The newest official to head the Department of Homeland Security plans to shift focus to siphoning off cash flow to the gangs and large criminal organizations behind cross-border smuggling efforts.
Chad Wolf, the fifth person to lead the DHS in the Trump administration, said in a Fox News interview he is stepping up the 240,000-person department’s efforts to go after these transnational criminal organizations, including the underground networks that charge migrants thousands of dollars each to be trafficked to the United States.
“So when we talk about TCOs, it’s not only them facilitating the flow of migrants to the border, it’s also drugs, weapons, and a lot of the violence,” Wolf said. “So targeting TCOs in a real way … is something that I will certainly push and work on from a DHS perspective, but we’ll also be working in the larger interagency to really start targeting these groups, because once you start eliminating their ability to bring migrants and the like, then I think you’ll start seeing a different dynamic.”
Wolf, fresh off his first border trip last week, said the U.S. would target the massive organizations in Central America and Mexico by cutting off the billions in profit from making it to them, but he did not explain how DHS will use its agencies to stymie funding to the organizations.
Some migrants from Central American countries pay human smugglers an average of $7,000 to $8,000 each to reach and get through the U.S.-Mexico border and in some cases, as much as $10,000, then-Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last December.
McAleenan added that transnational criminal organizations make $2.5 billion annually by moving people through the border. That figure is in addition to income from drug smuggling and other operations.
“The TCOs and cartels, they control the southern side of the border — they have to be paid, they have to be compensated for any of these large flows coming across the border,” Wolf said. “You eliminate that, and you eliminate their ability to recruit in Central America and bring these folks up.”
A Border Patrol agent giving a tour of the El Paso, Texas, region to a reporter in June said human smugglers who are members of these large networks list advertisements on radio stations in some Central American countries, telling people they will transport them to the U.S. In addition, smuggling organizations and gangs control the northern part of Mexico where migrants must cross through to get to the U.S.
Wolf did not knock efforts by his predecessor, McAleenan, but said he found it “exciting” he was able to do more on the issue.
