(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – The organized smuggling of illegal aliens through the US-Mexican Border is reaching unprecedented highs, as indicated by the number of human trafficking operations intercepted in a single Texas county.
In the past few weeks, Zavala County in South Central Texas has seen a “serious uptick in organized migrant smuggling activity, Breitbart News reports.
The county, with a population of 12,000, is not even on the Southern Border, as it stands 30 miles away from the Rio Grande.
Nonetheless, within five days last week, it saw 23 separate “smuggling ventures” in which criminals tried to traffic illegals through the county to bring them to the interior of the United States.
On just one of the days in question, the small Zavala County Sheriff’s Office’s deputies intercepted six vehicles trafficking illegal immigrants.
Those cases involved over 100 suspected illegal aliens; some even managed to evade detention by escaping on private ranches.
The Zavala County Sheriff’s Office informs that the stops of migrant-smuggling vehicles often include “high-speed pursuits, stolen vehicles, property damage, and… the frequent presence of loaded weapons within reach of the human smugglers.”
The report quotes the Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Ricardo Rios, who said his deputies were trying to simultaneously respond to the growing human trafficking incidents and continue to perform their primary law enforcement duties in the local community.
He revealed several human smuggling attempts prevented in Zavala County last week were using stolen cars from nearby cities.
It is noted that migrant traffickers tend to steal cars from Houston and San Antonio and then use those to immediately head to the Border to pick up and transport the illegals.
The report describes Zavala County as a “challenging environment” for the deputies on patrol due to the variety of roads, including farm-to-market ones, which smugglers utilize to move away from the border area.
Thus, in two high-speed pursuits last week, the traffickers crashed into “innocent motorists.”
There were also several incidents in which the criminals drove cross country to avoid the deputies’ patrols, thus destroying private ranch fences.
Zavala County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Rios emphasized that the smugglers were increasingly threatening public safety since they more and more often chose to escape from the police.
In January, two illegal immigrants died following a car crash on a bridge in Zavala County close to Uvalde.
The illegals initially survived the road accident but then perished after jumping 40 feet off the bridge to try to escape from law enforcement. Another four migrants survived the fall but suffered substantial injuries.
Rios noted that his department works to prosecute each smuggler under a Texas statute for Smuggling of Persons, which carries 2 to 10 years of prison terms, and fines up to $10,000.
Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott has asked the state legislature to up penalties for human traffickers. The resulting bill, which is yet to be voted on, would carry a minimum prison sentence of 10 years for convicted human smugglers.
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Law enforcement officers in Zavala County, Texas, report a serious uptick in organized migrant smuggling activity on county roads and highways in recent weeks. https://t.co/Wll1OCcrjy
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 12, 2023
