Mexican cartels are offering VIP smuggling packages to foreigners trying to enter the United States illegally. USA Today Recently reported.
Sources told the news agency that drug cartels charge between $6,000 and $15,000 per person to smuggle people through a network of underground drainage tunnels that stretch from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas.
“Right now, 60 to 70 percent of their focus is migrant smuggling.”
Cartel clients are given code words that identify which criminal organization they are traveling with, signaling local law enforcement and rival cartels not to harass the group.
A senior Mexican official told USA Today that La Linea, a drug cartel based in the city of Juarez, smuggles at least 1,000 illegal immigrants across the US border each month through a system of tunnels.
“Criminals have turned away from their main job, which is drug trafficking,” Arturo Velasco, head of the anti-kidnapping unit at the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office, told the news agency.
“Right now, 60 to 70 percent of their focus is migrant smuggling,” Velasco said. “A kilo of cocaine might bring in $1,500 profit, but the risks are very high. The cost-benefit of trafficking is $10,000, $12,000, $15,000.”
“Remittances to cities like Ciudad Juarez are set to double to about $90 million per quarter by 2024,” said Inés Barrios de la O, a migration expert at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez.
“Any corruption in Juarez, or any other city on the Mexican border, must have been the result of collusion with authorities,” Oscar Hagelsieb, a former assistant special agent in charge of the Department of Homeland Security Investigations, told USA Today.
Velasco added, “We know that federal law enforcement agencies are trafficking migrants. … They, together with officials from the National Migration Institute, send information about people from inside the shelters, and then outside the shelters, these people are kidnapped by criminal groups.”
Velasco said some police officers kidnap migrants and hold them in safe houses until they can pay smuggling cartels for the smuggling.
One smuggler told USA Today that law enforcement also guides immigrants to the tunnel entrances, and claimed that for about $600 a person, police officers provide cover for the smugglers while they transport them to El Paso.
“We’re pleased to be able to provide this service,” said Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council. News Nation “It’s not new” for cartels to use drainage systems to smuggle people
“They use different kinds of social media, they have information inside the United States, they obviously have information along the border,” Del Cueto said. “They prosecute different groups and families depending on whether they’re taking the safest route or the easier route.”
He explained that smugglers are “willing to sacrifice” groups of illegal immigrants who pay less in order to distract those who have paid higher prices to enter the United States.
“They create groups, they separate them and they say, ‘If you see them, turn yourself in. You won’t be turned away. Apply for asylum. You will be exempt.’ This allows these cartels to pass other individuals through other areas,” Del Cueto told NewsNation.
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