It’s unusual when a human smuggler manages to spit in the face of every veteran who’s ever served this country at the same time he’s actin...
It’s unusual when a human smuggler manages to spit in the face of every veteran who’s ever served this country at the same time he’s acting as a mule for illegal immigrants.
For whatever it’s worth, Zachary Taylor Blood managed to pull it off.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Blood — a 33-year-old Galveston, Texas, resident — pleaded guilty to attempting to smuggle two migrants inside a flag-draped coffin. The Justice Department announced the plea Tuesday.
However, of all the mixed-up, oft-tragic tales the chaos has engendered, few are stranger — or more insulting — than this one.
Blood attempted to drive through the Falfurrias, Texas, Border Patrol checkpoint on Oct. 26, 2021, in a gray van that had been modified to transport caskets, according to a Department of Justice news release Tuesday.
Agents saw a flag-draped coffin in the back and asked him what was being transported.
“Dead guy, Navy guy,” Blood claimed.
This didn’t sit right with the agents, apparently; the coffin was beat up and the flag was taped to the top of the casket with packing tape.
The van was pulled aside for further inspection. Authorities then discovered the coffin contained not a dead serviceman but two very alive Mexican nationals.
“The two men admitted to paying a smuggler to get them to San Antonio,” the DOJ said in a statement.
“They claimed that after crossing the [Rio Grande] river into the United States, they were taken to a parking lot where Blood was waiting for them. He had them get into the coffin and began driving north.”
The Falfurrias checkpoint is 70 miles north of the border on Highway 281. According to the website of Customs and Border Protection, it’s in what’s known as corridor two of the Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector — “the heaviest area of alien and narcotic traffic” in the notoriously busy sector, which has been the locus of the current border crisis.
The day before Blood was arrested, according to the CBP, agents found four migrants in a U-Haul van driven through the checkpoint — all hidden in furniture or under mattresses.
Blood’s case, however, is even more bizarre and insulting than that. To top it off, NBC News reported the Border Patrol agents who discovered the illegal aliens stashed in the coffin were both military vets.
As for the smuggler, Blood’s attorney said his client had accepted responsibility for the smuggling but wouldn’t comment further before his May sentencing. He faces up to five years in federal prison or a $250,000 fine.
Given the circumstances of the case, accepting responsibility isn’t necessarily a high bar, given the particulars of the crime. Human smuggling is bad enough, but to top it off by draping an American flag over a coffin containing illegal aliens evinces a truly disturbed mind.
Without a more comprehensive and public apology, one can only hope Blood receives serious time for this.
If the administration won’t act to deter smugglers, perhaps a stiff sentence from the courts can do a little bit of the job.
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