BRACKETTVILLE, Texas — One person is dead after human smugglers led authorities on a high-speed chase through Kinney County last Friday night.
County officials said the truck carrying nine undocumented migrants in the backseat rolled at least once and crashed, killing one migrant and injuring the others.
“People were thrown out the windows. It was a bad accident,” said Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe.
Authorities said the driver, Domonik Martinez from Eagle Pass, was arrested along with four other people involved in the smuggling attempt.
“It was a matter of time before we had a severe accident with these guys trying to run from us,” Coe said.
He said human smuggling has dramatically increased in Kinney County – the 27th largest county in Texas with 16 miles of border along the Rio Grande River – over the last few months.
“We have almost 1,400 square miles, and there’s 3,300 people in the whole county,” Coe said.
In May alone, Coe said, authorities contended with 13 human smuggling cases. In June they’ve had at least nine; over the last three years, there was a total of 19.
“We had a one-week stretch where we had one smuggling case per day, and then we had one day where we had five in one day,” Coe said. "It's getting worse."
The sheriff said the smugglers are using the backroads of Kinney County, like Ranch Road 674 heading towards Rocksprings, to get around the Border Patrol checkpoint in Uvalde on their way to San Antonio.
“It’s not just affecting Border Patrol, it’s affecting our infrastructure here within Kinney County,” Coe said.
And, he said, the increase in cases is overwhelming county resources that are already spread thin. According to Coe, said the county only has four deputies, with only two on the clock each 12 hours. Further, Kinney County only has two EMS crews, with one working every 12 hours.
Through Operation StoneGarden, Coe said they have additional deputies who work part-time, funded by the federal government for border counties.
“My StoneGarden deputies, which acts as a force multiplier for Border Patrol, their primary duty is to prevent the smuggling of aliens, narcotics and terrorists on the back roads,” Coe said.
But even that’s not enough.
“Like this case we had the other night where we ended up with a fatality, just that one accident took every resource that Kinney County had,” the sheriff said.
Last Friday, Coe said, they had to call in help from Uvalde and Val Verde counties to help with the accident.
“With our resources being taxed, we can’t get out to visit with people and check on some of these outlying regions because we’re busy handling what’s coming across the border,” he said.
The sheriff said he’s hoping to get more funding for additional StoneGarden deputies because he doesn’t foresee the problem getting any better anytime soon.