Border Patrol stops Comstock driver trying to drop off five migrants

Border Patrol agents stopped a driver in Comstock who was trying to drop off five migrants before an immigration checkpoint and return later to pick them up. The U.S. Border Patrol Del Rio Sector said the incident was documented with photo evidence, adding another case to the enforcement pressure along the Val Verde County corridor.

The stop unfolded in a part of the border landscape that has long drawn smugglers looking for a shortcut around detection. The Del Rio Sector covers 55,063 square miles of Texas, including 245 miles of the Rio Grande and Lake Amistad, and it employs more than 1,500 people, including more than 1,400 Border Patrol agents. The sector says it has served the Del Rio area since July 1, 1924.

Comstock has been part of that history for nearly as long. The Comstock Station was founded in 1925 as one of the original Del Rio Sector stations, and in 1970 a two-man post was established above Amistad Dam to help control illegal entries in the area. CBP says the station uses marine patrols, ground patrols, traffic inspections, intelligence collection and technology to detect and interdict border crossings.

The agency has repeatedly described the Comstock area as a smuggling corridor, with traffickers using remote ranchland, hot weather and isolated roads to try to move people around checkpoints. In earlier cases, CBP said smugglers abandoned migrants in dangerous conditions, sometimes with limited access to water, raising the risk of dehydration and medical distress. Sector officials have also said those operations show transnational criminal organizations putting profit ahead of human life.

No name for the driver was released in the post, and no federal criminal charges were mentioned. The case adds to a steady pattern of interdictions around Comstock, where the checkpoint, the station and the surrounding terrain remain central to the Border Patrol’s work in western Val Verde County.