Mexican cartels use children to smuggle people into the US
South American drug cartels are minting money by separating children from their parents and then having their members pose as the children's relatives in order to cross into the US.
Mexico's dangerous criminal syndicates amassed as much as $14 million a day last month by smuggling people into the US. While America is facing one of the biggest surge of migrants at its southwestern border, the notorious drug cartels took advantage of the border crisis and used children as decoys for human trafficking, according to US-Mexico border police.
"Trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry," retired Tucson Border Patrol Chief, Roy Villareal,
told Fox News.
"A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings. Some are essentially indentured servants and they're working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt."
The cartels have increased their fees for human trafficking and are now “making more money on humans than they are on the drug side,” said Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. Guerra
from the front lines of the US immigration battle in Texas.
Drug cartels are splitting children from their families and have their members pose as their relatives in order to hoodwink the US border forces, Guerra said.
“So now with the family units coming across, you might have a mother come in, say, a mother with three children,” he added.
“Well, the cartels say, ‘You can cross with one child, we’re going to take two children. And we’re going to use those two children to smuggle two others and pretend that those are family units.’ ”
“We also have individuals that might be 21, 22, and they pass themselves off as 16, 17 years old and say, ‘Hey, we’re an unaccompanied minor.’ And they might give false name. And they might have a criminal record in their countries,’’ Guerra said.
