Thousands of people have been arrested under Texas’ human smuggling law. Now they face at least a decade in prison under sentencing guidelines that took effect this year.
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Persinger is among thousands of people who have been charged with human smuggling since Texas began an all-out effort calledThe people they’re arresting are often lured into becoming human smugglers by vague posts seeking drivers for thousands of dollars on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to eight defense attorneys, three prosecutors and four people arrested for smuggling.
Texas’ human smuggling law has been in the books for a quarter century, but over the last decade the state Legislature has repeatedly broadened it and made the punishment more extreme. People convicted under federal human smuggling law face on average about 15 months in prison.
Persinger was 33 when he stopped in Texas in the spring of 2023 during a cross-country trip from North Carolina to California, where he lived at the time. His father had just died and left him some belongings — including a car. Persinger, a musician who had always struggled earning money, met up with a friend in San Antonio where the two were going to record a few songs. He said he planned to stay for about a month.
A few months after graduating from high school in 2021, Perrow received a vague message through Snapchat asking if he could give a person and their friends a ride for $1,200. They’d also cover his gas to and from the border.last fall during a hearing about proposed changes to the smuggling law. “I just thought I was going to give them a ride and I was going to get paid.”
“That's generally how it happens,” Delgado said. “Doesn't say, ‘Oh, and that’s illegal so be careful.’ It doesn’t warn them of the dangers.” “I was ahead of the curve,” Chávez said in a recent interview. “I recognized that we need to also go after those who use this for profit.”The federal government ramped up national security efforts after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — including along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a George Mason University professor who studies smuggling.
Soon, Texas state troopers began arresting migrants along the southern border, mostly for criminal trespassing on private property. National Guard soldiers patrolled the banks along the Rio Grande with long guns. That gap has only widened. In the 2022 fiscal year, federal law enforcement charged 2,745 people with human smuggling in Texas. Meanwhile, Texas law enforcement made roughly 17,592 smuggling arrests that year.
El Paso Public Defender Kelli Childress, whose office has nearly 400 smuggling cases, posed a scenario: If she were to give her father a ride and her car has tinted windows and she drives away from an officer, she could be arrested on suspicion of smuggling her own father. She said those cases are piling up, which strains county courts that don’t have enough personnel — from prosecutors to court reporters to interpreters — to keep up.
After seeing several people emerge from the brush and jump into the Hyundai, the trooper pulled Persinger over, according to a probable cause affidavit. One “undocumented alien” ran off immediately and was followed by two more, despite the trooper’s orders to “stop and show hands,” he wrote.
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