MCALLEN, Texas — Law enforcement in Texas foiled a dangerous human smuggling attempt involving more than 50 illegal immigrants hidden inside a gas tanker that was being hauled by a tractor-trailer north from the U.S.-Mexico border.
Border Patrol agents stationed near Laredo, Texas, made the discovery while the truck and tanker were pulled over for an inspection at an immigration checkpoint on Highway 83 in south-central Texas on May 28. A Border Patrol canine that sniffed the tanker alerted its handler, prompting checkpoint officials to send the truck through a massive, nonintrusive X-ray machine on site.
Agents opened the tanker to find more than four dozen Mexican citizens concealed inside. The driver was identified as a U.S. citizen. All were taken into federal custody, Border Patrol’s overseeing agency, Customs and Border Protection, said in a statement Monday.
Federal law enforcement in the Laredo region is increasingly taking down “stash houses” that smugglers use to hold illegal immigrants who have just crossed the border, as well as adults and children hidden inside tractor-trailers headed deep into the United States.
While in other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border, children and families make up the majority of illegal border crossers, adults make up 94% of all known illegal entries in the Laredo region. Just 2% of the 52,000 people encountered at the border from September through mid-March were families, and 4% were children without parents.
“Laredo is relatively safe. It is. But if we don’t correct this stash house and tractor-trailers activity that we have with these folks, this could escalate and possibly become a war zone … between rival gangs,” Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, a Democrat, told the Washington Examiner in an interview in March.
The morning following the gas tanker incident, Border Patrol agents at a different highway checkpoint near Laredo uncovered more than 100 noncitizens hidden inside a commercial tractor-trailer. The driver was also a U.S. citizen.
Single adults sneaking over the border near Laredo are determined to evade arrest and rely on smugglers to get them over the border and then into a “stash house.” These houses or apartments will often hold 50 to 100 people for days to weeks as the smugglers plan out how to transport them to the destination of their choice deeper within the country. Oftentimes, they use tractor-trailers.
From October 2020 to March, Laredo saw a 400% increase in stash house busts compared to the same period last year. Some of the people inside the houses have criminal records, Saenz said, which is one reason they do not want to get caught by police while getting across the border.
Law enforcement has arrested 3,900 people around Laredo who were being smuggled into the country via tractor-trailer trucks. It is a 120% increase from the same time a year ago.
The numbers are prompting concern in the city because they mean the cartels are expanding operations within the community and growing their network. Cartels, or massive gangs that make money through corruption and illegal activity, are constantly in a fight with one another to make more money and control their territory. When one cartel is doing well, they become a target to another seeking to outperform them.
“These local gangs that we have here — it’s an extension of these Mexican cartels working through these local gangs that we have,” said Saenz. “We’ve had a stash house surge. If we don’t get to it now, it will only escalate.”
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Laredo has seen a proliferation in stash houses in the past six months, and arrests of illegal immigrant adults have also risen, an indicator that many are getting past Border Patrol agents. Last week, federal police arrested 11 Mexican mafia members, and in another incident, gunfire erupted at a house.
