Hector may not believe it, but he’s one of the lucky ones.
The 18-year-old Mexican national was abandoned in the desert by the smugglers whom he had paid about $3,000 to get him across the southern border and into the United States. He was supposed to pay them another $3,000 upon reaching his destination — Indianapolis, where he said his father works as a roofer.
Because of a condition that was causing his muscles to deteriorate from overuse, Hector couldn’t keep up with the rest of the group. The smugglers, having already received half their $6,000 fee up front, apparently didn’t care.
The other 10 or so people in his group moved on, leaving him to fend for himself in what NewsNation described as a “desolate area of Texas”: Terrell County, population 760, or about one person for every three square miles of land.
Hector, whose last name wasn’t reported, found a rancher’s RV and stayed there for two days. Eventually, he used a pillowcase and a pipe to make a flag to try to attract attention, and found a game camera, to which he showed his Mexican passport.
Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland saw that and went out to find the young man. NewsNation’s Ali Bradley was with him when he did.
“I want to go home to my mother,” a visibly distraught Hector told the sheriff in Spanish while crying. “They left me in those hills and I went to the ranch looking for help.”
Cleveland told Bradley that he’d never seen someone as bad off as Hector — and he’s been patrolling the border in one capacity or another for 26 years, with the Border Patrol and then as sheriff.
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Hector said he fled Mexico because he had been pressured to work for a drug cartel.
“They threatened me in Tehuacan if I didn’t work for the narcos, because I was indebted to them,” he said. “So I focused on getting out of Tehuacan as soon as I could.”
Cleveland took Hector to a hospital for treatment. After that, he went home to Mexico and an uncertain future.
You can watch NewsNation’s report below.
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Still and all, Hector should be considered one of the lucky ones, and not only because he has a family to go back to in Mexico.
NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas reported that the U.N.’s migration agency — the International Organization for Migration — called the trek from Mexico over the border “the deadliest land route for migrants in the world.”
That organization said that 686 people — that they know of — had either died or disappeared while trying to to cross the border illegally in 2022 alone.
For his part, Cleveland told NewsNation that his office had found 37 bodies in Terrell County over the past three years, or about one a month during the Biden administration. That’s up from about one recovered body per year prior to that.
