Busy “Pipeline” Migrant Route Makes Texas Town Hub for Human Smuggling
Easy highway access and a frontier lawlessness has transformed Falfurrias.
FALFURRIAS, Texas—Wyatt Hollek maneuvers his four-wheel-drive truck along a rutted sandy road and stops at a small, fenced-off enclosure where a mesquite tree provides shade to a dripping water pipe. Last Thanksgiving, Hollek found a dead woman tied to the tree trunk, her pants and underwear wrapped around her ankles. A Honduran ID card had been neatly placed next to her head, which lay face down in the sand.
“They just keep coming,” said Hollek, the 26-year-old manager of the Los Compadres Ranch, which grazes cattle and offers quail hunting. “They all just want to get to Houston, and a lot of them die trying.”
Tens of thousands of migrants from Central America have streamed across the U.S.-Mexico border this year and
