Smuggling rings are increasingly pushing groups of 100 or more migrant children and families at a time over the southern border, in some cases overwhelming authorities.
The development, which conservative critics blame on relaxed enforcement, threatens the Biden administration’s efforts to maintain control of the U.S.-Mexico border while overhauling the immigration system.
Border Patrol agents encountered 10 large groups totaling more than 1,000 people since the start of the government’s fiscal year in October 2020 but saw more large groups arrive in February, according to Customs and Border Protection. The dramatic uptick in group size is different than the normal handful to a dozen migrants that smugglers historically ferry across rivers or land and into the United States.
In early February, agents in Edinburg, Texas, took in a group of 166 people, most of whom were families and children from Central America. While the group was being taken into custody, a second group of 87 crossed the border and surrendered to Border Patrol agents. Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas, encountered a group of 130 people last week. Once in custody, agents determined most were minors who were not with a parent, while others were families. Agents from the same area apprehended a group of 100 people several days earlier, most of whom fit the same demographic.
Former U.S. officials at the top of federal border and immigration agencies told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that cartels in Mexico are taking advantage of a slew of factors amid the onset of the Biden administration forcing as many migrants over the border knowing full well that children and families from Central America will be released into the U.S. They were divided about the extent that President Biden’s immigration stances have influenced transnational criminal organizations operations.
“The cartels know what’s going on in the United States with respect to policy a lot better than a lot of American citizens do. [Migrants are] being told by the human smuggling organizations that the borders are open, Biden has now ended [the Remain in Mexico policy], and once you get there, you’re going to be released,” said Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and former acting CBP commissioner during the Trump administration. “The more they can bring in, in large groups, the more money they make.”
Dr. Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former senior Border Patrol agent who is the associate director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso, said decisions in Washington have a ripple effect on the border system “ecosystem,” including how smugglers do business.
“What we’ve seen is, in essence, the spigot open because of policy, and that’s really not unexpected because that happens almost with every administration. There’s always a change, and it ebbs and flows based on policy,” said Manjarrez. “Smugglers are really good at adapting to that. They adapt to those changes much faster than the government does.”
Manjarrez, speaking anecdotally about what he has seen, said migrants “feel welcomed” under the Biden administration, whereas they had not over the past four years.
“It’s a sense that they’re not going to get expelled. They’re not going to be sent back or told to wait in Mexico,” Manjarrez said.
But Morgan explicitly blamed Biden’s rescinding of Trump-era border initiatives, including not returning Central American unaccompanied minors, for giving cartels their talking points. In addition, Mexico recently began refusing U.S. border officials to return many families automatically, forcing Border Patrol to begin taking thousands into custody and transfer them to other agencies or release them into the U.S.
John Sandweg, who oversaw Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration, disagreed with Morgan and said that smuggling organizations have recruited families to the border for years and are doing so at greater rates now, in part, because of the “perception that the COVID threat is dissipating.”
“The smuggling organizations have long proven successful in recruiting people to attempt to cross the border regardless of what posture the administration has taken. Obviously, the numbers of families crossing the border during the Trump administration vastly outnumbered anything we are seeing today, despite often draconian efforts to deter migration,” Sandweg wrote in an email, referring to the half a million migrants taken into custody at the southern border in 2019, as well as 80,000 children who arrived without parents.
Dr. Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who tracks migration of children at the U.S.-Mexico border, said it was within the logic for smugglers to send over more people at a time than smaller groups.
“The more people you send, the more probability that more migrants will get away,” said Rodriguez. “Sometimes, they’ll send a large group to distract Border Patrol from another group they want to get across.”
“If they can smuggle in 40, 50, or 100 across this area, they know that it’s going to take every single Border Patrol resource that they have on duty at the time to handle that,” Morgan added. “Everywhere else along that area at that time is wide open for them to smuggle criminal aliens and drugs across the border. So [migrants are] not only exploited to make money through human smuggling, they’re also exploited to make money through other threats.”
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Between Oct. 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, Border Patrol agents apprehended 284,000 people on the southern border. Of that figure, 3,800 people were found hiding inside tractor-trailers and large trucks. Another 3,500 people were found hiding in houses on the U.S. side of the border, where smugglers hold people temporarily before they transport them to their final destinations in the U.S. if they are able to avoid being caught by Border Patrol.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said 405,000 people were apprehended on the southern border from Oct. 1, 2020, through Jan. 31. A CBP spokesman said that the agency provided inaccurate information and clarified that the correct figure was 284,000.
