Migrants Held for Ransom in Texas Hoped Biden Would Welcome Them
Listen, the situation at the Texas border right now – I’ve been covering this for weeks and each story is harder than the last.
Migrants from Central America who made the dangerous journey north hoping for a better life are ending up in what law enforcement calls “stash houses” – held for ransom by the very smugglers they paid to get them across. And many of them say they came because they believed President Biden would be more welcoming than his predecessor.
“He cares more about us than the other one, and I thought he would see our necessity and help us,” one migrant told reporters after being rescued.
The Houston Chronicle documented one such rescue in late April – a Houston SWAT team responding to a kidnapping call discovered over 90 people crammed into a two-story house in deplorable conditions. Some hadn’t eaten in days. Many were sick. The smugglers had been holding them for ransom.
Ilden López from Guatemala had been traveling for 25 days. He’d made a promise to his wife and two young children that he would do anything to lift them out of poverty. What he found in that Houston stash house wasn’t the American dream.
Under the Biden Administration, border apprehensions reached a record of more than 170,000 in March 2021. The Western Journal reported that those who make it across face continued dangers, including trafficking and exploitation at the hands of criminal organizations.
NBC News spoke with police chiefs from Rio Grande Valley border towns who meet weekly to compare notes. Pharr Police Chief Andy Harvey described getting a frantic call from a man who’d escaped a stash house holding 70 migrants. The house had no running water, no furniture, and the people inside were being left to “fend for themselves.”
“One thing we don’t want, and I think we could all say the same thing as chiefs, is crimes happening in our community and us not knowing about it,” Harvey said.
Federal agents are stretched so thin processing newly apprehended migrants that local police are having to fill the gaps – raiding stash houses, busting coyotes, saving border crossers suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion.
“We take up the slack,” said Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra. “These are things that normally our federal partners would be doing.”
The FBI has since issued warnings about the growing trend of migrants being held for ransoms of up to $10,000.
The contrast between what these migrants hoped to find and what they actually encountered is as heartbreaking as it is complicated.
