Border Patrol Details Most Common Excuses Human Smugglers Give When Stopped by the Authorities

AP Photo/Christian Chavez

Border Patrol appears to have heard all the stories when it comes to people trying to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country.

A recent report discusses the myriad ways that smugglers try to evade the authorities when they are transporting people across the southern border.

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Drivers leaving a border town with a vehicle full of people have said they are going to “visit family in Houston,” going to a funeral in Houston, Dallas or San Antonio, are “traveling with friends,” or a “guy paid me to pick up his workers.”

They “never know their names [of those being transported], even if they claim to be family,” one Operation Lone Star Task Force investigator in Goliad County told The Center Square. The investigator cannot be named because he works undercover.

OLS is Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security mission; the OLS Task Force involves multiple law enforcement agencies working to thwart cartel crime, The Center Square has reported.

“I’ve had people hiding in a toolbox and [the driver] says he was just giving them a ride. We also stopped a male driver where the passenger had a guy hiding in the floorboard in front of him,” the OLS investigator said.

An OLS Task Force investigator in Kleberg County told The Center Square one driver he pulled over said he was “headed south to look at a job site. He was from Houston but headed to a small town by a [Border Patrol] checkpoint for a landscaping job. About an hour later, we got in a chase with him northbound and he had illegal immigrants in his car.”

OLS officers say that those they pull over driving to or from the border claim they are looking for work or are visiting friends, “but most times can’t give an exact location of where they are going or who they are going to see. Most times when they said they were going to visit someone they can only give a nickname or first name and can’t answer any further about it,” an officer told The Center Square.

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DPS spokesperson Lt. Chris Olivarez told reporters that many of the drivers they have caught “are not from the general area of Eagle Pass or Del Rio, where we see the majority of human smuggling. They’re driving from San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Dallas to Eagle Pass or Del Rio.”

Olivarez explained that these individuals are “providing GPS coordinates to pick up these individuals that are crossing the border illegally” but that when they are stopped, “they try to distance themselves from the criminal activity.”

The spokesperson also warned about possible terrorists being smuggled into the country, an issue that has raised concerns about protecting national security.

Border authorities are quite adept at stopping people from gaining entry into the United States. But even they are unable to fully stem the flood of illegals making their way across the border as the Biden administration continues to do little to address the problem.

The border crisis has not only been a strain on border towns and major cities, it has also endangered many who are in the country legally. Earlier this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray discussed the many threats coming over the southern border, highlighting the capture of people with ties to terrorist organizations who attempted to enter the country.

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He also discussed threats in the form of fentanyl being trafficked into the country and being consumed by unaware Americans.

"From an FBI perspective, we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border. And that includes everything from drug trafficking — the FBI alone seized enough fentanyl in the last two years to kill 270 million people — that's just on the fentanyl side," he said during a Senate hearing.

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