On Thursday, The Washington Times reported that Ayala had turned himself in to Border Patrol at least six times between mid-April and mid-May, each time at the same part of the border, after crossing from Mexico. He was a single adult — which meant, under COVID-era guidance, he would be expelled from the country immediately.
Five of those times, the Border Patrol drove him back to Mexico and summarily deported him. Even though multiple re-entries are nominally a felony, authorities have avoided prosecuting most offenders during the pandemic.
Upon his sixth capture, however, they didn’t let him go. That’s because they allege he was a human trafficker who brought those he was smuggling into the country on foot. Instead of walking the 16 hours back to Mexico after dropping his charges off, however, he’d hitch a ride with the Border Patrol.
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It’s almost like a taxi — except if it were a taxi, Ayala would have paid.
When he was captured May 16 with a group of four other individuals, however, the swift deportations were over for Ayala.
“The return-trip scam is the latest in a long line of tactics that allow smugglers to slip through holes in the nation’s defenses,” Stephan Dinan reported in The Times.
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