A report from the Department of Homeland Security estimates illegal immigrants are spending nearly $10,000 to hire a human smuggler to travel from Central America in an attempt to enter the U.S. illegally.
Smugglers charged an average of $1,200 as down payment and up to $8,000 following arrival at the final destination, often the southern point of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics’ September 2017 report “Efforts by DHS to Estimate Southwest Border Security between Ports of Entry.”
That number has more than doubled from down payments of less than $100 and final costs of between $1,000 and $3,000 that were seen in the late 2000s.
The usage of smugglers has also increased despite the significant cost uptick.
“[R]elatively few illegal border crossers hired a smuggler prior to 2001, but usage rates climbed to 80-95 percent among apprehended border crossers in 2015,” according to Border Patrol interviews studied in the report.
That estimates were based on information shared by migrants who were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection officers and questioned about how they made the trip to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Central America is comprised of seven countries: Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. The trip from the Mexico-Guatemala border is 1,200 miles, a little longer than the distance from Jacksonville, Fla., to Boston.
