Illegals dying in South Texas treks

LA Times:

The South Texas sun had scorched the woman's face. Flies swarmed over her lips. Under a nearby mesquite plant, a plastic water jug lay empty.

Brooks County Chief Deputy Sheriff Urbino Martinez picked it up and walked back to a group of officials gathered around the sprawled body of the dead migrant.

"She got left behind for some reason," he said. "Either she got ill or she just got tired and they left her, knowing very well she wasn't going to get out of this area."

Justice of the Peace Roel Villarreal noticed that the woman's pants were pulled down around her hips, and her shirt was wrapped over her shoulders — signs of the woman's desperate struggle to cool down, he said.

"When it's damn hot, that's what you do before you die," Villarreal said.
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Many of these deaths occur as they try to make it through the vast ranch lands that surround a Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. Highway 281, some 70 miles north of the border. It is the last obstacle for migrants trying to get to Houston, so they attempt to go around it by the hundreds every night.

The Rio Grande Valley recently surpassed the Tucson sector as the area with the most migrant arrests. The surging traffic has besieged border agents at the once-relatively tranquil checkpoint near the small town of Falfurrias. It also illuminates one of the major obstacles to a comprehensive immigration overhaul being debated in the Senate.
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People trying to circumvent the checkpoint fail with alarming regularity. So far this year, 31 bodies or sets of human remains have been found, including the 22-year-old Honduran woman whose body Martinez retrieved in April.

Last year the remains of 129 people were discovered, a record that contributed to the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas becoming the second-deadliest crossing region, behind the Tucson area. Overall, 463 migrants died last year trying to cross the Southwest border, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Officials and ranchers estimate that hundreds more have probably died in Brooks County, but their bodies lie undiscovered on the cattle and hunting ranches, some of which are barren expanses larger than San Francisco.
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Getting across the Rio Grande is just the first step. Migrants hole up in stash houses in the McAllen area, then board vehicles that take them north. A few miles south of the Highway 281 checkpoint, where a sign reads "Smuggling illegal aliens is a federal crime," the cars stop and the migrants spill out. Collapsed fences and broken branches mark the way into the ranches, including the fabled King Ranch. The migrants follow their smuggling guides north beyond the checkpoint, then board vehicles that take them to Houston.

The trek ranges from 15 to 30 miles, a relatively short distance compared with the days-long hikes migrants endure to reach Tucson or Phoenix farther west. The terrain isn't desert, but it is perilous.

The ranch soil is sandy, sapping strength from the hardiest of legs. With no mountain peaks or unique terrain features to guide the way, migrants trudge through brushy pastures and clusters of mesquite and oak trees not realizing they've been walking in circles. Summertime temperatures regularly top 100 degrees.
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There is more.

These people cross the southern Mexican border and climb on top of northbound freight trains that take them as far as the border with South Texas.  There they fall under the control of the drug cartels who have branched out into human trafficking.  They have replaced the old Coyote system.  The cartels use stolen SUV's and trucks to carry the migrants to the stash houses.

Those who survive the walk around the Border Patrol checkpoint are carried to a stash house in Houston where as many as 40 or 50 are kept until they find jobs are they leave for another stash house in large cities.  But once they make it passed the Falfurrias checkpoint they are pretty much home free under Obama who will only send them back if they are caught committing a felony.  They can then wait for their Democrat voter registration cards.