CORAL GABLES, FLA. (WSVN) - Thirty-one migrants were discovered inside a U-Haul van after police swarmed a Coral Gables neighborhood, investigators said.

Coral Gables Police, Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Border Patrol responded to the area along LeJeune Road, near Ridgewood Road, Friday morning.

According to detectives, a security guard who was nearby alerted authorities about a possible kidnapping.

Responding officers arrived at the scene to find a U-Haul truck and a car, and they proceeded to conduct a traffic stop on both vehicles.

Officers removed a woman who was the car. When they opened the back of the truck, they found 31 “Chinese national” migrants.

Five others were also taken into custody. Three of them, a Cuban man, a Ecuadorian woman and a Brazilian female were in the car, and the other two were operating the van.

It remains unclear whether this is a smuggling or a human trafficking incident.

“We’re looking at it, and what we do is, we bring in our partners from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to see if this is a human trafficking operation or is this a smuggling,” said Coral Gables Police Chief Edward Hudak. “People that were in the van did have paperwork, so it was not like they were against their will in most cases. We have to, with Homeland Security Investigations, go case by case and see what the issue is.”

Upon further investigation, officials concluded that these migrants were dropped by the water, somewhere around the southern end of Coral Gables, and they made their way on foot to the U-Haul van.

“We are assuming that they were dropped off somewhere around the southern end of Coral Gables and approached on foot to the van where they were loaded into. Whether the woman that was observed, possibly being abducted, was trying to escape the persons that were bringing her in, it is still under investigation,” said Hudak.

One neighbor, Kathy Parks, watched the situation unfold.

“You couldn’t get down LeJeune; they had LeJeune blocked off from multiple streets,” she said. “All we saw was a U-Haul van with cardboard in the windows and two people handcuffed outside the van.”

Parks added that she saw several people being escorted by officers.

“We saw people on the ground. We saw that briefly, and then they called in a trolley and they put everyone on the trolley,” she said.

Detectives said all persons found were found unharmed and medically cleared.

Investigators are now looking into this situation.

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