Neil Edwin Valera arrested after Chinese illegal immigrants found dead in car trunk

Passersby saw blood dripping out of the BMW, and said there was a foul smell emanating from the car, left on a city street in San Diego.

Police who investigated found three dead illegal immigrants — two of them a mother and her 15-year-old son — stuffed in the trunk.

On Tuesday authorities announced they’d made an arrest, nabbing Neil Edwin Valera at a bus station in San Diego over the weekend, three weeks after they say he snuck the three Chinese migrants across the border in the trunk of his BMW.

It’s not clear how the migrants ended up dead, and authorities have not charged Mr. Valera with involvement beyond the Aug. 9 smuggling event — though one of the two charges is “encouraging aliens to enter resulting in death.”

“These tragic cases are grim reminders that attempting to cross into the United States illegally in the trunk of a car – and putting your faith, hope and future in the hands of smugglers – is extremely dangerous,” said Robert Brewer, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California.

The criminal case against Mr. Valera remained sealed Tuesday night.

But details emerged in a separate case against his wife, Nora Gabriela Navarro-Hernandez, who is being held as a material witness in the case against her husband.

She was detained on Aug. 23 while entering through a port of entry in San Diego, where she presented a valid visa. She was flagged by a computer-generated alert, and Homeland Security Investigations agents arrived to talk to her.

She said Mr. Valera, 50, was on the phone with her on Aug. 9 as he waited in line at the port of entry to smuggling what he said was one migrant into the country.

He was being paid $5,000 to make the trip, and was told to take his vehicle to a shopping center in Chula Vista, California, where he turned it over to someone else “with the agreement that the vehicle was to be returned in a timely manner with money placed under the car seat cover,” according to court documents.

Authorities say they caught Mr. Valera’s Aug. 9 border crossing in the 1999 silver BMW on video at the San Ysidro port of entry.

After that day, Valera was spotted crossing the border but only on foot through the port of entry.

Smuggling migrants through ports of entry can be incredibly lucrative, usually paying even more than driving migrants inside the U.S. who crossed the border themselves.

According to data compiled over the last 16 months by The Washington Times, migrants caught being smuggled in vehicles through border crossings paid an average of $16,700, or about twice what migrants who jumped the fence, swam the Rio Grande or otherwise snuck into the U.S. paid to their smugglers.

Of that $16,700, the drivers caught at the border with the migrants in their cars were being paid an average of $3,500 to make the trip.

Chinese migrants are particularly hot commodities in smuggling through the ports of entry, with rates of up to $70,000 per person recorded in the court files.

In Mr. Valera’s case it’s not clear how the migrants died. But the court cases detail shocking contortion efforts to conceal migrants in vehicles.

Customs and Border Protection officers regularly report opening car glove boxes to find hands sticking out of the back. Those migrants are concealed inside the center consoles of vehicles, or sometimes behind false car bottoms.

Fake walls in car trunks are also a frequent tactic, while CBP officers have also reported finding migrants stuffed inside hollowed-out car stereo speakers, modified gas tanks and in spare tire wells. Sometimes the migrants are stuffed in so tightly that the fire department has to be called to come cut them out of the vehicles, the same as they would for crash victims.