Six months after its creation, a multicounty task force involving the Kendall County Sheriff’s Office and other agencies is seeing plenty of action, including stopping human trafficking.
Sheriff Al Auxier said the group includes one of his deputies and deputies from Gillespie and Kerr counties. The local task force is modeled after one in North Texas involving eight counties, including Tarrant and Dallas.
The goal is to help stop criminals who cross county lines and so increase the odds of an arrest, Auxier said.
“There’s eight counties up there (in North Texas), and their sheriffs got together and formed this multijurisdictional task force. So, we are modeling ourselves after what they are doing up there,” Auxier said. “Right now, it seems like it’s human trafficking, but it’s criminal interdiction. So, no matter what it is — whether it’s fugitives, guns, drugs, trafficking, whatever — they just go after any criminal element that’s out there.”
The deputies on the joint force are not assigned to anything else and have come across “all kinds of things like drugs, guns” in the force’s sixor- so months of existence, the sheriff said.
Just last Thursday, the law officers worked with the Central Texas Criminal Interdiction Task Force to stop a vehicle suspected of being used in human trafficking heading down FM 289.
“The vehicle finally stopped on FM 289 in-between Big Joshua Creek and Waring Knoll,” according to a release from the Sheriff’s Office. “Multiple subjects fled the vehicle and left on foot south onto nearby properties. Deputies attempted to locate all subjects but were unable to find all of them. There are approximately eight subjects still at large in the area. All subjects were seen wearing dark clothing.”
While only three counties are united, Auxier said the task force may expand to add more neighbors.
The counties currently working together are filling a void along the Interstate 10 corridor, he added.
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