Forget drugs. Mexican cartels make more cash trafficking PEOPLE

Mexico's criminal cartels earn more money nowadays from trafficking people than drugs, exploiting the Biden administration's lax border security and forcing migrants into years of debt servitude, an ex-lawman from Texas warns.

Speaking with a think tank, Jaeson Jones, a retired captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the US is not meeting the threat posed by heavily-armed Mexican gangs like the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels.

He described a ‘tectonic shift' in operations of the cartels, which have made some $13 billion from trafficking migrants across the border and making them repay a transit debt once they start earning wages in the US.

His comments, aired in a podcast on Thursday, echo those of US border guards who spoke with DailyMail.com on a recent visit to the frontier at El Paso, Texas, as a steady flow of migrants crossed the Rio Grande and turned themselves in.

Much like legislation proposed by Republican senators Roger Marshall and Rick Scott, Jones says the Biden administration should designate Mexico's cartels as foreign terrorist groups — as was done with ISIS and Al Qaeda — to better crack down on their activities.

 

 

‘We've got literally hundreds of thousands of people crossing through Gulf Cartel territory,' Jones said in a podcast aired by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

‘They didn't have the money up front to pay. So now they're indebted to these cartels. So they crossed that river, they're allowed to come into the United States, the federal government then ships these people to every state in the country. But yet, they are indebted to a criminal organization in a foreign country for years, if not decades, to come.'

U.S. border guards are grappling with a surge of migrants crossing from Mexico. Authorities stopped migrants 2.15 million times from October through August, the first time the figure was above 2 million during the government's fiscal year.

It was a 39 percent increase from 1.54 million stops the same period a year earlier. August is the latest month for which data are available.

Border crossings have been fueled partly by repeat crossers, as there are no legal consequences for getting expelled under a pandemic-era rule that denies a right to seek asylum. Still, the numbers are very high.

About a decade ago, local gangs charged migrants just $100 to traverse the frontier, said Jones.

Nowadays, Mexicans have to stump up $2,500 and migrants from Central America $3,000. Those from China pay $5,000 and Russians and Middle Easterners have to pay $9,000, he added.

The gangs and their so-called ‘coyote' smuggling experts charge more to transit people up to and across the border. The latest influx comes mostly from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.

Cartel gangsters call migrants the ‘gift that keeps giving' because they have to pay the wages they earn in the US, said Jones.

They use the cash to acquire military-grade weapons, buy off Mexican politicians and in some cases run ‘parallel governments' in the areas effectively under their control, said Jones.

Cartel revenues from human trafficking have soared from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion this year, estimates Homeland Security Investigations, the federal agency that probes such cases, according to The New York Times.

The cartels are now multibillion dollar complicated international operations, with the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) operating in at least 50 countries each, said Jones.

 

 

 

They are kitted out with assault rifles purchased in U.S. stores and smuggled back across the border, as well as everything from belt-fed machine guns from Central America and Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades, he added.

‘They are here, and the failures at the southwest border are being felt across this country, in every different form possible,' said Jones.

Cartel muscle was on display on Wednesday in the violence-plagued southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero, where a shootout between rival gangs left 18 dead, including a mayor, Mexican authorities said on Thursday.

The organized crime groups La Familia Michoacana and Los Tequileros appeared to be involved.

Jones called for the US to designate cartels as foreign terrorist groups, making it illegal for individuals to assist them, freezing their assets, stopping their international money flows and barring the entry of members into America.

The White House did not immediately answer DailyMail.com's request for comment.

The administration of US President Joe Biden is pushing other countries in the Americas to absorb more people fleeing their homes.

 

 

Some 6.8 million people have left Venezuela since an economic crisis took hold in 2014 for the country of 28 million people. Most have gone to nearby nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, including more than 2.4 million who are in neighboring Colombia.

Venezuelan migration to the U.S. fell sharply early this year after Mexico restricted air travel, but has increased in recent months as more come over land through the notoriously perilous Darien Gap jungle terrain in Panama.

The Republican Governors of Texas, Arizona and Florida — Greg Abbott, Doug Ducey and Ron DeSantis — have made headlines by bussing or flying migrants to Democrat-led areas in the northern US to highlight the crisis.

Still, even Democratic-run administrations like El Paso, a frontier city in Texas, are bussing thousands of migrants to Chicago and New York, only calling it a ‘humanitarian' mission, a DailyMail.com investigation revealed.

US voters favor Republicans over Democrats for solving immigration and crime woes, suggesting the Republican emphasis on border security could help it in the midterm elections on November 8, an Ipsos poll showed this week.

Forty percent of registered voters said Republicans were the party best suited to address immigration, compared to 32 percent who selected Democrats, according to the survey of 4,415 adults between September 27 and October 3.

Soaring inflation remains a top concern for U.S. voters, but crime and immigration are seen as important themes for motivating core Republican supporters to turn out and vote – and for winning over independents and moderate Democrats.