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Federal agents recovered a teenage girl from Nicaragua who was being held by smugglers demanding additional money from her family. "She's in our custody now. She'll be interviewed and medically screened," said Greg Palmore with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A grocery store parking lot in southwest Houston was to have been the spot where Amparo Centeno would be reunited with her teenage daughter. Centeno had already paid more than $6,000 to have Hidalma, 16, brought from Nicaragua to the United States.

BROOKS COUNTY -- A search is underway for a 12-year-old El Salvadorian girl has been missing for 17 days. Officials said the girl is an illegal immigrant who was traveling with a group of other immigrants that left her behind in Brooks County. Kimberly Orellana was last seen near the Falfurrias checkpoint on August 8th. Kimberly was traveling with a group of immigrants who were smuggled into the United States and dropped off in Mcallen. Immigrant activist Livio Danna said the group was heading to Houston but left her behind after she couldn't walk anymore. Now, Danna is doing whatever...

MESA, Ariz. -- Three Mexican men face federal charges after agents busted an alleged drop house in Mesa on Wednesday. Jesus Castillo-Mejia, 47, and Genaro Guzman-Guzman, 29, appeared in federal court Thursday where they were charged with human smuggling. Marco Guzman-Guzman, 27, was charged with illegally re-entering the United States following a previous deportation order.

(CNN) -- A 6-year-old girl, detained in Arizona on suspicion of entering the United States illegally, is now at a shelter in El Paso, Texas, as authorities try to locate a relative. The girl, who told authorities she is from El Salvador, had to be moved to El Paso because there is no room in Arizona shelters for minors in her situation, said Jose Joaquin Chacon, the consul general for El Salvador in Arizona. The girl was traveling with her mother through Mexico, Chacon said, but for some unknown reason the mother apparently turned her daughter over to smugglers at...

Inside Mexico's 'illegal immigrant theme park': Incredible footage gives taste of potentially deadly trip across the U.S. border-- An incredible new video has revealed a rare glimpse of what it's like for illegal immigrants who make the potentially deadly trip across the Mexican border into the United States. The EcoAlberto theme park in El Alberto, Mexico, offers tourists the chance to experience a simulated illegal U.S. border crossing and for the first time the bizarre tourist attraction has been caught on film. Vice documentary makers took a video camera along to expose just how scary it is for the thousands...

More information has been revealed about the 115 immigrants found in an Edinburg Stash House on Wednesday. According to court records, “Welcome to Hell” is the greeting dozens of undocumented immigrants heard when they arrived into the U.S. Those same court records stated that the greeting wasn’t far from the truth. $500 a week is much Marcial Salas claimed he was making to smuggle in and hide dozens of illegal immigrants. Court documents show that Salas admitted to locking the immigrants in a stash house located down a dirt road off of University Drive in Edinburg, despite the rising heat,...

Early on the morning of March 16, Wong Tat joined a line of about 100 people waiting for the launch of the new iPad in a chilly rain outside an Apple store on the outskirts of San Francisco. When the doors opened, he was among the first to buy his quota of two iPads -- the maximum Apple Inc allows per person. Then, sporting a bright red cap for easy identification, Wong began to direct a stream of people toting their new tablets to a silver Mercedes SUV in the parking lot. After about two dozen of the neatly boxed...

McALLEN — Another reminder of why we need a secure border emerged this week, as U.S. Border Patrol officials confirmed three Afghan nationals were detained in the Rio Grande Valley - an increasing "hot zone" of cartel invasion and violence against American ranchers. Border Patrol confirmed the detentions, but would not say where or when they occurred. Enrique Mendiola, assistant chief Border Patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley sector, said that human smugglers see moving people besides Mexican nationals as a "business opportunity." "Average smuggling rates for other-than-Mexican nationals far exceed those of Mexicans and Central and South Americans,"...

Five people are charged in a plot to employ African Americans from Compton to avert suspicion when bringing illegal immigrants across the border. In the calculus of cross-border human smuggling, Maria Lopez-Diaz allegedly concluded that black instead of brown equals green. The 60-year-old Compton woman, prosecutors say, tried to cash in on racial profiling by operating a human smuggling ring that hired mostly African American drivers who didn't speak a word of Spanish to ferry small groups of immigrants from Mexico to Los Angeles. In the end, the venture failed. Authorities announced charges Thursday against Lopez-Diaz and four others, including...

Watch a police officer stop this plane with his car John McLane's got nothing on this real Brazilian Federal Police Officer, who use his cop car to take down a plane loaded with smugglers and $150,000 of stolen electronics. Here is THE LINK.

Some of them were 15... some 12 years old Does their cruelty know NO limit? Be warned, these repulsive images  are not for the faint-of-heart: ______________________________________________ Sick bas-----s! 'Risky Whiskey' smuggling video/more at Reaganite Republican _____________________________________________ WarNet.ws   h/t Speedunque

Drug smugglers are endlessly creative when it comes to inventing ways to move marijuana, cocaine and other contraband from Mexico into the United States. In the latest innovation uncovered by law enforcement, smugglers in the border town of Nogales, Arizona were bringing drugs into the U.S. for the cost of a quarter. The parking meters on International Street, which hugs the border fence in Nogales, cost 25 cents. Smugglers in Mexico tunneled under the fence and under the metered parking spaces, and then carefully cut neat rectangles out of the pavement. Their confederates on the U.S. side would park false-bottomed...

Two men are in custody after allegedly kidnapping a Guatemalan girl and extorting the girl’s mother. Investigators say that on June 28, a woman contacted the Trenton Police and reported that her 15-year-old daughter had been kidnapped. The woman had paid to have her daughter brought to the U.S. from Guatemala. Once the girl arrived in Texas, police say that two men kidnapped her. They then allegedly demanded large sums of money over several days from the girl’s mother in exchange for the girl’s safe transport to Trenton. The mother told police that she made initial payments to the alleged...

On May 9, 2011, the Illegal Immigration Prevention Apprehension Co-op Team (IIMPACT) conducted a human smuggling investigation. During surveillance, detectives stopped a suspected smuggling load vehicle on State Route 202 at 40th Street in Phoenix. The vehicle was loaded with nine undocumented immigrants and smuggler or “coyote” who was the driver.It was discovered during further investigation that one of the persons being smuggled was a criminal alien, with a prior arrest in California by the Redwood City Sheriff’s Office in 2005 for attempted murder of a police officer. The charges in California were dismissed and there was no record of...

In Texas, nearly 8,200 farms and ranches back up to the Mexican border. The men and women who live and work on those properties say they’re under attack from the same drug cartels blamed for thousands of murders in Mexico. “It’s a war, make no mistake about it,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said. “And it’s happening on American soil.” Texas farmers and ranchers produce more cotton and more cattle than any other state, so Staples is concerned this war could eventually impact our food supply, and calls it a threat to our national security. “Farmers and ranchers are being...

DONNA — Some might say Ken Mol was fortunate to recover his truck after it was stolen from outside the Walmart in Weslaco two weeks ago. He would give it away if only he could find what was left inside. “I don’t think he’d come out of the truck himself, they’d have to pull him out,” Mol said. Since U.S. Border Patrol agents found his truck Jan. 28, Mol and his wife, Tina, have been looking for Hogan, their Labrador-Shepherd mix dog. Almost 6 years old, the canine was resting in the extended cab of Mol’s 2005 Ford F-250 pickup...

Note: The following text is a quote: Queens Man and Accomplice Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to Hizballah Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Joseph M. Demarest, Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the FBI, announced the filing of an indictment yesterday charging Patrick Nayyar and Conrad Stanisclaus Mulholland with attempting to provide material support to Hizballah, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The indictment also charges Nayyar with illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition. On Sept. 24, 2009, Nayyar, a 46-year-old citizen of India who had...

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (still known as ATF) is considering a pilot program that would require gun dealers in the borders states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to report each sale of two or more rifles. Jim Pruett of Jim Pruett’s Guns and Ammo in Houston considers such a move simply a back door to gun registration. “It [would go] on record with the ATF forever,” Pruett says of the reported sales. “There’s no mention of purging the system. So what you basically have is ad-hoc gun registration.” It is hard to argue with...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will go to Arizona on Thursday after a Border Patrol agent was shot and killed in the state. “The fatal shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry last night is an unconscionable act of violence against the men and women of the Border Patrol and all those who serve and defend our country,” Napolitano said in a statement