Suspected human smuggler arrested outside Olney

A 34-year-old woman was arrested over Memorial Day weekend just outside of the Olney city limits for allegedly smuggling 11 illegal immigrants in a Honda Odyssey van bound for the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, law enforcement officials said.

Mexican national Julia Ovalles-Ramirez remains in Young County jail in lieu of $45,000 in bail, charged with felony smuggling of persons and possessing fraudulent identification, according to jail records. She was stopped on State Highway 114 and Willard Road at 4:38 p.m. by a sheriff ’s deputy assisted by Olney police, law enforcement records show. Deputy Joshua Gallardo pulled over the van on a license plate violation and discovered seven men and three women on the floorboard in the back of the vehicle and one man in the trunk section. The immigrants were questioned and released, according to Gallardo’s affidavit. The women told the deputy that they had paid $9,700 apiece to be picked up at the border and transported to Phoenix, and from there to the East Coast, the affidavit said. They said Ovalles-Ramirez knew they were in the United States illegally.

Ovalles-Ramirez said she was taking the migrants to Dallas, where they would be picked up by another van and taken to work, but she did not know where they would be working.

Rural law enforcement officials also have noted an uptick in Mexican cartels’ movement of illegal laborers from the border to Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, where they are distributed throughout the United States.

Young County Sheriff Travis Babcock said deputies had stopped two such caravans of migrant workers in the last two months. “These people are paying the cartel before they even hit the border, and they have people picking them up in Del Rio, El Paso, Phoenix and other cities and driving them,” Babcock said.

Texas law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Ken Paxton, have criticized President Joseph Biden’s decision to lift Title 42, a public health order that allowed U.S. immigration officers to expel migrants, including asylum-seekers, at the international border because of the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of detaining and deporting those who don’t qualify for asylum.

Texas and other border states sued the federal government over the Biden administration’s decision to stop enforcing Title 42 as of May 23, saying it would promote a surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border and force states to fund health care, law enforcement, education and other services for them.

“The Biden administration’s disastrous open border policies and its confusing and haphazard COVID-19 response have combined to create a humanitarian and public safety crisis on our southern border,” Paxton argued in Texas’s lawsuit.

A federal judge in Louisiana blocked the administration from lifting the order last month.