The body count keeps rising along the deadliest smuggling thoroughfare on the porous US southern border. “Texas sheriff’s deputies in a county located 80 miles north of the border with Mexico recovered the bodies or remains of at least 26 migrants so far this year,” Breitbart reported July 16. “The migrants mostly died while crossing through ranches to circumvent a US Border Patrol immigration checkpoint.”
That would be Brooks County, and it has long served as a hideous field of death for illegal aliens abused and abandoned by the smugglers they pay to guide them into America.
“Since 1994, at least 8,000 [illegal aliens] have perished in Brooks County alone,” Business Insider reported in January 2022. “The actual death toll is almost certainly higher than the official count, with the number of missing people far exceeding the human remains that have been discovered to date.”
Rotting Bodies Along the Border
The harsh terrain, featuring sandy and confusing brushland, makes discovering and recovering corpses exceedingly difficult. “Most of the recoveries involved the collection of skeletal remains scattered by animals and scavenger birds,” Breitbart noted. “Most of the time, that is all that is left,” Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez told the news site. “It doesn’t take long with the animals and the heat for a human body to decay.”
Unfortunately for beleaguered local police, Brooks County serves as a strategic route for human smuggling operations. The Texas Public Policy Foundation explained:
“Why is Brooks County, nearly 2,000 miles away from New York City and still miles away from the Texas/Mexico border, the epicenter for migrant deaths? It’s simple, really. [Major highway] US 281 bisects the county and serves as a major artery for human trafficking going north. Border Patrol has a checkpoint on 281 on the south side of the county; the cartels that control the smuggling would rather not risk it. So they tell migrants to get out of the vehicle, and hike around the checkpoint – a hike of between 20 and 30 miles, depending on their path.”
“At night, you can see the lights of Falfurrias in the distance,” Brooks County Deputy Don White told the foundation. “Sometimes they’ll tell the migrants, ‘See those lights? That’s Houston. Just go north, and you’ll find it.’ And, of course, they don’t.”
‘Secondary Smuggling’
The cruelty of the smugglers is a staple of this modern American wasteland of death. “Brooks County deputies have busted 80 smuggling operations this year,” The San Antonio Express-News reported in 2018. “Smugglers have been arrested along the border on charges of raping and killing [illegal aliens], holding them for ransom or leaving them behind in the brush.”
Smugglers capitalize on the unforgiving landscape to further prey on border jumpers. “In addition to the smugglers who bring migrants across the border in vehicles, smugglers based in Falfurrias wait for lost, weak migrants to straggle across the brush alone or in small groups. They often hold these people hostage and demand ransom from their relatives, [Sheriff] Martinez said,” the paper related. “He called this form of exploitation ‘secondary smuggling.’”
As the border becomes more chaotic, the death toll mounts.
“In August 2021, Martinez testified before a Texas House Appropriations Committee on border security funding, stating Brooks County had seen ‘a 140% increase in dead bodies, a 130% increase in 911 calls, over 200% increase in rescues,’” The Center Square reported in February.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Martinez has repeatedly described the shocking scale of the carnage, which seems straight out of a lawless Third World banana republic.
“The Falfurrias checkpoint reported a 100% increase in firearms seizures in 2022 from 2021,” he said, “a 400% increase in checkpoint vehicle circumventions, 150% increase in cocaine seizures, a 1,743% increase in meth seizures, 175% increase in apprehensions of gang members, 67% increase in apprehensions of sexual offenders, and a 220% increase in alien smuggling cases.”
“We have a high number of sexual assault cases that occur on these females that are crossing,” the sheriff added.
Picking the Bones for Political Gain
In yet another despicable display of progressives intentionally ignoring reality to score cheap political points, the body of a severely decomposed man found hanging from a tree in 2021 was painted as a “lynching” with the onus of blame placed on Americans opposed to illegal immigration.
If you don’t recall hearing about this racially loaded mudball aimed at law-abiding American citizens, it’s because it failed to stick on the dirt-covered walls of the dominant media’s 24-hour news cycle. And so it was discarded as the next mudball came along.
Joaquin Castro (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“A century ago, when migrants were seeking safety from the violent uncertainties of the revolution in Mexico, they were sometimes met by mobs armed with chains, ropes, and guns,” Texas Monthly explained as it attempted to mine this barren narrative. “They were tortured and beaten all along the border. Often, anyone with a ‘foreign’ name, US citizen or not, was in danger of being singled out.”
“This appears to be a lynching of a Mexican man in South Texas. I will request an FBI investigation if one has not commenced,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) exclaimed in a tweet. “The dangerous, dehumanizing rhetoric of ‘invasion’ used by right-wing politicians to describe asylum seekers must stop.”
Imagine being a sitting US congressman with a years-long stream of detailed information made available to you on the gross disdain for human life ceaselessly displayed by the cartels and, rather than seriously addressing that scourge, choosing to cherry-pick one of the thousands of decaying bodies on this trail of misery to wield as a race-baiting political weapon.
As with homelessness in Los Angeles and the open-air drug market in San Francisco, progressives are deliberately turning their backs on the root causes of human suffering in pursuit of a partisan agenda. It is not sustainable for one simple fact: Whether it be on the streets of California’s two largest cities or the sandy brushlands of south Texas, the growing pile of bodies is rapidly approaching a tipping point.
