SAN ANTONIO – Three people who ran from the scene of a possible human smuggling case Tuesday on the Southwest Side tried to take refuge in a woman’s home, according to her son.
Jorge Vasquez said he found out about it in a late-night phone call from his mother, who lives in a mobile home park near New Laredo Highway, not far from Plumnear Road.
“She said that she was in the kitchen, and then all of a sudden she just turned around and saw three girls in the kitchen standing there,” Vasquez recalled. “It’s just crazy.”
Within minutes, Vasquez said, San Antonio police were on the women’s trail.
They ended up taking a total of seven people into custody in and near the mobile home park, then turned them over to Homeland Security and Immigration, a San Antonio Police Department spokesperson said.
A police report says the people detained were among about a dozen who were seen climbing out of a semitruck that had stopped on Quintana Road near Plumnear Road. The intersection is a little more than a mile away from the site where 53 smuggled migrants died in the back of a big rig in 2022.
To hear about another possible human smuggling case there hit like a bad case of déjà vu for some people who live in the area.
“It’s a little shocking,” said Alexis Sanchez just after going for a jog in a nearby park Wednesday morning. “I feel like that’s kind of scary just to be dumped off in somebody’s backyard. Nobody knows where they’re at.”
City Councilman Edward Mungia, whose district includes that stretch of Quintana Road, said he was “devastated” when he got a late-night phone call about it from SAPD Chief William McManus.
“I think my heart sank when the chief told me that there was a trailer found. Thankfully, this time there were no deaths reported,” he said.
Mungia, who said he was a staff member in a previous city councilmember’s office at the time of the 2022 migrant deaths, is determined now to prevent any more cases from happening.
He said in response to recent vandalism done to a memorial for the migrants who died three years ago, his office was able to install solar lights along that dark section of Quintana Road.
However, he plans to continue pushing for more permanent lighting there.
“We don’t have cameras, as far as I know, on this street. We need to look into that, not only because of that crime. There’s illegal dumping here all the time,” he said.
While both ideas are aimed at making the area less desirable to smugglers, Mungia said a solution to illegal immigration and human smuggling will have to come from the federal government.
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