AP Photo/Eric Gay

The High Points:

• A Texas man is jailed in Mexico after accidentally crossing the border with a licensed firearm.

• His family is pleading for U.S. officials to intervene before he serves his full sentence.

• The case highlights the extreme risk gun owners face near the U.S.–Mexico border.

This is the nightmare scenario every gun owner hopes never to face: one wrong turn, one honest mistake, and suddenly you’re sitting in a foreign prison for something that would barely earn a citation back home. Caden Hawkins wasn’t smuggling weapons or running with a cartel—he was a licensed Texas gun owner trying to get home from work when he accidentally crossed into Mexico. Nine months later, he’s still behind bars, and his family is begging anyone in government to help bring him home.

What stings even more is the blatant double standard. When Mexican soldiers wander across our border armed to the teeth, they’re processed and sent back. But an American civilian with a legally owned pistol? Automatic prison time. Mexico doesn’t play around with firearms, and stories like this make it painfully clear that even a single bullet can cost you your freedom. Anyone living or traveling near the border needs to take this seriously.

From Bearing Arms:

The family of a 23-year-old Texas man is pleading for help from officials to spring him from the Mexican prison where he’s spent the last nine months on weapons charges.

According to April Thomas, she was on the phone with her son Caden Hawkins on March 2 as we was trying to drive home after a work assignment near the U.S. – Mexico border. Hawkins apparently got lost and ended up south of the border, which Thomas only realized when she heard the sound of men speaking Spanish coming through the receiver.

Hawkins filmed on his phone at the border crossing moments before he was handcuffed.

His family said they have since learned he was detained because he had a pistol and bullets in his possession when he arrived at the crossing. They said he had a license to carry the gun.

“This was something that, ‘Oh hey I messed up and get a ticket’, not a year in state prison in a different country,” Hawkins said during a phone call with his family.

Thomas said the situation has been devastating for the family.

“Please give me my baby back, he does not deserve this. My son is not a criminal; this was an honest accident,” Thomas said.

We’ve seen similar mistakes on the other side of the border, including an incident back in July when more than a dozen Mexican soldiers crossed the border and were discovered by two U.S. citizens who were looking for illegal immigrants who might have gotten lost in the deserts of southern New Mexico.

In that case the soldiers high-tailed it back to the border on their own, but in 2021 14 Mexican soldiers were briefly detained in El Paso, Texas, after they too inadvertently crossed the border. Instead of being prosecuted for illegally possessing guns they were processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and then returned to Mexico.

The same thing arguably should have happened with Hawkins. Granted, given his civilian status, I can somewhat understand police detaining him for a brief period of time, but once it became clear that this was a simple mistake it would have been easy enough to send him back across the border, even if they kept ahold of his gun and ammo.

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