California court documents reveal that in recent weeks a novel method of attempting to cross the border has emerged: in at least four cases, migrants without official documents pose as false patients to cross the border on ambulance stretchers.
According to testimonies, traffickers charge $15,000 to attempt to smuggle them across in these medical vehicles, an exorbitant amount that apparently does not guarantee them access to the northern United States.
So far, all the documented cases have occurred in California, in just five weeks.
From 6:00 a.m. onward, the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana is in chaos. The sound of horns and the shouts of burrito vendors compete with the shrill wail of ambulance turrets, announcing the transfer of American patients seeking care in their countries.
June 17 was no exception: at 6:45 a.m. that day, Officer Nancy Cervantes detected the arrival of an ambulance in the lane she was supervising. The paramedic driving the unit informed her that a patient in critical condition was on a stretcher in the back.
He showed her a supposed driver’s license that certified the person was a U.S. resident who had suffered a medical crisis in Mexico and needed to be transported to his country.
The officer peered into the ambulance. She saw, indeed, someone unconscious on a stretcher in the back. Still, something jumped out at her. Despite the urgency, she sent the vehicle for a secondary check. According to the report that day, another supervisor performed a simple comparison between the person lying in bed—and being charged in court—and the California identification card presented. He thought they looked very different.
For this reason, he decided to take the patient’s fingerprints, which were sent to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT).
The result was that it was clearly not the same individual as the card, and that he had even been identified as a Mexican citizen and had been previously deported.
His real name was Heriberto Morales, who was first deported from the United States to Mexico on September 22, 2023, through Brownsville, Texas. He had managed to return and was deported again on January 24, 2025, also through that Texas crossing.
According to documents from the Southern District of California Court, Heriberto Morales resorted to an extreme strategy: feigning illness and hiring an ambulance to pose as a patient in critical condition, hoping that the medical emergency would allow him to evade the checkpoints at the San Ysidro border crossing.
As if coordinated, on June 17, a second ambulance attempted to enter with another fake patient. It was at 5:34 p.m., ten hours after Heriberto Morales’s first attempt to cross.
The mechanics were the same: the ambulance driver handed the immigration officer a California residency card, seeking to prove that the patient was a regular citizen and had a medical emergency that needed to be treated in the United States.
Only in this case, they called an emergency medical technician to examine him. He noted that he was not unconscious or showing any signs of pain. He confirmed that even during the evaluation, the man opened his eyes and smiled.
But that wasn’t the only thing they’d done wrong: when an agent removed his shoes to search him, they found he’d hidden a Mexican ID card that showed his face. When they took his fingerprints, they found an inconvenient match in their systems: his expedited deportation had been ordered on April 23 of this year in Phoenix, Arizona.
Finally, on July 8, after several days in detention, he pleaded guilty, but did not reveal how much he had paid to be transported in an ambulance, where he was supposed to cross safely and safely into the United States.
