Police in Texas found 17 illegal immigrants on Friday crammed into a three-foot hidden space in a large trailer disguised as a Lowe's shipment.
Incredible body camera footage It shows the moment police officers demolished the fake wall to reveal a group of migrants who had entered the country illegally.
According to the video, Texas Sheriff's Department deputies arrested the cloned truck near the U.S.-Mexico border in Kinney County after noticing it was traveling with expired license plates.
The driver, Megel Kazanna Patterson, who was wearing a Lowe's-branded T-shirt, explained that he was just a driver and couldn't explain anything to do with the truck, but fatefully consented to a full search of the vehicle.
The officers entered a semi-trailer, which suspiciously had only a couple of white doors.
That's when a keen-eyed officer noticed new wood at the bottom of one of the trailer's walls, and the team tugged it off, revealing the legs of several migrants hiding behind the false wall.
Following the officers' orders, the 17 migrants crawled out of the small hole one by one.
“Officers reported that several men and women were drenched in sweat and suffered from dehydration and numbness in their legs as a result of being crammed into a space just three feet wide,” police department spokesman Lt. Chris Olivarez said, adding that some required medical attention.
“DPS troopers did an outstanding job disrupting a smuggling operation that resulted in a large number of casualties.”
Patterson, a Mississippi native, was charged with smuggling a person risking serious injury or death.
The 17 migrants were transferred to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Nearly 8 million immigrants have entered the U.S. illegally at record rates since June 2021, according to federal data.
