According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a migrant woman allegedly attempted to sneak a drugged child across the southern border on Wednesday using a fake birth certificate.
According to court documents, ICE officers from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations unit arrested Gloria Lopez-Corona, a 24-year-old US resident from Mexico, while she was driving her car through the San Luis port of entry with a child in tow.
Lopez-Corona claimed they were visiting her son’s father and his family in Los Angeles.
Agents discovered the child asleep in the back seat, “completely covered with a large, bulky blanket from head to toe.” The young boy, however, refused to wake from his “deep sleep” despite the officers’ search of the vehicle, according to the documents.
Feds later discovered “sleep gummies” that they believe were used to sedate the child.
Lopez-Corona presented the border officers with a birth certificate identifying her as the mother and stating that the child was born in 2023.
After removing the child from beneath the blanket, they discovered that he appeared to be four or five years old, not two, according to court documents.
The child later told officers “that he was given gummies by his mother” and was taken to the US border by a man via taxi, bus, and plane.
The child stated that he was “taken to a place where there were other children” before arriving in the United States, where he was to live “with another unknown man,” according to the documents.
The officers then determined that the birth certificate belonged to a different child, prompting Lopez-Corona to admit that she was not the child’s mother.
The woman stated that “his mom has his birth certificate in Los Angeles.”
An officer also asked Lopez-Corona to show a photo of her and the boy, but she “struggled to find a photo of the two of them together” and presented photos that “looked nothing like the child asleep in the car seat,” according to the documents.
Lopez-Corona eventually admitted to officers that “she did not know the child’s name” and that her real child, a two-year-old, was back in Mexico.
The woman claimed she was forced to smuggle the child into the United States by someone who threatened her family, and she did not call the cops because “she did not trust the police in Mexico.”
She claimed she was told to drive to a location where the child was placed in a car seat in the back seat by an unidentified person.
The woman was offered $1,500 to transport the child, but declined, she claimed.
Agents from Homeland Security Investigations arrested Lopez-Corona and charged her with alien smuggling.
Officers were able to contact the child’s mother, Reyna Cecilia Hernandez Reyes, in Mexico and bring her in for an interview, according to documents.
Hernandez Reyes stated that she planned to smuggle her child across the border illegally after her husband was smuggled in the same location three years prior.
According to the documents, federal agents discovered that her husband had been deported three times prior to his most recent entry.
The mother admitted that “she understood the risk of handing her child off to a stranger, with the hopes of the child making it” to Los Angeles, claiming she knew “it was wrong,” but “that the decision had already been made, and it was now in the past.”
Hernandez Reyes gave her son to the same woman who smuggled her husband into the United States on Monday evening, in an arrangement orchestrated by her husband.
The woman informed her that her child would be dropped off at an undisclosed location in Los Angeles and that “she would not receive updates on the well-being of the child or the success of the smuggling scheme until the child’s arrival.”
Hernandez Reyes stated that once her son arrived in Los Angeles, the plan was for her to be smuggled to reunite with him in exchange for $18,000.
Officers at the border returned the child to Hernandez Reyes, who was also charged with smuggling.