Vanessa Valadez, 23, of Laredo, TX pleaded guilty to working with other family members to smuggle children under the age of five into the US from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, between August and September 2023.
A Texas woman confessed Friday to drugging young girls to traffic them across the US border. She used melatonin gummies to induce sleep in the children. Border Patrol agents have said there have been increasing cases of this occurring, with some children being "recycled" by smugglers crossing the porous southern border.
Vanessa Valadez, 23, of Laredo, TX pleaded guilty to working with other family members to smuggle children under the age of five into the US from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, between August and September 2023, according to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
Writing in Spanish, one of Valdez’s co-conspirators sent a message on a picture of an unconscious girl that read, “We knocked her out with some gummies.” Valdez and her family illegally moved at least four girls into the US, HSI officials said, transferring the children from a hideaway in Mexico, drugging them and then using fake birth certificates to pretend the kids were members of their family. CBP agents nabbed the gang on Sept. 21, 2023, during a routine inspection.
Three of the trafficked girls are still unidentified and their whereabouts are not known, HSI said. Valdez’s fellow traffickers were Ana Laura Bryand, 47, and her niece Kayla Marie Bryand, 20; Jose Eduardo Bryand, 43; Nancy Guadalupe Bryand, 44; and 32-year-old Lizeth Esmeralda Bryand Arredondo, of Mexico. All of them have pleaded guilty to participating in the operation. The confessions are part of a broad child trafficking operation that continues unabated at the southern border.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has admitted that under the Biden-Harris administration it has been unable to track the fate of 300,000 children. Numerous reports suggest these children are being sold into sex slavery or used as free or cheap labor. CBP sources previously told The New York Post that child traffickers often utilize the ruse of pretending the kids are family members in order to get adults across the border.
“A few years ago when they were coming in en masse, we had to let family units in. People kept coming in and after a while we noticed the kids were the same, but the parents were different. They were recycling the kids,” one source told the Post. “I hate thinking about it because there were thousands of kids and who knows where they all ended up.”
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