TOT RESCUED AMID THE DESPAIR
Honduran boy, 4, found walking solo along Rio Grande
A 4-year-old Honduran boy was recently found wandering alone near the banks of the Rio Grande, in the latest example of the danger faced by young migrants in their trek to the USMexico border.
The unaccompanied child was walking toward the border in an area thick with trees near Reynosa, Mexico, a city across from McAllen, Texas, that has been plagued by violence, Reuters reported, citing Mexican immigration officials.
A group of three mothers and six children was found in the same area, but the women told authorities that they did not know the boy.
The women and the children, all also from Honduras, were spotted running for cover in the trees during a flyover of the area.
The unaccompanied boy, who was not publicly identified, is among the thousands of minors who have made the dangerous journey to the border since President Biden took office in January.
On Wednesday, a Border Patrol agent tweeted a video of smugglers dropping two girls, ages 5 and 3, over a 14-foot-tall wall into the New Mexico desert.
Those girls were rescued by US authorities.
And on Tuesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety tweeted a photo of an agent rescuing a 6-month-old girl who was thrown by smugglers out of a raft and into the Rio Grande.
The thousands of children have overwhelmed federal border facilities, where they have been kept in cramped, uncomfortable conditions for days on end while awaiting transfer to shelters elsewhere.
Oscar Escamilla, acting executive officer for the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, described this week the conditions the children are being housed in after the arduous journey to the US, and related the tale of one girl who couldn’t speak after being gang-raped.
“About a month and a half ago, I was back here talking to one of the little girls, you know, and I told the congressional delegation just the same thing. Right,” Escamilla told reporters.
“We were going to send her to the hospital,” he continued.
“And as I got closer to her, I noticed that she couldn’t speak. And I asked the medical staff what happened. And the reason she was going to the hospital was because she had gotten gang-raped. And the reason that she couldn’t speak was because she had lost her voice in the process while she was getting raped. “Those things hit hard.” Meanwhile, agents this week disrupted a number of smuggling attempts and detained scores of immigrants after discovering stash houses and tractor-trailers smuggling people into the United States.
Officers in the Rio Grande Valley district found eight immigrants in a jackknifed tractortrailer east of Victoria, Texas, on Wednesday after being alerted to it by Wharton County sheriff ’s deputies, according to Customs and Border Protection.
Two of the immigrants injured in the crash were taken to a local hospital.
The agents determined the immigrants in the truck’s cargo area illegally crossed the border.
They are now being held at the Corpus Christi, Texas, Border Patrol Station.
In another incident, Border Patrol agents stopped a tractortrailer at the Javier Vega Jr. checkpoint in Sarita, Texas, asked the driver for his citizenship information and sent the truck to a secondary inspection area after sniffer dogs alerted them to something suspicious in its cargo hold.
A search uncovered 52 illegal immigrants hiding inside.
Photos of the bust posted on Twitter by Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings show the immigrants sitting on the floor of the truck shoulder-to-shoulder.
The driver was arrested and all 52 migrants were taken into custody.
Additionally, Border Patrol agents busted 29 immigrants after finding them hiding in two stash houses, CBP said.
Officers found a group of men near Sullivan City, Texas, being loaded into a vehicle.
The 15 men fled into nearby brush as the agents approached, but were apprehended.
They were arrested along with the driver and taken to the McAllen border station to be processed.
Agents also found 14 men inside a suspected stash house near Roma, Texas, on Monday.
Those men came from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.
Hastings said agents have busted 202 stash houses this fiscal year in the Rio Grande Valley alone.