The cartels are getting rich on human trafficking and the Biden administration doesn't care
Human traffickers apparently can make as much as $14 million in a single day. They question is, who else is profiting? Could it be the Democrats?
Biden apologists and the media are pushing back against claims by America’s Conservative Voice Monday that human traffickers are making as much as $14 million a day bringing illegal aliens into the U.S at the southern border. The knee-jerk efforts to deny the truth, however, have years of backing from Trump Administration officials.
Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Congress on two years ago that smuggling cartels were then making at least $500 million a year bringing migrants into the U.S. Other DHS officials appeared on Capitol Hill at the time, outlining the scope of the problem for lawmakers as illegal border crossings continued to surge. Now, of course, they are even worse.
According to border patrol sources, criminal organizations trafficking women, children, families and single adults over the U.S.-Mexico border earned as much as $14 million a day in February,
“Trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry,” said former Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal, who retired in December after 30 years with the agency. “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 human smuggling windfall comes as U.S. taxpayer costs for the border crisis continue to spike, topping $5 million a day, based on 2019 figures provided by Health and Human Services that put daily “influx” shelter costs at $800 per migrant. It is quite likely those costs are much higher now.
Additionally, last week the Biden administration awarded a $86 million contract for hotel rooms to hold 1,200 migrant families for six months, as the crisis exceeds ICE holding capacity.
Additional costs will include overtime and hotel costs for the hundreds of agents reassigned to Texas from other areas. For context, in 2019 Congress appropriated an extra $4.6 billion to handle a similar migrant surge. In 2014, Congress gave President Obama an extra $2.7 billion to deal with his border crisis.
“The Biden Administration has been an abject failure when it comes to ensuring the safety of unaccompanied minors who cross our border,” Gov. Greg Abbot (R-TX) said in a statement. “President Biden’s refusal to address the border crisis is not only enabling criminal actors like human traffickers and smugglers, but it is exposing innocent unaccompanied children to illness and potentially unsafe living conditions.”
Biden’s DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Sunday attempted to defend the administration’s handling of the border crisis, yet again claims “the border is closed,” even as hundreds of thousands pour across it each month. (Photo: Roger L. Wollenberg/Getty Images)
On “Fox News Sunday,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the president’s handling of the situation, saying, “We are encouraging families, not to send their children along the dangerous journey because so many do not make it safely. We are encouraging them not to do so. Yet, if they arrive at the border, we have a responsibility to allow them to make their claims under United States law.”
An appeals court this year found the U.S. is not legally obligated to accept unaccompanied minors. The Trump administration sent most Central American minors, the majority of whom are ages 15 to 17, back to their home countries to join family there.
As part of its media blackout, the Biden administration agencies responsible for caring for the migrants — HHS, DHS and FEMA — all refused to communicate with America’s Conservative Voice when we asked for cost projections.
That refusal is despite the fact that former officials tell us each agency keeps a running tally of daily expenses — which include a newly opened Carrizo Springs, Texas shelter, one in Midland, Texas, the Dallas Convention Center and prospectively two additional shelters in New Jersey and Florida.
NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations, are also looking for taxpayer support. The agencies typically step in when ICE or CBP shelters reach capacity. In San Diego, the county asked the California delegation to reimburse Jewish Family Services for shelter, food, transportation and case management for hundreds of migrants taken in since January.
“They did hold a gun to our head because they were asking for money to non-government organizations that take on these refugees,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. “And they wanted an indeterminate amount of money for something permanent. And they wanted basically a blank check.”
Issa’s staff asked for a breakdown of expenses, but the county has yet to respond. “The NGOs are happy to take federal dollars to do social work. But at the end of the day, the taxpayers on the hook and probably for a long time to come,” he said.
Despite claims of surprise from the White House and Mayorkas, Villareal says top-ranking border patrol officials, including RGV Sector Chief Brian Hastings, specifically warned the incoming Biden team in early December their plans would lead to an influx of migrants.
This stands diametrically opposed to the Trump Administration’s approach to illegal entry. Biden spokesmen insist “the border is closed” but the facts of the matter bely that claim.
Then-DHS Secretary Kristjen Neilsen warned Congress of the profiteering the drug cartels were taking at the southern border, to the point that now, two years later, at least two have abandoned drug running and oil theft for the more lucrative human trafficking incmoe now available. (Photo: Erin Schaff / Reuters)
In 2018, Nielsen took a firm stand on the causes of the surge, saying economies in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are growing and homicide rates are falling, suggesting the push factors back home should be easing. Instead, she said, the booming U.S. economy and lax American laws are enticing the flow northward.
That contradicts the narrative offered by immigrant rights activists, who have said violence in Central America has spawned the wave of illegal immigrants over the past few months, erasing gains made during President Trump’s early weeks in office and sending the rates of illegal immigration back up to the levels seen under President Obama.
“We do face a crisis,” the the former secretary told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing called in August 2018 to review her department’s budget and policies.
The $500 million figure paid by illegal immigrants then to smuggling cartels appeared to be the first time a federal official has put a dollar amount on that particular activity. That averages out to $1.3 million per day. But now, the urgency of so many people from not only Central America but the rest of the world has driven the price to seven times that.
Then and now, the money is split among the “coyotes,” or guides, who shepherd the migrants through Central America and Mexico to the border; the stash house operators and smugglers who transport them to their final destinations in the U.S.; and the major cartels that oversee all sides of the operation.
“To be clear — human smuggling operations are lining the pockets of transnational criminals. They are not humanitarian endeavors,” Ms. Nielsen said. Smugglers prioritize profit over people. And when aliens pay them to get here, they are contributing $500 million a year — or more — to groups that are fueling greater violence and instability in America and the region.”
That income, at the time, was substantially less than the amount of money the cartels make smuggling drugs, which totals billions of dollars a year, according to various government estimates.
That is no longer the case.
Organized crime is mutating in Mexico as gangs who made their money primarily by stealomg oil and selling drugs are now turning to a lucrative new line of work: Trafficking people
Santiago Nieto, head of Mexico’s financial intelligence unit (UIF), said his team had discovered that some of the country’s most notorious cartels had branched out into sex trafficking, especially ones whose core business faced disruption.
“A lot of criminal groups are mutating,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the unmarked office building that houses the UIF, responsible for unearthing illicit funds.
“When one possibility ends … they start to link up with other kinds of criminal activities,” Nieto said in an interview conducted at distance in his office.
Human trafficking may be the third-largest illicit activity in Mexico, after drugs and guns, he estimated.
Mexico is an origin, transit and destination country for human trafficking, a global business estimated to be worth $150 billion a year.
Yet relative to the drugs trade, little is known about the shadowy groups in Mexico that deal in people. High-profile cases often involve smaller, family-based U.S.-Mexico networks rather than the big cartels that grab headlines.
The Guanajuato-based Santa Rosa de Lima gang, for years dedicated to tapping oil pipelines, later turned to extortion and got involved in a table dancing bar staffed by trafficked women, Nieto said.
He said the Mexico City Tepito Union drug gang had similarly branched out to guard women forced into commercial sex.
It is clear that the Biden administration is aiding and abetting these illegal activities, knowingly or unknowingly. Given Biden’s past proclivity for selling his office to the highest bidder, perhaps it is time we found out if he and the rest of the Fascist Democrats are profiting from this border disaster.