Migrant woman allegedly tried to smuggle drugged child across the border with fake birth certificate

A migrant woman allegedly tried to sneak a drugged child across the southern border with a fake birth certificate Wednesday, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

ICE officers from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations unit busted Gloria Lopez-Corona — a 24-year-old US resident from Mexico — as she was driving her car through the San Luis port of entry with a child in tow, according to court documents.

Lopez-Corona claimed they were going to see her son’s father and his family in Los Angeles.

Gloria Lopez-Corona Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Agents spotted the child asleep in the back seat, “completely covered with a large, bulky blanket from head to toe.” However, the young boy wouldn’t wake from his “deep sleep” despite the officers’ search of the vehicle, the docs state.

Feds later found “sleep gummies” they believe were used to sedate the child.

Lopez-Corona presented the border officers with a birth certificate, which listed her name as the mother and stated that the child was born in 2023.

After uncovering the child from beneath the blanket, they noticed that he looked to be four or five years old — and not two, according to the court documents.

The child later told officers “that he was given gummies by his mother” and taken by a man to the US border by taxi, bus and plane.

At one point, the child said he was “taken to a place where there were other children” before he arrived in the US, where he was to reside “with another unknown man,” the documents recount.

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Homeland Security agents arrested the alleged smuggler and hit her with federal charges. Christopher Sadowski

The officers then determined that the birth certificate belonged to a different child, prompting Lopez-Corona to fess up that she wasn’t actually the kid’s mother.

The woman claimed that “his mom has his birth certificate in Los Angeles.”

An officer had also asked Lopez-Corona to show a photo of her and the boy, but said she “struggled to find a photo of the two of them together” and presented photos that “looked nothing like the child asleep in the car seat,” according to the docs.

Lopez-Corona eventually admitted to officers that “she did not know the child’s name” and that her actual child, a two-year-old, was back home in Mexico.

The woman claimed she was forced to smuggle the child into the US by a person who threatened her family, saying she didn’t alert the cops because “she did not trust the police in Mexico.”

She claimed she was instructed to drive to a location, where the child was placed into a car seat in her back seat by an unnamed individual.

The woman was offered $1,500 to transport the child, but didn’t take the money, she said.

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations arrested Lopez-Corona and charged her with alien smuggling.

Officers were able to contact the child’s mother, Reyna Cecilia Hernandez Reyes, in Mexico, and bring her in for an interview, according to the documents.

Hernandez Reyes stated that she arranged to smuggle her child across the border illegally after her husband was smuggled in the same place three years ago.

Federal agents later discovered that her husband was deported three times before his last entry, the documents state.

The mom admitted that “she understood the risk of handing her child off to a stranger, with the hopes of the child making it” to LA, claiming she knew “it was wrong,” but “that the decision had already been made, and it was now in the past.”

Hernandez Reyes gave her son to the same woman who smuggled her husband into the US on Monday evening, an arrangement coordinated by her husband.

The woman told her that her child would be dropped off at an undisclosed location in LA and that “she would not receive updates on the well-being of the child or the success of the smuggling scheme until the child’s arrival.”

Once her son made it to LA, Hernandez Reyes said the plan was to then have her smuggled to reunite with him for a payment of $18,000.

Officers at the border returned the child to Hernandez Reyes, who they also charged with smuggling.