MCALLEN, Texas — A Texas border woman is facing federal charges in connection with false allegations that she allegedly made about a federal agent taking bribes from drug traffickers.
On Monday morning, Candida Marroquin Mobley will go before a U.S. Magistrate Judge where she will be formally charged with one count of making false statements about a federal agent. The charges against Marroquin come from an indictment handed down by a federal grand jury earlier this week.
On April 19, Marroquin contacted a DEA agent and stated that another agent identified in court records only as J.F. had been taking bribes in exchange for providing information. The indictment revealed that Marroquin knew at the time she made the accusations that J.F. had not been taken bribes and was not “on the take.”
According to information provided to Breitbart Texas by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Marroquin on Friday morning in Weslaco and has been in custody until her upcoming hearing.
Marroquin’s arrest for false statements provides contrast to an ongoing series of arrests along the Texas border tied to corruption of public officials. As Breitbart Texas previously reported, the region known as the Rio Grande Valley has been trying to overcome a cloud of corruption that has included city and county officials, judges, district attorney’s, former sheriff’s and other law enforcement officials. In response to the ongoing events, the FBI established an anti-corruption task force in the region to address the “disproportionate number” of cases of public corruption in the area.
One of the most significant cases in recent years dealt with the arrest and conviction of former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño for having taken cash from a Mexican drug trafficker. The case against Treviño came at the tail end of a series of arrest that included Treviño’s son Jonathan and multiple law enforcement officials tied to a street level drug interdiction unit known as Panama Unit. Members of the unit and other officials adding up to over a dozen law individuals had been complicit in the theft of narcotics disguised as drug raids that were then sold to other drug traffickers.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.