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On 9 January 2019, a Reddit user with the handle leblancelle76 took to that platform to report she had witnessed a serious crime. She alleged that a group of migrant men had kidnapped and gang raped a 13-year-old girl from Mexico and had taken her across the border into Texas, where they held the Reddit user's husband at gunpoint until Border Patrol intervened in a helicopter. We were unable to independently verify the user's story. But the post has since gone viral, with many erroneously attributing it to a Facebook user named Lin Myers Ellis. The circulating message from leblancelle76 reads: El Indio is a tiny, unincorporated community in Maverick County, southwest of San Antonio. It has a population of less than 200. As it falls within the jurisdiction of the Maverick County Sheriff's Department, we reached out Sheriff Tom Schmerder to ask about the most serious and most specific claim in this post — that a Mexican child had been gang raped, kidnapped and forced into Texas by a group of armed migrant men. Schmerber told us that if such a serious crime occurred, his deputies would have been notified. But he had no knowledge of the incident as reported. We reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Special Operations Supervisor David Vera, who also told us he has no knowledge of the incident. We checked with the law enforcement agency for the nearest city, Eagle Pass. Humberto Garza, spokesman for the Eagle Pass Police Department, told us that the department was not notified of any such incident. There are no local news reports about it, and Mike Ramos, a reporter for the local Eagle Pass News, told us he has not heard about it, either. The post circulated amidst the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history. The shutdown was spurred by an impasse between Congressional Democrats and President Donald Trump over Trump's demand that Congress appropriate $5.7 billion in funding for border wall construction. Although the post has been widely attributed to Ellis, Ellis took to her Facebook account on 12 January 2019 to state that she was simply reposting.
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