PHARR, Texas — Dozens of police officers surrounded a small home in this border city as they followed up information that there were dozens of illegal immigrants inside.
When officers with Pharr Police and agents with U.S. Border Patrol went in they arrested 47 illegal immigrants including three women in what has become an all too common story in this border region.
However, according to information released to Breitbart Texas by Pharr Police, one of the women opened up to authorities about how she was raped by at least two human smugglers who recorded the rape on a tablet. The human smugglers were not at the house at the time the raid.
Stash houses, with dozens of illegal aliens who are often abused or held for ransom, show the human side of a topic that is largely reported with numbers only. The most recent figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed that from October to April from this fiscal year, authorities have made 223,869 apprehensions. According to the current models, the figure is likely to surpass the 331,333 apprehensions from the entire 2015 fiscal year. The large majority of them being made in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in South Texas.
Of those apprehensions from October to April 2016, 32,952 have been unaccompanied minors up to 17-years-of-age. The figure revealed a massive increase in the apprehensions of minors in the past seven months. The number of unaccompanied minors is almost as high as the entire 2015 number of 39,970 apprehensions. The large majority of the apprehensions are being made in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
Various news outlets that have been covering border issues have focused their resources on statistics — primarily on the number of children and families that come over the border. They have largely ignored the individual horror stories carried out by cartel controlled human smugglers.
The Texas Tribune has written a large number of stories focusing on the immigration and border debate while taking a left-of-center approach. The publication focused on civil rights groups, court cases, and other issues, but has largely ignored border crime and the atrocities committed by human smugglers. When the Texas Tribune did cover crime, they based their story on an outdated metric that the FBI has tried to phase out. In their articles, the Texas Tribune has not covered this week’s rape at the human stash house or the various cases where human smugglers have abandoned toddlers and juveniles in remote areas.
KGBT, a TV station owned by the Sinclair group, that in the past has shown a left-of-center view on immigration stories, did not cover the raid at the human stash house nor the fact that the woman was sexually assaulted by human smugglers as of Tuesday afternoon. KGBT also known as Valley Central, is the same station that in February 2015 used the words “Disturbance” and “Demonstration” to refer to a riot where more than 2,000 federal inmates, most held on immigration charges, set fire and vandalized a detention center in Willacy County. Authorities were forced to relocate the prison population after the “disturbance” left enough damage that the facility had to be shut down.
The Monitor, in McAllen, has also taken a left-of-center editorial line. This is primarily seen in their multiple editorials and their approach to the rise of unaccompanied minors and family units. As of Tuesday afternoon, the newspaper had not reported on the human stash house where the human smugglers raped the woman and recorded her ordeal.
On the other hand, KRGV a local TV station that has been consistently reporting on the immigration crisis, also reported on the stash house raid as well as the rape of the woman.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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