Border Patrol agents in Laredo worked a stash house this week and came out with three alleged human smugglers, all of them under 21 years old, along with a group of illegal aliens being held inside. You can read the basic rundown here.

I live a few hours up the road from Laredo, and I can tell you stash houses down there are as common as flattened armadillos on Highway 83. A rental house, a rented trailer, sometimes just a shed with a window unit and a padlock. The cartels pack people in like sardines, no water worth drinking, no way out, and wait for the next leg north. Sometimes they hold them for ransom. Sometimes the family already paid and they're just waiting on a driver who isn't drunk or flipped over in a ditch.

What caught my eye in this one is the age of the smugglers. All three under 21. That's the business model, straight up. The cartels recruit kids because kids catch lighter charges when they catch charges at all, and a 19-year-old with a phone and a key to a rental house can run a stash operation as well as anybody. Meanwhile the kid takes the fall and the man who owns the route counts money in Nuevo Laredo and never smells a jail.

We've recovered people from houses like this on our own side of the county. You knock on the door for one reason and find fourteen people folded into two bedrooms, dehydrated, wearing three days of the same clothes. The smugglers are usually the ones with the cleanest shoes. That's a detail nobody teaches you; you learn it standing in the doorway.

Credit where it's due: somebody tipped somebody, agents moved, and now three young traffickers are looking at federal cases instead of a pat on the back. Every stash house that gets popped is a house the cartel has to replace, and every replacement costs them money and exposes them to another set of eyes. That's how you grind these people down, and it don't come from a press conference. It comes from receipts.

The people who get held in these houses are part of the deal the cartels sold them, and I don't forget that either. They paid, they got warehoused, and some of them died in houses just like this one in other towns. Doesn't change what the law says they are. But the ones running the warehouses deserve every charge a prosecutor can hang on them, and I'd happily see the ages of the recruits go up and the number of stash houses go down until the whole rotten business is a story old men tell.