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“One thing is a big pile of dirt,” Brown said. “Again, this is a 5-foot-by-3-foot-wide hole that’s about 590-feet-long. A rough estimate is about 200 tons of dirt they had to get out of there and move surreptitiously.”
And it’s actually fairly common for an unwitting resident on either side of the border to report suspicious noises to law enforcement.
“We’ve had instances where people have come in and said, ‘Hey, I’m sitting in my house at night, and I hear this constant scratching, and I can’t figure out what it is,’” Brown said. “Well, again, you tell that to an HSI or Border Patrol agent, they’re going to guess somebody’s digging underneath your house or in close proximity to your house.”
But it’s not just drugs that are coming through the clandestine underground shafts.
Sadly, there’s a whole lot more going on…
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UNFORTUNATELY, IT’S NOT JUST DRUGS COMING THROUGH…
Although this particular tunnel appears to have been limited to the drug trade, owing to the tiny opening on the US side, that’s not always the case.
“All too often, we see human beings smuggled through these tunnels,” said Brown.
On the Mexico side, the tunnel’s entrance was hidden beneath a trapdoor under a bed in a residential home.
More alarming than the existence of the tunnel was what passed through it.
“Generally, with tunnels what we’ve seen is marijuana,” added Brown. “This was a purely hard narcotics tunnel. Everything that we seized was hard narcotics. So I think that’s what makes this tunnel a little unique and frankly a little more scary than some of the other ones we’ve seen.”
The uncovering of these tunnels comes on the heels of a national debate about immigration, both legal and illegal.
And then there’s the opioid crisis…