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CARRIZO SPRINGS, Texas – From the street, the small brown space was mundane but pleasant. A bright yellow toy school bus and a red truck hung from the rope fence, and the front of space showed a giant Texas lone star. But in the garden an empty cell phone house that a prosecutor later described as a “space of horrors. “
It became known one day in 2014, when a guy called from Maryland to report that his father-in-law, Moisés Ferrera, a migrant from Honduras, was detained and tortured there by smugglers who had brought him to the United States. His captors sought more money, the son-in-law said, and continuously hit Ferrera’s hands with a hammer, promising to continue until his circle of relatives sent him.
When federal agents and sheriff’s deputies descended on the home, they discovered that Ferrara was not the only victim. Smugglers had detained many migrants there for ransom, according to their investigation. They had mutilated limbs and raped women.
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“What happened there is the subject of science fiction, a horror movie, and anything we just don’t see in the United States,” U. S. Attorney Matthew Watters told a jury in the trial of the accused smugglers. Organized crime cartels, he said, have “pushed this terror across the border. “
But if it is one of the first cases of its kind, it will not be the last. Smuggling migrants across the U. S. southern borderThe U. S. has evolved over the past 10 years from a dispersed network of independent “coyotes” to a multibillion-dollar foreign corporation controlled through concerted agreements. crime, adding some of Mexico’s most violent drug cartels.
The deaths of 53 migrants in San Antonio last month, who were crammed into the back of a sweltering air-conditioned semi-trailer, the deadliest smuggling incident in the country to date, came as U. S. border restrictions tightened. The U. S. economy, exacerbated by a public connected to the pandemic fitness rule, led more migrants to turn to smugglers.
While migrants have long suffered kidnappings and extortion in Mexican border cities, these incidents are on the rise on the U. S. side, according to federal authorities.
More than 5,046 more people were arrested and charged with human trafficking last year, up from 2762 in 2014.
For more than a year, federal agents have raided daily hideouts housing dozens of migrants.
Title 42, the public fitness order introduced by the Trump administration at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, allowed for the prompt deportation of those who crossed the border illegally, allowing migrants to cross in hopes of eventual success. a broad escalation in the number of encounters with migrants at the border (1. 7 million in fiscal year 2021) and thriving activity for smugglers.
In March, officials near El Paso, Texas, rescued 34 migrants from two unventilated shipping boxes in a single day. The following month, another 24 people detained against their will were found in a hideout.
Law enforcement officials have been involved in so many high-speed chases of smugglers in recent times in Uvalde, Texas (between February and May, there were only about 50 such “rescues” in the city) that some school workers said they had not taken a lockdown. seriously order a mass shooting in May because many past closures were ordered when smugglers ran into the streets.
Teófilo Valencia, whose 17- and 19-year-old sons perished in the San Antonio tragedy, said he took a loan from the relative circle’s home to pay the smugglers $10,000 to the son he was transporting.
Fees range from $4,000, for migrants from Latin America, to $20,000, if they want to be moved from Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a smuggling expert at George Mason University.
For years, independent coyotes paid a tax to cartels to move migrants through territory they controlled along the border, and criminal syndicates stood firm in their classic industry, drug trafficking, which is much more profitable.
That began to replace around 2019, said Patrick Lechleitner, acting deputy director of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the U. S. , to Congress last year. The sheer number of other people seeking to cross has made migrant smuggling an unsavory source of profit for some cartels, he said.
Corporations specialize in logistics, transportation, surveillance, hideouts and accounting, all of which support an industry whose revenues have skyrocketed to around $13 billion today, up from $500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security Investigations, the federal firm investigating these cases. . .
Migrants move through planes, buses and personal vehicles. In some border regions, such as the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, smugglers place colored strips on migrants’ wrists to imply that they belong to them and what they receive.
“They organize products in a way that maybe you would never have imagined five or 10 years ago,” Correa-Cabrera said.
Groups of Central American families who recently crossed the Rio Grande into La Joya, Texas, wore blue bracelets with the Gulf Cartel logo, a dolphin and the word “entregas” or “entregas,” meaning they intended to reach the United States. apply for asylum. Once they had crossed the river, they were no longer the business of the cartel.
Previously, migrants entering Laredo, Texas, crossed the river alone and blended into the dense cityscape. Now, according to interviews with migrants and law enforcement officials, it is crossing without paying a coyote connected to the Northeast Cartel, a splinter of the Zetas Syndicate.
Smugglers recruit teenagers to send newcomers to hideouts in working-class neighborhoods. After gathering several dozen people, they load the migrants into trucks parked in Laredo’s vast warehouse district around Killam Industrial Boulevard.
“Drivers are recruited at bars, strip clubs, truck stops,” said Timothy Tubbs, deputy special agent at the homeland security investigations rate for Laredo until his retirement in January.
Migrant platforms mingle with the 20,000 trucks that daily travel I-35 to and from Laredo, the country’s busiest land port. Border Patrol officers stationed at checkpoints inspect only a fraction of all cars to make sure traffic remains fluid.
The semi-trailer learned on June 27 with its tragic shipment had passed through a checkpoint about 30 miles north of Laredo without arousing suspicion. By the time he stopped 3 hours later on a remote San Antonio highway, at most of the other 64 people interned. he had already died.
The driver, Homero Zamorano Jr. , one of the two men charged Thursday in connection with the tragedy, said he was unaware that the air conditioning formula failed.
The 2014 incident at the Texas hideout resulted in the arrest of the perpetrators and an upcoming trial, providing an unusually brilliant glimpse into the brutal tactics of smuggling operations. to federal law enforcement officials. Fearing deportation, relatives of kidnapped migrants rarely call authorities.
This case began in the thick weedland 8 miles from the Rio Grande, in Carrizo Springs, a popular transit point for others seeking to evade detection. “You can hide a million elephants here, this weed is so thick,” he said. Jerry Martinez, captain of the Dimmit County Sheriff’s Office.
Ferrera, 54, a victim of torture, first immigrated to the United States in 1993, heading to sites in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where he earned more than 10 times what he earned in Honduras. He returned home a few years later.
“At the time, you didn’t want a coyote,” he said in an interview from his Maryland home. “I went and came here several times. “
When he left in early 2014, Ferrera knew he would have to turn to a smuggler to cross the border. In Pidras Negras, Mexico, a guy promised to advise him in Houston. Ferrera’s son-in-law, Mario Peña, said he transferred $1,500 in payment.
After arriving in Texas, Ferrera and several migrants were towed in Carrizo Springs.
Soon after, Ferrera’s son-in-law won a call asking for $3,500 more. He said he had no more money.
He has common and threatening calls, Peña recalled in an interview; the smugglers made him hear the screams and groans of his father-in-law as a hammer fell on his fingers.
Peña managed to move $2,000 through Western Union, he said, but when the kidnappers learned they couldn’t get the money back because it was Sunday, they stepped up their attacks.
Peña 911.
Law enforcement officials discovered Ferrera in the caravan “seriously injured physically, with a lot of blood everywhere, begging on a couch” in the living room, according to testimony from one of the officials, Jonathan Bonds.
Another migrant, in his underwear, writhed in pain, his hand beaten up in the air, in the front room. In the back room, officials encountered a migrant, who had just been raped by a smuggler, who came out of the bathroom naked.
The owner of the house, Eduardo Rocha Sr. , who was passing through Lalo and known as the leader of the smuggling network, arrested along with several others, adding his son, Eduardo Rocha Jr. Young Rocha testified that his mobile was affiliated with Los Zetas. In two years, he had funneled lots of migrants into the United States and raised piles of thousands of dollars.
Elder Rocha sentenced to life in prison. Her son and the guy who committed the maximum physical violence were sentenced to 15 and 20 years.
Ferrera testified at his trial. As a victim of a crime that had aided law enforcement, he allowed himself to remain in the United States. But his new life came at a cost, which he showed when he raised his right arm for the jury, now with lifeless hands. my hand ran out,” he said.
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