Busy “Pipeline” Migrant Route Makes Texas Town Hub for Human Smuggling

Easy highway access and a frontier lawlessness has transformed Falfurrias.

FALFURRIAS, Texas — Wyatt Hollek maneuvers his four-wheel-drive truck along a rutted sandy road and stops at a small, fenced-off enclosure where a mesquite tree provides shade to a dripping water pipe. Last Thanksgiving, Hollek found a dead woman tied to the tree trunk, her pants and underwear wrapped around her ankles. A Honduran ID card had been neatly placed next to her head, which lay face down in the sand.

“They just keep coming,” said Hollek, the 26-year-old manager of the Los Compadres Ranch, which grazes cattle and offers quail hunting. “They all just want to get to Houston, and a lot of them die trying.”

Tens of thousands of migrants from Central America have streamed across the U.S.-Mexico border this year and have surrendered to U.S. Border Patrolagents. The agents can’t immediately deport those from countries that don’t share a border with the U.S. so many Central American migrants believe they stand a better chance of staying if they go through the legal procedure of requesting asylum. (Related: “Texas Church Becomes Oasis for Central American Migrants, Their Children”)

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