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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