A Texas woman has admitted to drugging young girls with melatonin gummies to smuggle them into the United States, just as the Border Patrol warns that children are being smuggled in the same way across the southern border.
Vanessa Valadez, 23, of Laredo, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiring with family members to smuggle children under the age of 5 into the country from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, between August and September 2023.
“We are with Gomitas,” one of Valdez's co-conspirators wrote, accompanying a photo of a girl who had passed out during one operation, meaning “we knocked her unconscious with gummy bears.”
According to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Valdez and her family smuggled at least four girls into the U.S., taking them from a safe house at the border and drugging them, then tried to pass them off as members of the family using false birth certificates.
After Laredo, the girls were taken further into the United States and left behind with unknown people for an unknown purpose.
Valdez and his co-conspirators were finally stopped on September 21, 2023, during a routine Border Patrol inspection.
Three of the girls smuggled into the US are unidentified and their whereabouts are unknown, HSI said in a statement.
Valdez's co-conspirators are Ana Laura Briand, 47, her niece Kayla Marie Briand, 20, Jose Eduardo Briand, 43, Nancy Guadalupe Briand, 44, and Mexico native Lizeth Esmeralda Briand Arredondo, 32. Each previously pleaded guilty for their role in the sick conspiracy.
The shocking admission comes as the US Border Patrol warns that child trafficking is on the rise along the border, but no one knows the full extent of the problem.
Border Patrol sources have previously told The Washington Post that smugglers are increasingly using children to represent families, sometimes showing up at the border multiple times but with different adults each time.
“A few years ago, when they were coming in in large numbers, we had to admit families. The numbers kept growing, and after a while they realized the kids were the same but with different parents. They were recycling them,” one source said.
“There are thousands of kids out there and no one knows where they ended up, so it's disgusting to think about.”
It is unclear exactly what the children's fate will be, but authorities fear they could be at risk of child labour or sexual exploitation.
As in Valdez's case, smugglers have been caught drugging children with sleeping pills and using fake birth certificates to falsely identify them.
