Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents said Wednesday that a migrant mother attempted to use a forged birth certificate to smuggle a drugged child across the southern border.
According to court filings, Gloria Lopez-Corona, a 24-year-old Mexican US resident, was arrested by ICE authorities from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations team while she was transporting a kid through the San Luis port of entry.
According to Lopez-Corona, they were travelling to Los Angeles to visit her son’s father and his family.
The boy was “completely covered with a large, bulky blanket from head to toe” when agents discovered him sleeping in the back seat. According to the documents, the officers searched the car, but the little child refused to come out of his “deep sleep.”
Later, the Feds discovered “sleep gummies,” which they suspect were used to put the toddler to sleep.
Lopez-Corona showed the border officials a birth certificate that said the child was born in 2023 and named her as the mother.
They discovered the boy under the blanket and saw that, according to the court paperwork, he appeared to be four or five years old.
After being driven by a man to the US border via taxi, bus and aeroplane, the boy eventually admitted to police that “his mother gave him gummies.”
According to the records, the boy claimed that before arriving in the US, he was “taken to a place where there were other children” and was supposed to live “with another unknown man.”
After the officers discovered that the birth certificate belonged to someone else, Lopez-Corona confessed that she wasn’t the child’s biological mother.
His mum has his birth certificate in Los Angeles’, the woman said.
According to the documents, Lopez-Corona was also asked to display a picture of herself and the youngster, but she “struggled to find a photo of the two of them together” and instead showed pictures that “looked nothing like the child asleep in the car seat.”
Eventually, Lopez-Corona told police that her real child, a two-year-old, was back in Mexico and that “she did not know the child’s name.”
The mother said she didn’t call the police because “she did not trust the police in Mexico,” and that she was compelled to smuggle the child into the US by someone threatening her family.
She said that an unidentified person told her to travel to a site and put the youngster in a car seat in her back seat.
The mother claimed that despite being offered $1,500 to move the child, she chose not to accept the money.
Lopez-Corona was taken into custody and accused of smuggling aliens by Homeland Security Investigations agents.
According to the documents, officers were able to get in touch with Reyna Cecilia Hernandez Reyes, the child’s mother, in Mexico and bring her in for an interview.
Hernandez Reyes claimed that after her husband was unlawfully trafficked in the same location three years prior, she made plans to take her child across the border.
According to the records, federal authorities then learnt that her spouse had been deported three times before to his final admission.
In spite of her knowledge that “it was wrong,” the mother acknowledged that “she understood the risk of handing her child off to a stranger, with the hopes of the child making it” to LA, adding that “the decision had already been made, and it was now in the past.”
Hernandez Reyes’ husband arranged for her to give her son to the same woman who sneaked her husband into the United States on Monday night.
“She would not receive updates on the well-being of the child or the success of the smuggling scheme until the child’s arrival,” the woman informed her, adding that her child would be dropped off at an unidentified place in Los Angeles.
Hernandez Reyes claimed that after her son arrived in Los Angeles, the intention was to have her brought back to meet him in exchange for $18,000.
Hernandez Reyes received the child back from border officers, who also accused him of smuggling.
