DHS: Cartels earn up to $6 billion a year from smuggling migrants

Smuggling migrants into the U.S. earns cartels and others involved in the practice as much as $6 billion a year, a senior Homeland Security official told Congress.

That staggering figure is much higher than other public estimates, though experts said they wouldn’t be surprised if the actual amount were higher still.

The figures underscore the stakes for the Biden administration as it tries to contain an unprecedented surge of migrants, who are enriching the smugglers with record profits.

Smugglers know how to negotiate the harsh terrain and arrange passage through the approaches to the U.S. border, and most migrants end up paying for the service, helping fuel the underground economy, John Condon, acting assistant director of international operations at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, told Congress.The Washington Times tracks smuggling cases along the border and it’s easy to see how the money can pile up.

...The Times’ database found Mexicans paying from $3,600 to $18,000 to enter the U.S. in June, though $8,000 to $9,000 was a typical rate. Migrants from the key Central American countries paid from $4,500 to $30,000, with the typical payment coming to between $9,000 and $10,000.

That doesn’t include extra cash to pay for food along the way or, in many cases, a final release fee smugglers charge the migrants’ families — which can add on thousands of dollars. 

Analysts guess that at least three-quarters of migrants are paying a smuggling organization for the journey.

...Of those caught, about 40% were from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala, slightly more than one-third were from Mexico and the remaining quarter were from elsewhere.

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Why would the cartels chose human smuggling over the more lucrative drug smuggling? Less financial risk.

With people, they pay thousands of dollars up front, and if the migrants are captured, the cartels already have that cash in hand. With drugs, it’s the opposite — the cartels have to invest upfront and only earn their money when the drugs are successfully delivered.

 

The article gives examples of several immigrant's stories, including these two:

That includes one woman who paid $15,000 to enter the country in March, when she was pregnant, so she could give birth to a baby on U.S. soil, automatically earning the child U.S. citizenship.

The woman, Denise Flores-Dominguez, still owed $10,000 to her smugglers, so she began smuggling other migrants to pay off her debt, according to Border Patrol agents who caught her on a highway near the border wall in New Mexico on June 24.

One Honduran woman told agents she paid $30,000 to reach the border and be sneaked across the Rio Grande in Texas. Dania Melendez-George was arrested along with a juvenile traveling without parents, and she said the smugglers had tried to make it seem like she was the boy’s mother.