If smugglers and their illegal-alien cargo aren’t careful, they’ll get in big trouble for not wearing masks and social distancing of at least six feet.
Border agents have caught the smugglers and hundreds of men, women, and children packed into trailers and trucks, and even lying atop one another in small compartments of trucks, in the last two months, Customs and Border Patrol has reported in multiple releases.
Contracting the Chinese virus, or spreading it, doesn’t seem to scare or concern them. And if an American must contract the virus so they can enter the country illegally, so be it.
All that matters is entering the country for a job, welfare, and taxpayer-subsidized medical care. That last, of course, includes treatment for SARS-CoV-2, the deadly Asiatic pathogen.
Packed to the Roof
On four occasions, agents have stopped trucks and trailers that don’t exactly allow, needless to say, the mandated distance between one or more individuals. Nor, amazingly, do smugglers comply with the ban on large groups of 10 or more.
Smugglers filled the vehicles to the roof with three, two, and in one case even more than four dozen illegals.
Three days ago at a checkpoint on Interstate 35 near Laredo, Texas, a CBP canine alerted agents to a trailer brimming with cheap labor.
Inside were 54 illegals from Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the agency reported.
At the same station on April 30, agents stopped a trailer hauling 36 illegals from Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Agents have intercepted tractor-trailers packed with 102 illegals in the last six days before May 4, CBP reported.
The same day, agents with the El Centro Border Sector California stopped a truckload of 21 illegals — 16 men, four women, and one child — at an immigration checkpoint near Salton City, California.
But that big hauls wasn’t the biggest for El Centro agents of late. On February 13, again near Salton City, agency canines sniffed out 26 illegals packed into a tractor-trailer.
On May 6, agents there caught another six who were hiding in a hydraulic dump trailer.
In March, El Centro agents operating near Calexico netted 42, an even larger catch than February’s: Four illegals were inside a truck pulling a utility trailer that carried 38.
Agents caught yet another smuggler near Tucson yesterday. His plans weren’t quite as ambitious as numbers go, but as with so many smugglers, he was inventive.
Reported CBP, “15 individuals, including the driver and two accompanied children, were discovered throughout the pickup. Four were concealed behind the seat. Ten others were in the bed, hidden beneath a makeshift, plywood bed cover.”
That arrest didn’t top another in January, when video surveillance cameras picked up a group of illegals running north from the All American Canal about seven miles east of the Calexico West Port of Entry.
The bunch jumped into a truck.
When agents stopped it, CBP reported, they discovered “14 individuals stuffed and laying on top of one another in the rear metal utility box and one man on the front passenger’s seat floor covered with the driver’s jacket.”
Five of those illegals were Mexican, 10 were Chinese.
Chinese Virus or Ebola
CBP did not report whether the Chinese or any of the others have the virus, which is spreading across Mexico and Central America.
CBP did not report the home country of most of the illegals recently caught in large groups.
The number of COVID-19 cases and deaths for the countries that typically send illegals north or showed up the groups caught in the last month are these:
• Ecuador — 30,296 / 1,654
• Mexico — 27,634 / 2,704
• El Salvador — 695 / 15
• Guatemala — 798 / 21
• Honduras — 1,461 / 99
The Chinese virus hasn’t been the only threat of contagion at the border.
Another recent concern is Ebola virus, given the number of Congolese who showed up in the region, hoping to cross the U.S. border illegally.
As well, illegals frequently cross the border with the flu, mumps, strep throat, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases that often spread to border agents. Illegals have also brought in swine flu, and often carry lice that can spread typhus.
Until President Trump ordered the immediate deportation of illegals after the virus pandemic began, the government released them into unsuspecting communities across the country.
Photo: vichinterlang / iStock / Getty Images Plus
