Posted: Wednesday, January 22, 2014 5:21 pm
Jared Taylor | The Monitor

ROMA — A woman told Border Patrol agents that she was smuggling Central Americans into the country because her convict husband owes money to the Zetas drug cartel.

Border Patrol on Sunday responded to a call at an unidentified apartment about 30 yards from the Rio Grande that is a common path for illegal smuggling, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. Magistrate Court in McAllen.

Agents pulled over a black SUV they say was traveling twice the residential speed limit and making erratic turns without stopping, the complaint says.

The driver, Jesica Lynett Lara, 31, finally stopped and told agents she was a U.S. citizen, according to the complaint. Four others inside the vehicle said they were in the country illegally without documentation.

Lara had twice been caught but not criminally charged with human smuggling twice before, agents said.

She told agents that she worked with her husband — who’s in jail — to pick up immigrants in Roma because he owes money to the Zetas drug cartel, the complaint said. Lara said she wasn’t getting paid to pick up the immigrants — only that she was trying to help her husband pay off his cartel debt.

Lara said she received a phone call from an unknown man, who told her where to pick up the immigrants, one of whom told agents they’d entered the U.S. illegally by wading across the river.

Lara appeared Tuesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dorina Ramos. A detention hearing in the case is set for Friday.

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