Mexican Cartel ‘Travel Agencies’ Selling $15,000 Packages to Illegal Aliens for Help to Cross Border
People from the local police to the higher echelons of the government play a part in the operation.
USA Today reported that Mexican cartels offer illegal aliens packages up to $15,000 for help to cross the border.
The tunnel is dark and narrow. Toxic gases rise from the dank water. Insects scurry along the sides, rattlesnakes wait, coiled. Rodents lurk along the water’s edge.
Yet this drainage network that reaches from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso, Texas, is one of the most sought-after routes for patrons of a VIP migration package offered by Mexican cartels to those with the money to pay for it.
The tunnel route costs at least $6,000, according to interviews with top Mexican state authorities, federal law enforcement officials from both sides of the border and migrants waiting to cross in encampments along the Rio Grande. Ricardo, a migrant smuggler, said he has charged as much as $15,000.
Each cartel “travel agency” has a code. The VIP customers receive the code so everyone knows which cartel is working with them “so everyone from local police to rival criminal syndicates knows not to harass them.”
La Linea, a cartel in Juárez, has helped at least 1,000 people through the El Paso tunnels.
Human trafficking has become more profitable than drugs:
Experts predict the return on investment of trafficking humans has eclipsed that of trafficking drugs.
“Criminals have shifted from their primary business, which was drug trafficking,” said Arturo Velasco, head of the anti-kidnapping unit at the Chihuahua attorney general’s office. “Now 60 to 70% of their focus is migrant smuggling.
“A kilo of cocaine might bring in $1,500, but the risk is very high. The cost-benefit of trafficking a person is $10,000, $12,000, $15,000.”
To the shock of no one, everyone has to be in on the take for the operation to work:
For the VIP transit to work, key people must be in on the action. Interviews with migrants and government officials suggest the system relies on an already established flow of bribes that reach from high-level Mexican immigration bureaucrats to the city’s municipal police.
“Corruption in Juárez, or in any other Mexican border city, must be in collusion with authorities,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, a former assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations unit in Ciudad Juárez who now runs a security consulting firm in El Paso.
Velasco said investigations by his office have found that Mexican National Guard and immigration authorities turn migrants over to cartels and sell migration permits that allow people to legally transit through the country.
“We know of federal law enforcement that traffic migrants,” Velasco told USA. “From inside shelters, they, along with officials from the National Institute of Migration, send information on people and then, outside, these people are abducted by criminal groups.”
Velsco admitted the local police play a “crucial part” in the game. They are known to abduct illegal aliens to make money:
Velasco, however, confirmed that police officers are kidnapping migrants, who are then held in safe houses − in one case, just feet from the homes of one officer − until they come up with the amount they agreed to pay the cartel before starting their journey.
State investigators documented municipal police participating in kidnapping of migrants arriving at the Juárez International Airport. This year, that has resulted in several shootouts between government and rival human smuggling groups, which has turned the airport area into the latest turf war for organized crime.
Disgusting.
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Comments
Seems to me that $15,000 is quite a bit of money in the Third World. Could set yourself up pretty well. Instead they fund organized crime and come here to break our laws.
You’ll get your $15K back in U.S. Government benefits in just a few months.
You are insane. You don’t get $15K from the US to build a well in Mexico. Maybe this would be a good thing for the US to fund, but we aren’t doing it now.
No, we shouldn’t be bribing people not to break our laws.
What are you talking about?
It’s far more insidious than that. They might be charging $15k, but they also might not be collecting that up front. What they do collect is information on the family and loved ones the migrants leave behind. When the migrants get to the US, it’s made very clear to them how they have to pay up, or they might just find a loved one back home in a shallow grave, and maybe not in one piece. It’s indentured servitude done in the shadows and with torture and murder held over the heads of the servants.
Why aren’t we following Israel’s example? Terminate Mexico’s bad players. Having Mexico as a neighbor is as bad as Section 8 neighbors.
The cartels are a clear & present danger to US citizens. The government of Mexico has proven to be either unwilling or incapable (or both) of confronting this threat…so, we should do it for them. I’m FAR LESS concerned about Vladmir Putin and his laughably incompetent military than I am about the Mexican drug cartels who have facilitated the greatest invasion of a sovereign country…maybe ever. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – Operation Barbarossa – was an invasion force of ‘only’ 3.8M. The cartels have sent more than 10M across our border. It’s insane. We should bomb them back to the days of the Aztecs.
Black Jack Pershing, where are you now?
(I concur on dealing with it.)
To Targe gts,
just who do you plan to target with your bombs?
The article says the police and mayors are in on the graft.
Are you going to bomb the mayors office in Juarez?
The police headquarters?
how about Laredo and Tijuana?
what is your plan for the week after these bombs fall?
Let’s pretend the Mexican army and Air Force do not respond to these bombings.
There will be a new mayor and a new police chief.
The cartels will force them to join in the operation or will kill them, And their families.
so are you going to kill every mayor and police chief after they’ve been in office for three months?
I’m guessing that bombing the cartels would have some kind of impact. And, since that’s who he mentions, why did you pick up on the mayor?
One has to wonder what the percentage of kickback is going to the Democrat party.
Subotai Bahadur
… or to The Big Guy.
Well he will get his ten percent. But there are many turns in this deal, and every one of them gets a cut.
Gators….no, crocodiles in the drainage tunnels.
¡Vamanos, muy peligrosa!
I believe they are funded by those that are dumping them upon us.
The US Government funds many NGO’s, many of which then provide funds to aliens to enable them to pay the cartels.
I wonder who else they are paying with our taxes?
one of the agencies named was
Booking.biden
are we at war with mexico?
b/c the mexican government sure acts as if we are as the attack us with this invasion