Busts of El Paso migrant stash houses rise
EL PASO — More than 260 stash houses used for human smuggling have been discovered in the El Paso region amid an increase in unauthorized immigration, according to U.S. Border Patrol.
Border agents have uncovered 264 stash houses in the first 11 months of fiscal 2021, up from 66 such locations in the prior fiscal year. Immigrants are often held in crowded, unsanitary conditions while waiting for coyote smugglers to deliver them on the next leg of their journey.
Border Patrol El Paso Sector Chief Gloria Chavez attributes the bump in busts of illegal stash houses to tips from the community and a new “integrated targeting team” of agents from each of the sector’s 11 stations. The sector stretches across West Texas and New Mexico.
“Frankly, it’s citizen calls and hotel calls and just people reporting suspicious activity (such as) a hotel room with 20-plus people inside it,” Chavez said.
“My biggest concern for them is the conditions these people are living in and secondly my high concern for the fact that they are locked in there for days,” she said. “You don’t know if they get food, or if they have the opportunity to bathe, and you don’t know if they have children. Sometimes there are underage children in these stash houses.”
Faced with a sharp rise in the number of people crossing the U.s.-mexico border and trying to evade border agents, Chavez set up a special team that pulls together agents from different stations to a sectorlevel team to share intelligence and build cases.
The idea sprang from intelligence and operations teams hoping to eliminate redundancies, she said, as the sector — and Border Patrol
nationally — has continuously struggled to boost staffing.
El Paso Sector Border Patrol referred 1,555 human smuggling cases to federal prosecutors in Texas and New Mexico so far this fiscal year, with 708 accepted for prosecution, Chavez said. That’s up from 792 cases referred in fiscal year 2020, with 500 accepted for prosecution.
The cases encompass activities that can result in a felony charge for aiding and abetting, harboring or transporting a person unlawfully present here.
“This region is being exploited every day by the transnational criminal organizations as it relates to the human smuggling that’s going on in the region,” said Chavez, who has been touting Border Patrol’s stash house busts on social media.
The focused team of agents, she said, “is able to prioritize some of the highest threats that we have within our sector. That way we are able to disrupt and dismantle these TCOS within the region,” shorthand for transnational criminal organizations.
The jump in the number of stash house busts has been mirrored in Juárez, where municipal policy sharpened its focus on uncovering casas de seguridad in the city, according to Rogelio Pinal, the city’s human rights director.
Pinal, who runs the city’s Enrique “Kiki” Romero migrant shelter, said that beginning in June, police began delivering dozens of immigrants to the shelter after uncovering stash houses.
In Mexico, local police aren’t permitted to enforce immigration law, so rather than make arrests, they deliver inmigrants to a shelter. Many don’t last more than a few hours at the shelter.
“Most of them contact their pollero, and they head back to the stash house immediately,” Pinal said, describing how three or four drivers presenting themselves as Uber drivers will show up shortly after the police drop off the “rescued” immigrants.
Chavez said Border Patrol is collaborating with Mexican law enforcement.
Liaison officers in the Border Patrol’s foreign operations branch share information — if not intelligence — with counterparts in Juárez, she said.