Posted: Saturday, January 4, 2014 7:17 pm
Jacob Fischler | The Monitor

MISSION — Federal agents last week searched the home of a suspected human smuggler they believe belongs to an organization responsible for a December incident in which an immigrant fleeing authorities was killed by a tractor-trailer.

A special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations applied Thursday for a warrant to search the Mission apartment of Daniel Hernandez, court records say. U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter E. Ornsby granted the request.

The results of the search remain under seal. Two ICE spokeswomen did not respond to requests for comment Saturday. Court records do not show that Hernandez has been arrested.

FATAL BAILOUT

The evidence that led authorities to Hernandez’s apartment remains unclear, but people detained after they bailed out of a car a U.S. Border Patrol agent tried to pull over about 1 a.m. on Dec. 23 identified Hernandez as belonging to the organization they’d paid to transport them to Houston.

When the agent turned on his lights, the Chevrolet Impala initially pulled over to the side of U.S. Highway 77.

But once it came to a complete stop, the doors opened and five or six people bailed from the vehicle.

Seconds later, as the agent approached the car, he heard brakes grinding and tires screeching. He turned to see a tractor-trailer strike and kill a man who’d been in the car. The man, later identified as Tomas Vasquez-Hurarchar of Guatemala, was taken to Spohn Kingsville Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The agent ultimately detained three people from the car — immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico who’d entered the country illegally.

In interviews with the Border Patrol and HSI agents, two of the immigrants recalled how they’d paid a human smuggling operation to transport them from a Mexican border town across the Rio Grande on a raft, then concealed them in two different stash houses in the Rio Grande Valley, the warrant application stated. The Border Patrol agent recognized several of the nicknames the immigrants knew their smugglers by, court documents stated.

‘EL TIO’

On Dec. 23, six immigrants drove in the Impala with a man they knew as “El Tio” to a spot just south of the Falfurrias Border Patrol checkpoint. They got out of the car. Another person who’d been the passenger in a vehicle tailing the Impala got into the driver’s seat of the recently emptied car.

El Tio led the immigrants through the brush on foot for hours until they arrived at a rest stop north of the checkpoint, where the Impala arrived a few minutes later to pick them up.

When shown a photo lineup, the immigrants identified Hector Armando Duran — a Mexican national caught earlier in December trying to illegally transport immigrants north — as El Tio.

Duran was deported following the earlier December incident, but not before agents searched his cell phone and found correspondence with a number belonging to Mirian Galvan — Hernandez’s common-law wife with whom he’d been arrested in 2012.

Galvan’s phone number listed as her home the Mission apartment HSI investigators searched Friday.

Western Union records, subpoenaed by investigators, showed both Galvan and Hernandez received payments listing the Mission apartment as their home address. The HSI investigator applying for the warrant asserted the payments were consistent with human smuggling operations.

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