A woman in Corpus Christi, Texas has been arrested by police after allegedly selling her 7 year old child to two men.
Esmeralda Garza, age 29, was arrested by Texas Department of Public Safety officers on Friday after she sold her 7 year old son to two men. She was also attempting to sell two other children, a pair of girls ages 2 and 3.
DPS officers caught her selling her children while in the midst of a drug raid. Garza was charged with the sale or purchase of a child, which is a felony in the third degree. She’s now being held in a Nueces County Jail, on $100,000 bond.
Another woman and a man where also arrested with Garza during the DPS raid, but it’s still unclear whether they were involved with the drug thing or the child-selling thing. Police are expected to file additional charges against Garza in the case, and the others arrested with her may face charges as well.
This case is illustrative of one of the main problems with having such a porous border. The statistics on human trafficking in America consistently show that almost a third of all victims of human trafficking in the US are from Latin America. In fact, nearly 29 percent of trafficking victims enter the US border from Mexico via human smuggling.
But most trafficking of Latin American people in America occurs through networks of organized crime. Coyotes who smuggle illegal immigrants across the borders will often then enslave their victims, threatening to report them for deportation if they don’t work. (And, of course, the illegals cannot really go to the authorities to complain about their treatment.)
Pimps and brothels traffic in underage children, almost always girls. An estimated 63% of sex trafficking victims are minors, and most are believed to be from Mexico or Central America.
But it’s rare for immigrants in the US to sell their own children. That’s what makes this case so strange. Perhaps the woman, Esmeralda Garza, was involved in drugs and desperate for cash.
Either way, she’ll now be separated from her children and, hopefully, deported or thrown in jail. And we’ll see if the libs kick up a big fuss about “splitting up families” in this case.
