Mexican drug cartels are murdering people and dumping their bodies on the US side of the border — including a woman who had been raped and mutilated, law enforcement officials said Thursday.
Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez told Fox News that Texas Rangers are investigating cartel activity on American soil after an undisclosed number of bodies started showing up amid the ongoing border crisis.
Authorities said the woman’s body was found near the border on Oct. 26 and authorities suspected she had been raped and tortured before her murder.
Olivarez said the killings were “professional” and described cartels as “very methodical in the way they do it.”
“These criminal organizations come across from Mexico to the US side and they kill individuals,” Olivarez said.
“They carry out these killings, these horrendous acts of violence and then go back to Mexico.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if the murder victims were American or Mexican citizens.
Olivarez said such murders are typically carried out in Mexico “as a message to rival cartels” and added that investigators are still trying to determine a motive for why the cartels are now “placing the bodies on the US side.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety is working as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star to ease the ongoing border crisis.
Nearly 1.7 million people were encountered trying to illegally cross the US border in the 12-month period that ended in October, according to US Customs and Border Protection, the highest number on record.