A sheriff’s office in Texas announced in a press release that a traffic stop over the weekend has brought newfound attention to how Mexican cartels use underage teenagers to carry out human smuggling.
According to the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office, the cartels use underage teenagers to act as drivers and organizers in their illicit operations and tell them they will not suffer any real penalties.
“This is frequently the case, as the U.S. Justice Department [DOJ] tends not to prosecute minors,” the office said. “When [the minors] turn 18, the cartels usually pressure them to transition to more dangerous work, like working as hitmen or drug smugglers and replace them with other children.”
Kinney County is an agricultural community in southwest Texas on the border with Mexico. According to the sheriff’s office, at a traffic stop over the weekend on Ranch Road 3008, a deputy “spotted another vehicle with a load of what appeared to be illegal aliens.”
In the truck were crammed “about half a dozen illegal aliens, mostly from Mexico” and at the front of the truck there was a 61-year-old Colombian driver, next to whom sat a 14-year-old boy who came from Mexico but was found to be living in Austin, Texas.
“It turns out, the Colombian man was a subcontractor and driver—and the 14-year-old was the shot-caller with the connections,” the office stated. “ Colombian man told authorities that he’d met the boy on a couple of occasions in an Austin laundromat, and at some point told him about how he was having health problems and that money was tight.
“He says the 14-year-old offered him $5,000 to make the trip with him.”
U.S. Border Patrol later confirmed the Colombian driver’s allegations about who was in charge.
It is unclear what will happen to the 14-year-old boy in the case.
sheriff’s office noted that sometimes the DOJ “will return underage smugglers to border cities far away from their homes, as a way to try an inconvenience them.” For example, a Matamoros smuggler might be sent to Juarez.
Texas Department of Public Safety back in 2011 warned that Mexican cartels seek to recruit Texas students as young as 11 to support their illicit smuggling operations, whether those involve drugs, humans, or weapons. n-DPS director Steven McCraw told Reuters at the time the drug gangs have a chilling name for the recruited young Texans—”the expendables.”
DPS stated at the time, “se [Mexican] Cartels and their operatives are extremely violent, torturing and killing thousands of people in Mexico, and they use transnational and Texas prison gangs to further their criminal operations in Mexico and the U.S.”
Pezou : Underage Teenagers Being Recruited Into Human Smuggling Operations, Texas Sheriff Warns