The Cubans Rainel Lázaro Silies and Lima Gálvez González have been detained for the crime of migrant smuggling in the US county of Kinney, Texas, since last Wednesday. The couple is awaiting trial.
Kinney Sheriff Brad Coe lamented that the county “is rife with human and drug smuggling.” The arrest of Silies and Gálvez occurred in the town of Bracketville, when they were transporting five undocumented immigrants in a vehicle with Kentucky license plates.
According to the authorities, this would not be the first transfer of migrants carried out by the Cuban couple, who lived for a time in the Texan city of Elton. The migrants, who were hidden in the back of the Kia brand unit, were handed over to the Border Patrol, which returned them to Mexico.
In the Kinney county office they have listed Louisville as an “active Cuban settlement since the 1990s.” According to published data by Radio and Television Martí In April of last year, the largest city in Kentucky inhabited about 30,000 Cubans, “a population that far exceeds the little more than 6,000 who lived in the city in 2010.”
Last week, Sheriff Coe shared images of women transporting several migrants in a van. When they were stopped, they tried to escape and stopped in a place so that the undocumented could get lost in the undergrowth.
Two female smugglers from Gonzalez, Tx, led @TxDPS Troopers on a high-speed chase on SH 131 in Kinney County. During the chase, multiple illegal immigrants bailed out & ran towards the brush. Both females were arrested & face smuggling charges. #OperationLoneStar pic.twitter.com/9OzTVfw0hg
—Chris Olivarez (@LtChrisOlivarez) April 13, 2023
Cole insisted that illegal entry continues at Kinney. During the month of February, 39 cases of human smuggling were registered with the arrest of coyotes. Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported 29 chases along the border during March.
Last Thursday, a coyote identified as Randolph Sheppard Jr. was arrested. After checking his fingerprints, it was found that he was wanted in Guadalupe County for drug trafficking. This subject was transporting seven migrants from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala in a van.
On the other hand, this Tuesday, the US government denied having “lost” 85,000 unaccompanied migrant minors who arrived at its border from Mexico, although it did not offer figures on how many it has tracked after being handed over to a relative or guardian. legal.
“I would like to make this clear: we have not lost anyone,” said the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Robin Dunn Marcos, before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability of the US House of Representatives.
Dunn was questioned following an investigation by the newspaper The New York Times of last March, according to which in 2022 the number of unaccompanied minors who entered the US reached 130,000. Between 2021 and 2022 the agency failed to contact more than 85,000 children.
In his testimony Dunn pointed out that more than 85% of the 127,447 unaccompanied minors handed over to “sponsors”, people who care for those children, in 2022 stayed with a close relative.
Less than 15% of children released from custody that year went to the home of a distant relative or person they were not related to. In the first half of fiscal year 2023, he added, ORR has found homes for 58,735 minors.
Republican lawmaker Glenn Grothman, chair of that committee, accused the Joe Biden Administration of pursuing an “open borders” policy that “has created a humanitarian crisis that drives child traffickers.”
While, the US Coast Guard returned 27 rafters to Cuba this Sunday and, with them, there are more than 3,000 irregular migrants returned to the Island in 2023.
This last group is made up of 25 men, one woman and one minor, the majority residing in the province of Matanzas, according to data from the Cuban Ministry of the Interior.
These rafters last Sunday had participated in an illegal exit from the country and were intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard.
Since last October 1, the crews of the US Coast Guard have detained more than 6,200 Cuban rafters, a figure that exceeded the total number of migrants from the island intercepted between October 2021 and September 2022.
The Government of Washington implemented at the beginning of 2023 a policy to welcome 30,000 migrants per month from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua. In parallel, it will immediately expel undocumented immigrants from those countries who try to cross the southern border into its territory irregularly to Mexico.
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