Cars stolen in the United States are smuggled to Mexico, where they are

Tijuana, Mexico — After a month away, Catherine Vermillion returned to her San Diego apartment to find an empty parking space.

“I looked up and realized my car was gone,” Vermillion told News themezone. “I remembered I had an AirTag in the car, so I checked my phone and the AirTag showed that my car was in Tijuana, Mexico.”

When she saw where the AirTag appeared, she said she was “shocked and in disbelief.”

Disbelief turned to frustration after she said local police couldn’t help.

“They just said because it’s on the other side of the border, they can’t go get it even though I was able to show them it was only 45 minutes away,” Vermillion said.

It’s a frustration shared by the California Highway Patrol.

“When it comes to national borders, we can’t cross that line,” said CHP Lt. David Navarro.

Navarro warned that organized gangs of thieves go after high-end SUVs, pickups and performance cars, stealing them in the US and then smuggle them to Mexico. He said it’s lucrative, difficult to track and often impossible to recover those cars once they cross the border.

In the last four years alone, CHP data shows the number of stolen vehicles tracked across the border from California, Arizona and Texas increased by 79%.

“If a vehicle is stolen in the middle of the night and the victim doesn’t wake up until 7 in the morning, well, if it’s stolen at 2, you have approximately five hours to transport that vehicle,” Navarro said. “If that vehicle doesn’t show up in the system and passes through that camera, then no, you won’t get any alerts.”

That’s exactly what happened with Vermillion’s Jeep. The difference was that she knew exactly where she ended up: 46 miles away, across the border in Tijuana.

Enter Phil Mohr, a repository man who has spent the last 20 years as a stolen car bounty hunter in Mexico.

Mohr said many stolen cars They end next to the Tijuana airport, a few hundred meters from the border between the United States and Mexico.

“This is an organized drop-off point,” Mohr said.

Organized in many cases by cartels, who federal agents told News themezone drive the cars to Mexico and use them to traffic drugs and weapons.

Mohr worked with local authorities in Mexico to recover Vermillion’s car and bring it back to San Diego.

“It feels like a victory,” Mohr said. “It feels like you’ve done it right, like you’ve righted a wrong in the world.”

A Vermillion neighbor took a photo to capture the moment Mohr brought her car in.

“I just have my hands up, like, wait,” Vermillion said. “It was like the best day of my life.”

For Vermillion, it was the best day of his life, but for most, that day never comes.