CARRIZO SPRINGS, Texas — From the street, the little brown house was unremarkable yet pleasant. A bright yellow toy school bus and red truck hung on the hog-wire fence, and the home’s facade featured a large Texas lone star. But in the backyard was a gutted mobile home that a prosecutor later described as a “house of horrors.”
It was discovered one day in 2014, when a man called from Maryland to report that his stepfather, Moises Ferrera, a migrant from Honduras, was being held there and tortured by the smugglers who had brought him into the United States. His captors wanted more money, the stepson said, and were pounding Mr. Ferrera’s hands repeatedly with a hammer, vowing to continue until his family sent it.
When federal agents and sheriff’s deputies descended on the house, they discovered that Mr. Ferrara was not the sole victim. Smugglers had held hundreds of migrants for ransom there, their investigation found. They had mutilated limbs and raped women.
nearly 50 such “bailouts” in the town between February and May — that some school employees said they failed to take a lockdown order seriously during a mass shooting in May because so many previous lockdowns had been ordered when smugglers raced through the streets.
Teófilo Valencia, whose 17- and 19-year-old sons perished in the San Antonio tragedy, said he had taken out a loan against the family home to pay the smugglers $10,000 for each son’s transport.
$500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security Investigations, the federal agency that investigates such cases.