(The Center Square) – Five years into Texas’ border security mission Operation Lone Star, law enforcement efforts in South Texas have become so successful that transnational criminal organizations are moving stolen vehicles and equipment south out of Texas to Mexico and using shipping containers to transport people across the Gulf of America to other states, OLS officials said.
Although southwest illegal border crossings have dropped by 95% in the first year of the Trump administration, OLS 2.0 is ongoing, with law enforcement targeting transnational crime. And in Jackson County, roughly two hours south of Houston, they’re getting caught.
OLS has become so effective that instead of cartel operatives moving large groups of people north into the U.S. through Texas, they’re using shipping containers to go around Texas and cross the Gulf, OLS participants told The Center Square.
“They’re doing that instead of getting caught in the OLS net on I-59. Our operations have saturated the highways,” Jackson County Sheriff Rick Boone told The Center Square in an exclusive interview.
Jackson County Sheriff’s Office is a founding member of an OLS Task Force led by Goliad County Sheriff Roy Boyd. If OLS funds stop and task force operations don’t continue, illegal traffic “is coming right back,” Boone said.
“Proactively hitting hotspots as heavily as we have has really paid off. When we started OLS, we began saturating routes like Highway 59. Then we pushed the illegal traffic to I-10 and then we saturated that area. Then we pushed the illegal traffic further north where they were going into Dallas. Then we formed additional OLS partnerships in new regions and saturated those areas. Then we pushed them as far west as the state of Arizona to the point where law enforcement wanted to come down and see what we were doing so they could do the same thing.
“Every day the cartels are looking for a route or a hole to get through to get here,” he said. “That hasn’t stopped. They’ve just morphed into different ways to move their product, and that’s people, drugs, cash, weapons, stolen vehicles and other contraband.”
One OLS Task Force member, JCSO Criminal Interdiction Deputy Jorge Franco, is actively working to stop them. He’s well-skilled at finding stolen license plates, vehicles, equipment, tools and has an instinct for catching thieves, Boone and others have told The Center Square. His position is fully funded by OLS.
One night, Franco made a major bust. He noticed a semi-truck driver hauling five stacked chassis on a trailer. Most in law enforcement may not think twice about the haul, but because of OLS training, Franco suspected theft and he was right, officials said. He also uncovered something bigger.
The driver was a Guatemalan national with a California commercial driver’s license who spoke broken English. Franco, fluent in Spanish, learned he’d flown into Phoenix and then drove to Houston where he switched vehicles. He then picked up the 18-wheeler and stacked chassis and drove south. Franco said he used resources he already had to recover other stolen vehicles and discovered the chassis were stolen from the Houston Shipyard.
The shipyard’s security team determined “not only were all of those stolen but they realized they were missing hundreds more, up to 600 trailers that were either missing or stolen,” Boone said. The five chassis would transport five shipping containers that could fit hundreds of people inside. It’s unknown how many lives Franco saved, Boone said.
An OLS DPS trooper working in the Rio Grande Valley has made a similar bust as has another OLS Task Force member in another county, The Center Square has learned. Border Patrol in Corpus Christi have confirmed a new trend: cartel operatives are using shipping containers and equipment stolen in the U.S. and elsewhere to ship foreign nationals and stolen goods from Mexico across the Gulf.
“That is why they are stealing the chassis trailers. That is the only reason a truck would be hauling that many, to use for shipping containers,” Franco said.
Once the cartels get the equipment to a port, “they put people, vehicles other items in a shipping container and ship them out,” Franco said. “The cars are stacked and shipped to Africa and the East Coast. People are being shipped across the Gulf to ports in Florida and elsewhere.”
“Most of the chassis and trailers are in terrible condition,” he said. “They’d been stored in a lot to be fixed up and most of the time the owners don’t even know they were stolen.”
Franco is working with multiple agencies on interdiction efforts from Dallas to Brownsville, targeting transnational crime. OLS Task Force sheriffs say this wouldn’t be possible without OLS funding.
“Crime is never going to stop,” Franco said. A task force member jurisdiction has recently been hit hard with several shootings and requested help. OLS Task Force members responded. “We multiple our forces. It helps other agencies that are struggling,” he said. “When we come together, we take our expertise to different areas of investigations. We bring the best of the best to wherever we are.”
The sheriff’s office impounded the truck, named “El Chapo,” after the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel kingpin, who is now incarcerated in the U.S. The Guatemalan driver was arrested and faces several charges.
He didn’t know the chassis were stolen and headed to Mexico, Franco said. Instead, he got arrested and ended up in the Jackson County Jail.
