A San Antonio man is facing a theft charge in Laredo. Police say he stole a company trailer in December 2025. Just over a week later, agents caught him pulling that same trailer. He was hauling it during a human smuggling stop on Interstate 35.
James David Bursott, 57, was booked into the Webb County Jail on July 17, 2026. He faces one count of theft of property worth $2,500 to $30,000. That is a state jail felony, a lower level felony charge. It can still mean real jail time. The Laredo Police Department filed the charge. It covers the stolen trailer only. It does not cover the smuggling stop from months earlier.
The details below come from a Laredo police affidavit and from the Laredo Police Department.
The case started on December 28, 2025. A white 2022 Great Dane box trailer went missing that night. It disappeared from outside a tire shop. The shop sits in the 1100 block of Beltway Parkway in Laredo. The trailer belongs to a trucking company called Rapido Transfer. Workers had dropped it off for repairs. Once the work was done, they parked it outside. Surveillance video showed a white truck cab pull up around 11 p.m. The truck left pulling the trailer behind it. Nobody noticed right away. An employee went to pick up the trailer three days later. It was gone. That is when police got the call.
The trailer turned up again in January 2026. On January 5, the Texas Department of Public Safety told a Laredo investigator the trailer had been found. State troopers gave the investigator contact information for a U.S. Border Patrol agent. That agent had helped find it.
The Border Patrol agent said he stopped a white Volvo truck near mile marker 32 on Interstate 35. The truck was pulling the stolen trailer. It had a Mexican license plate and a Texas plate. The Texas plate looked damaged or tampered with. The plate on the trailer itself was from Maine. That plate came back as stolen too. The driver was identified as Bursott, agents said. He was detained. Eight migrants were with him in the smuggling attempt. Bursott was arrested that day, agents said. What happened next with any federal smuggling case against him is not part of the record for this story.
Laredo police did not charge Bursott over the trailer right away. In March 2026, the department got a copy of the Border Patrol report. Investigators used it to build their theft case. A judge signed an arrest warrant for Bursott that same month.
The warrant sat for months. Bursott was finally booked into the Webb County Jail on July 17, 2026. That is nearly seven months after the trailer first went missing.
Laredo sits right on the US Mexico border, along Interstate 35. The highway is one of the busiest trade routes in the country. Trucks cross the border there day and night. Police say stolen trailers and cargo theft are a real problem in the area. Some stolen trailers end up moving drugs. Others end up moving people. Cases like this one show how the two crimes can overlap. A trailer built to haul freight ended up hauling migrants instead.
Bursott remained in the Webb County Jail as of Wednesday afternoon. He was held on a $10,000 bond. No court date has been made public yet on the theft charge.
