Thirty-one migrants were discovered inside a U-Haul van after police swarmed a Coral Gables neighborhood, investigators said.
Coral Gables Police officers responded to the area along LeJeune Road, near Ridgewood Road, at around 9:30 a.m. on Friday.
According to detectives, a security guard who was nearby alerted authorities about a possible kidnapping.
Responding officers arrived at the scene to find a U-Haul truck and a car, and they proceeded to conduct a traffic stop on both vehicles.
Officers removed a woman who was the car. When they opened the back of the truck, they found 31 “Chinese national” migrants.
Four others were also taken into custody. Two of them, a Cuban man and an Ecuadorian woman, were driving the car, and the other two were operating the van.
It remains unclear whether this is a smuggling or a human trafficking incident.
“We’re looking at it, and what we do is, we bring in our partners from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to see if this is a human trafficking operation or is this a smuggling,” said Coral Gables Police Chief Edward Hudak. “People that were in the van did have paperwork, so it was not like they were against their will in most cases. We have to, with Homeland Security Investigators, go case by case and see what the issue is.”
Upon further investigation, officials concluded that these migrants were dropped by the water, somewhere around the southern end of Coral Gables, and they made their way on foot to the U-Haul van.
Detectives said all persons found were found unharmed and medically cleared.
Investigators are now looking into this situation.
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