Texas Trucker Pleads Guilty to Smuggling 73 Migrants

A trucker pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle 73 migrants through a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint 80 miles north of the Texas border.

This week, 24-year-old Leonardo Davila Jr. went before U.S. District Judge Drew B. Tipton in Corpus Christi, where he pleaded guilty to a human smuggling charge. Davila is expected to be sentenced on August 24, where he could receive a prison sentence of up to five years.

According to the criminal complaint, in early February 2022, Davila tried to drive a tractor-trailer from Edinburg to Houston, but was arrested at a checkpoint in Falfurrias. A police dog alerted to people hiding in the trailer. Authorities found 73 migrants hiding in the cargo trailer.

Agents took three of the migrants as material witnesses. They claimed to have crossed into Texas through the Rio Grande and spent roughly two weeks at a stash house. Unnamed human smugglers took the migrants from various houses to a tire shop, where Davila was waiting with the trailer. Once the migrants were inside, he told them to keep quiet and to sit in a certain part of the hold to avoid being caught by a police dog or scanning device.

As Breitbart Texas has reported, the Falfurrias checkpoint and similar ones in other sectors are considered by cartel-connected smugglers to be the last barriers into the country. While in some cases smugglers try to get past it using vehicles, in other cases human smugglers force migrants to trek for miles through dangerous terrain, where hundreds have died in recent years.

Luisana Moreno is a contributing writer for Breitbart Texas.