Authorities in South Texas arrested a human smuggler who had allegedly dragged a sick migrant out of a stash house and dumped him on a rural road, expecting him to die.
The incident took place on Saturday near the border town of Roma, Texas, where deputies with the Starr County Sheriff’s Office responded to calls of a body having been dumped on the side of a road in a rural area. When authorities arrived, they discovered that the body was a migrant from Mexico who was still alive but was in poor health and had been left to die. Authorities saved the man and rushed him to a local hospital. Investigators eventually identified the man and contacted his family in Mexico.
According to a criminal complaint filed by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, at approximately the same time that sheriff’s deputies were responding to the call of the body on the side of the road, HSI agents were responding to an apartment complex for a call about a group of men dragging a body out of a house and placing it inside a car.
Agents went to the house where the body was dragged out of and spoke with a man whom they identified as an illegal alien from Mexico. He revealed that he had been smuggled into Roma with three other men and had been taken to the stash house under the care of Elias Vasquez. At the house, the migrant stated that there was another migrant gotaway who was sick, and Vasquez had been trying to deal with the situation. He claimed that a doctor had gone to the house and put IV bags on the man, but that eventually Vasquez had other migrants take the man away. The migrant revealed that he had been ordered to clean up the house and wipe up the blood from the sick migrant.
As a result of the investigation, HSI agents tracked down Vasquez and arrested him in McAllen. Since then, a U.S. Magistrate Judge charged him with one count of harboring illegal aliens and ordered that he be held without bond. It remains unclear if he could face additional charges.
Despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal border crossings, illegal aliens still manage to cross the border as “gotaways” without being apprehended along the border, Breitbart Texas’s Bob Price reported. This frequently places the illegal aliens in the hands of cartel-connected human smugglers who transport them in dangerous, even life-threatening conditions.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart News Foundation. He co-founded Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com.
Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.
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