Americans arrested trying to smuggle Mexican citizens across border

Two Americans were arrested in Arizona while attempting to smuggle five Mexican citizens across the US border, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials said.

Agents from the Border Patrol’s Tucson station responded to Sasabe — a border town with just over 50 residents — after agency camera operators “spotted suspected criminal activity,” John Modlin, Chief Patrol Agent of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, announced Saturday night.

Two US citizens were arrested for attempting to sneak in five Mexican nationals, he said.

A handgun and a small amount of methamphetamine and fentanyl were seized in the arrest, Modlin added.

Additional details were not immediately available when the agency was contacted by The Post.

The US has shattered its record for recorded stops along the Mexican border in Fiscal 2022. With three months still to go, there have been more stops this year than in any accounting year in the 20-year history of the Department of Homeland Security.

US Customs and Border Protection recorded 207,416 migrant encounters in June for a total of 1,746,119 stops along the southern border since Oct. 1 — the most the agency has recorded for any fiscal year since 1960.

Nationwide, border officials have encountered more than 2 million migrants since Oct. 1, 2021.

Last month a failed smuggling operation disastrously led to the deaths of 53 migrants in San Antonio in the deadliest smuggling incident ever recorded, officials said.