SAN ANTONIO – Neighbors are still trying to make sense of a raid on an East Side home that ended with the arrest of a woman they knew only as a wife and mother.
Bexar County Sheriff’s investigators said Diana Salazar, 26, was allegedly running a human smuggling operation out of her East Side home.
Authorities said her house, located on Hays Street and not far from Walters Avenue, was being used to stash people who had entered the country illegally.
“They came in, guns blazing. And when they rolled in, they came in with their lights on,” said Kimone Simmons, who lives in the neighborhood where deputies conducted the raid on Saturday night. “By the time I came outside, they were already surrounding the house, and all we heard was, ‘We got a search warrant. Come out.’”
According to a Bexar County Sheriff’s Office report, members of the Human Exploitation Unit had been monitoring Salazar, who was suspected of smuggling in the past, for some time.
The report states investigators saw Salazar pick up several suspected migrants from a Love’s Travel Stop gas station Saturday near Interstate 35 and Fischer Road and drove those strangers to her home, where she stashed them.
Salazar later left the home with a man and two children in her car; deputies conducted a traffic stop and arrested her, the report stated.
They also took the man, Victorino GonzalezRamirez, 48, into custody after he tried to run from deputies.
A second traffic stop that day led to the arrest of Kassandra Sias, 27, who had a suspected migrant in the car.
Court records show Sias and Salazar are charged with human smuggling, while GonzalezRamirez faces a charge of evading arrest.
After the arrests, investigators spent hours searching the home for evidence.
“They had this street blocked off all the way around,” Simmons said, referring to the large law enforcement presence in the neighborhood.
Neighbors who spoke off-camera said they never suspected anything illegal was happening at Salazar’s home.
They described Salazar as an ordinary wife and mother — someone who was dedicated to her children.
“If she was doing it, she was very good at it,” Simmons said. “She never stood out.”
However, another neighbor, Dan Brooks, said he had a suspicion that things were not quite right there.
“I kind of had a feeling,” Brooks said. “Those people were outside all night, on the porch. There were a lot of people over there. But, in the daytime, you saw nobody.”
There was no one at Salazar’s home on Tuesday morning.
Salazar and Sias are being held in the Bexar County Adult Detention Center with a bond set at $75,000 each, jail records show.
GonzalezRamirez was released after posting a $20,000 bond.
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