Mexican drug cartels offer migrants VIP package to enter the United States

Steve Fisher and Alfredo Corchado
| For USA TODAY

CIUDAD JUÁREZ — The tunnel is dark and narrow. Toxic gases rise from damp water. Insects run to the sides, rattlesnakes wait, coiled. Rodents hide at the water’s edge.

Yet this drainage network stretching from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas, is one of the most sought-after routes by clients of a VIP migration package offered by Mexican cartels to those who can afford to pay it.

The tunnel route costs at least $6,000, according to interviews with top Mexican state officials, federal law enforcement officials on both sides of the border and migrants waiting to cross in encampments along the way. along the Rio Grande. Ricardo, a migrant smuggler, said he charged up to $15,000.

Everything in this underworld operates according to a code that the cartels give to their VIP clients, often transmitted by cell phone, which identifies which “travel agency” a migrant is working with so that everyone from local police to rival criminal syndicates , know that you should not harass them.

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Increased U.S. security along the 3,000-mile border with Mexico and fewer legal avenues to come north have been an economic boon for Mexican criminal organizations. Instead of fixing a broken immigration system, the U.S. government is outsourcing its migration policy to criminal groups, some experts say, increasing corrupt practices.

“The migrant,” said Blanca Navarrete, director of the migrant advocacy nonprofit Integral Human Rights in Action, “is the one who pays the price for this lack of action.”

An ongoing joint investigation by Mexican and U.S. authorities has found that a Juárez-based cartel, La Linea, was smuggling at least 1,000 migrants through tunnels leading to El Paso every month, according to a senior Mexican official.

Experts predict that the return on investment from human trafficking has eclipsed that of drug trafficking.

“The criminals abandoned their main activity, which was drug trafficking,” said Arturo Velasco, head of the anti-kidnapping unit at the Chihuahua attorney general’s office. “Now 60 to 70 percent of their attention is devoted to migrant smuggling. »

“A kilo of cocaine can fetch $1,500, but the risk is very high,” he added. “The cost/benefit ratio of trafficking a person is $10,000, $12,000, $15,000. »

Velasco says he has seen pressure – and with it, opportunities – increase over the past two years, after economies around the world destroyed by the pandemic pushed people to emigrate in search of work. Natural disasters caused by climate change and violence have also prompted Latin Americans to leave their countries.

A draft study from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, expected to be released later this year, estimates that record payments made to migrants in Mexico by their family members in the United States

“Remittances to cities like Ciudad Juárez have doubled to nearly $90 million per quarter so far in 2024,” said Ines Barrios de la O, an immigration specialist at the college. That represents an increase of $40 million to $60 million in the border city in 2015, she added.

“Migrants are walking around with a price on their heads,” she said, “desperate to cross, fearing for their lives.”

“Everyone is involved”

For VIP transit to work, key people need to be involved in the action. Interviews with migrants and government officials suggest the system relies on an already established flow of bribes, stretching from high-level Mexican immigration bureaucrats to the city’s municipal police.

“Corruption in Juárez, or any other Mexican border city, must be in collusion with the authorities,” said Oscar Hagelsieb, former assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations Unit in Ciudad Juárez, who now runs a security consulting company. in El Paso.

Velasco said investigations by his office found that Mexico’s National Guard and immigration authorities were turning migrants over to cartels and selling migration permits that allow people to legally transit through the country.

“We know of federal law enforcement who are trafficking migrants,” Velasco said. “From inside the shelters, together with officials from the National Migration Institute, they send information about people, and then, outside, these people are kidnapped by criminal groups. »

Requests for comment sent to the National Guard by phone and messaging app were not returned. The National Migration Institute declined to comment.

Local police also kidnap migrants for profit, Velasco said. And they are a vital part of migrant smuggling operations in the city’s Juárez networks.

In Juárez, municipal police chief Cesar Omar Muñoz Morales denied allegations of corruption, saying it was “difficult and complicated” to “tackle things that are not formally documented.”

“It’s difficult to answer your question when there is no official complaint that our department can follow up on,” Muñoz said. He described his service as clean and efficient, adding: “We do our best. »

However, Velasco confirmed that police officers kidnap migrants, who are then held in secure locations – in one case, just steps from a police officer’s home – until they find the amount they accepted to pay to the cartel before starting their journey.

State investigators documented municipal police involvement in the kidnapping of migrants arriving at Juárez International Airport. This year, that has resulted in several shootings between the government and rival human trafficking groups, turning the airport area into a new turf war for organized crime.

The migrant smuggler who spoke to USA TODAY confirmed that municipal police also play a vital role for his organization, particularly in transporting migrants from shelters to tunnels.

“They load people into their trucks and take care of them so another cartel doesn’t take them away,” Ricardo said.

Agents not only bring customers to the drain entrances, he said, but they also provide cover for him and his fellow smugglers to get to El Paso. For this service, Ricardo said he pays a police commander nearly $600 per migrant.

“This is extortion of millions of pesos and everyone is involved,” said Tony Payan, director of the United States-Mexico Center at Rice University, who wrote a book on the political situation in Juárez .

“In other words,” Payan said, “it’s an extortion force.”

The promise of a hassle-free bus ride

Ciudad Juárez is at the heart of tensions over migration and immigration policy.

Last year, El Paso recorded 427,000 encounters with Border Patrol authorities, the most of any sector along the U.S. southern border.

Migrants come to the city from all over the world. Some, like the Chinese, pay exorbitant fees of up to $75,000 for VIP packages, according to Ricardo.

Others fail or run out of money and find themselves among hundreds of people camping on the banks of the Rio Grande.

There, they say they feel like hostages, caught between wanting to stay away from criminal groups while still being within reach of the United States. Between them and their destination are hundreds of Texas National Guardsmen aboard Humvees and in helicopters hovering overhead.

Andrés, a 25-year-old Venezuelan, naps in a sleeping bag in an area he calls “no man’s land.” Nearby, others sleep on flattened cardboard boxes.

On a recent afternoon, Andrés, who asked to be identified only by his first name, recounted how he arrived in the North thanks to the promise of a “VIP package” advertised on social media. The package described crossing Darien Gap on horseback, he recalled, followed by a hassle-free bus ride.

He made his journey using his cell phone, communicating with a chain of regional cartel representatives from his hometown of Caracas to the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Everything went according to plan until he arrived in Juárez, Andrés said. At that point, he had paid half of the $15,000 fee to the cartel, but he had no money to cover the other half. As a result, his cartel travel agency stopped responding.

His family loaned him $750 to pay for a code provided by local crime groups.

It’s especially useful, he says, when he has to cross the street next to the Río Grande, where his camp is located.

As Andrés sat by the river, he pointed to men in pickup trucks armed with powerful weapons. Below, on a highway, municipal police cars were driving up and down. Everyone had asked for his code, he said.

Andrés was becoming more and more desperate. He saw his only option as jumping over, or crawling through, the concertina wire that separated him from the United States. Then he would rush past Texas National Guardsmen and find himself in the arms of U.S. immigration authorities.

Further away, in central Juárez, Ricardo talks about the promising future his work offers him. In just five years, he went from being a junior guide to managing 15 migrant smugglers. He said he smuggled about 50 migrants a month into the United States and was paid thousands of dollars per person.

Just like the people he brings down the storm drains, he too has a dream.

“I want to buy my mother a car, a house, everything,” he said. “In fact, construction is already underway.”

This article is published in partnership with the Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, organizer and funder whose mission is to provide high-quality news and information on the U.S.-Mexico border. Alfredo Corchado is editor-in-chief and correspondent for the collaborative.