Texas authorities uncovered 27 illegal immigrants carried in a horse trailer during a routine traffic stop on Friday, Fox News reports.
The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) posted a video on website X that shows a DPS police officer stopping a Ford-250 towing a horse trailer on Highway US-281 in Hidalgo County on Friday.
The driver was identified by police as Jose Guadalupe Salinas of Palmview, Texas. When asked what was in the trailer, Salinas told the officer that there were two horses in the trailer. The officer then asked for consent to search the trailer. Salinas told the officer to “be careful, they are aggressive” and then voluntarily opened the side hatch for the officer.
During the search, police found 27 people huddled in the trailer’s storage area, “upset and sweating profusely.” Three women were severely dehydrated and needed medical attention because of the extreme heat and lack of ventilation, officials said.
Troopers referred the immigrants from Mexico to the US Border Patrol. The US Border Patrol took Salinas into custody and will file federal human smuggling charges against him.
Migration crisis
Texas has long faced an immigration crisis due to its geography and size. It is one of the largest states in the US and has the longest border with Mexico – more than 2,000 kilometres.
In the last few years, there have been more migrants and the crisis has worsened. Every year under 200 thousand people arrive in the US through Mexico. Most of them are natives of Latin American countries from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela and Mexico. They account for 60 per cent of migrants entering the US through the southern border.
This is not the first year that Texas authorities have been self-sufficient in securing the border. Back in March 2021, Governor Greg Abbott, in response to the easing of migration policy by the federal authorities, launched his own operation to capture migrants and set up fences, which is still ongoing.
