found dead inside the truck, parked behind a Walmart in San Antonio in July 2017. The case made national news, and dozens of similar truck-smuggling incidents have been interrupted each year, according to CBP.
Illegal immigrants being guided by smugglers may be told to go to a specific location on the U.S. side where they will meet the next contact and possibly be placed in a stash house and wait for the next mode of transportation that will take them closer to their final destination within the U.S.
Border Patrol agents have found 2,700 people hidden in these stash houses since October, about the same amount as last year. The houses range from small shacks to neighborhood homes.
The official noted both types of discoveries, in trucks and houses, occurred despite agents being overwhelmed over the past eight months as record-high numbers of families surrender to agents after illegally crossing.
