By Isabel Vincent. There are also dozens of plush jewelry stores, where one vendor told The Post that she regularly imports African diamonds for custom engagement rings. In many of the gated communities in the area, terra cotta-roofed mansions sit empty behind concrete walls. At the upscale La Plaza Mall, shoppers and their kids lined up to meet the Easter Bunny and well-dressed young professionals tucked into steaks at the Texas de Brazil grill.
McAllen lies eight miles from the Mexican border, in one of the 30 poorest enclaves in the country, Hidalgo County, where 34 percent of residents live in poverty, according to US Census data.
Some of that cash even makes its way into political campaigns in this traditionally Democratic stronghold. He confessed to taking cash from a Texas drug trafficker who had a trucking business that he used as a front to smuggle drugs. Some of that cash went to his re-election campaign, prosecutors said.
A former cop and commander of an elite anti-narcotics squad that reported directly to his father, the younger Trevino was convicted in of drug trafficking and is currently serving a year sentence in federal prison, along with four other former members of his task force, known as the Panama Unit. In addition to drug trafficking, the Mexican cartels have made billions of dollars on the massive flow of illegal migrants into the Rio Grande Valley region near cities like McAllen, according to the US Customs and Border Protection.
In McAllen, a city of just over ,, Border Patrol choppers regularly hover overhead en route to the border, where agents scour the rugged terrain for illegal immigrants, many of them in life-threatening situations, suffering from hypothermia, exhaustion or starvation. Cartel and gang members are among the largest beneficiaries of this crisis. Migrants who pay gangs to bring them over the border into the US are often herded into local homes and detained for weeks at a time in order for the smugglers to extort even more money from their family members living in other parts of the US.
