The bottom line is the cartels are charging people to cross into our nation, It is not a lie.
EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Federal agencies are trying to streamline their processes to quickly get unaccompanied children out of detention and decide which migrant families get to stay or ar…
www.borderreport.com
snip
The senior Border Patrol official also addressed the involvement of the Mexican drug cartels in the ongoing migrant surge.
“Cartels or transnational criminal organizations are taking advantage of the situation that we’re in. […] They charge every single person that comes across that border,” he said. The cartels are so sophisticated that they’re constantly switching the entry points they chose for migrant families, children and single adults to illegally come into the country.
homeland.house.gov
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, MD (R-TN) issued the following statement after the Committee released additional portions of transcribed interviews conducted with the U.S. Border Patrol chief patrol agents responsible for the sectors along the Southwest border. In the interviews, Border Patrol leadership confirmed the unprecedented influence the criminal cartels wield at the Southwest border, detailed the numerous ways these groups take advantage of the chaos and anti-enforcement policies under Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and described the abuses and atrocities committed by these organizations against individuals seeking to get to the Southwest border:
“In these shocking transcripts, chief patrol agents not only shed a light on the unprecedented control exercised by the criminal cartels at our Southwest border, but they also confirmed that Americans are ‘living in the theater of engagement.’ This means that the policies of Secretary Mayorkas have ceded ground along our border to these heartless criminals and have allowed their malign activities to destabilize cities and towns across the country.
“From overwhelming Border Patrol agents with mass crossings to purposefully putting the lives of migrants—including children—in danger, these cartels will stop at nothing to smuggle criminals across the border and deadly drugs into our communities, all while abusing, trafficking, and profiting off of vulnerable individuals. Secretary Mayorkas’ refusal to enforce the law and remove incentives for illegal crossings is enabling the cartels’ booming business model. This is completely unacceptable. Homeland Republicans are committed to holding Secretary Mayorkas accountable for allowing criminal cartels with no respect for human life to control our border.”
The House Committee on Homeland Security and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability conducted interviews with eight chief patrol agents and one deputy chief patrol agent from April-September 2023 to acquire more information about operations in their sectors and how the crisis has impacted the safety and security of the United States. These interviews were part of the Committees’ ongoing investigation into the causes, costs, and consequences of the unprecedented crisis at America’s borders, and the role of Secretary Mayorkas in facilitating and maintaining this crisis.
Snip
The cartels are also raking in historic profits from both drug and human smuggling, as well as human trafficking. As noted in the Committee’s report, the cartels were estimated to have made $13 billion in 2021 just off of human smuggling—and the number of individuals traveling through Mexico to the Southwest border has only increased since.
Immigration officials say cartels are lying in wait — calculating how to orchestrate a surge of migrants at the border.
nypost.com
“The migrants try to organize themselves to stay safe,” a humanitarian worker told me as we stood near a town square in Reynosa, Mexico, steps away from the U.S. border. More than 2,000 people from many countries, blocked from asking for asylum in the United States, were packed into this square...
www.wola.org
snip
As Texas dips down far to the south here, this is the closest point on the border to Central America, so the agency encounters tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans here each year, along with Mexicans displaced by violence elsewhere in the country. Many are parents with children. I also met some of a growing number of migrants now coming from Colombia, Haiti, and Venezuela. The vast majority hope to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities and ask for a chance to petition for asylum in the United States, claiming threats to their lives if returned.
This is also a busy route for migration because Mexican organized crime has locked down the routes across the border. Those who can pay several-thousand-dollar fees, selling everything they own and borrowing the rest, cross with cartel-sanctioned smugglers. It’s a huge moneymaker for organized crime, and for the corrupt Mexican security and migration officials who get paid to look the other way.
I was struck by the level of control that organized crime has over the lives of residents, and especially of migrants, in the Tamaulipas border cities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros. Cold War-era East German officials would be impressed. Nobody is allowed near the Rio Grande: riverfront parks sit empty. Those who try to cross without having paid a fee are beaten, or worse. Those who lack a “password” or other proof that they have paid cartels’ exorbitant fees are kidnapped. Migrants, including parents and children, get held in fetid stash houses, while their captors text terrifying videos to relatives in the United States, instructing them to transfer ransom payments in the thousands of dollars. If nobody pays, they are disappeared, enslaved—forced to perform labor for the cartels—or even killed. Mexican security forces almost never come to the rescue.