Mexican Cartels Get the Blame for Human Smuggling. But Americans Are Heavily Involved.

EL PASO, Texas — Mexican criminal organizations involved in human smuggling are increasingly relying on Americans to maintain the flow of migrants reaching the U.S. 

The trend has emerged as a consortium of high-level U.S. officials touched down in Mexico this week to discuss plans for stopping a record number of migrants from reaching the U.S. 

President Joe Biden’s government and past U.S administrations have focused the blame for human smuggling on Mexican drug cartels, while overlooking the important and growing role of U.S. citizens in the criminal economy. Enticed by soaring profits during hard economic times, U.S. citizens have proven easy recruits to ferry migrants through the last—and arguably most perilous—leg of the trip. 

“The Americans just want money. They were not interested in this business when we were charging the migrants $100, but now that we charge up to $10,000, they want in. That is ok, as long as they keep doing their part of the job,” said a 45-year-old male Mexican smuggler who spoke to VICE News on condition of anonymity. 

The number of Americans apprehended for human smuggling in the El Paso border sector has spiked by “over 80 percent during the past three to four years,” Fidel Baca, a Border Patrol spokesperson in El Paso told VICE News. 

The El Paso sector, which has long been a hotbed of smuggling activity, includes 268 miles along the international line and 125,000 square miles of U.S territory. Federal prosecutors secured more than 2,000 smuggling convictions in the southern and western districts of Texas—where El Paso sits—in 2022 alone, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Baca said prosecutors have charged more than 750 U.S. citizens in the El Paso border sector in the first half of 2023 alone. And the number of arrests of U.S. citizens suspected of smuggling is much higher, he said.

“These are only the cases that got prosecuted. Many, many others don’t make it that far for a number of different reasons, so the number of sentences is incomplete [and] misleading,” he said.

Contrary to what most Americans understand, the majority of migrants arriving at the border want to turn themselves into the U.S. authorities to request asylum—a legal right under U.S. law. Unaccompanied minors and family units are most likely to be let in, while single, adult men are usually turned back. 

But for those migrants seeking to enter illegally, the journey doesn’t end once migrants cross the Rio Grande and step foot on U.S. soil. They still have to evade a hundred miles of Border Patrol checkpoints that reach well into the interior of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. That’s where the U.S. citizen smugglers come in. A surging number are being recruited to ferry migrants past Border Patrol checkpoints inside their personal vehicles, dump trucks and tractor trailers. 

In fiscal year 2022, 74 percent of people convicted of human smuggling nationally were U.S. citizens, up from 60 percent in 2015 and 40 percent in 2001, according to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most were caught transporting six people or less.  

Smuggling networks became more reliant on U.S. citizens after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the U.S. implemented tighter controls at its southwest border. But recruitment of U.S. citizens appears to have taken off again during the pandemic, when jobs dried up and smuggling offered a seemingly easy way to make a few thousand dollars. 

“When the pandemic hit there were no jobs and many of us found a way to make good money from human smuggling,” said Andrew, a human smuggler and a U.S. citizen in his late thirties who said he gets paid between $1,500 to $3,000 per migrant he picks and transports past Border Patrol checkpoints. The rate depends on the distance he transports the migrants and the “handler,” as the cartel operative in charge of a smuggling ring is known. 

“All of these operations are set up and owned by the cartel, but now they are using Americans almost exclusively because we get through the [Border Patrol] checkpoints very easily,” he said. 

Andrew has made over 100 runs transporting undocumented migrants from the El Paso area in Texas to Albuquerque in New Mexico, Andrew said, a distance of roughly 265 miles. He gives them clothes to look like construction workers so they don’t raise suspicion at checkpoints.

“I pick them up, dress them up differently and then go through the checkpoints and drop them off at a motel or at a stash house. Then I send videos or photos of them to their families to let them know they are good,” he said. 

The growing involvement of U.S. citizens in smuggling comes as the number of migrants arriving at the border reached record numbers, fueled by a surge of Venezuelans fleeing the poverty-wracked country.

During the last week of September, the number of migrant crossings surpassed 8,600 over a single 24-hour period, according to the Department of Homeland Security figures. That’s up from around 3,500 daily border apprehensions in May, after President Biden ended Title 42, the public health emergency policy that allowed immigration authorities to immediately expel asylum seekers into Mexico. 

After the policy’s end, migration numbers plummeted for a few months, before spiking again in August, fueled by misinformation shared online by smuggler networks and the fact that many migrants’ families and friends successfully entered the U.S. 

“Migrants will keep coming and as long as the U.S. keeps trying to stop them, there will be business for us and for them [Americans],” said the male Mexican smuggler in Ciudad Juárez, who is based across the border from El Paso.

The smuggler, who has been working under the armed branch of the Juárez Cartel, said that right now “it’s more profitable to get migrants across [the border wall] than trafficking bricks of cocaine.”