Editor’s note: This is the third part of a three-part series examining how transnational criminal organizations are sowing terror in Juarez, Mexico, and extending their tentacles into West Texas and Southern New Mexico, and challenging the Mexican government’s discourse that 90 percent of the violence is gang-on-gang and does not touch ordinary citizens.
The images are graphic, but that is exactly what the residents of working-class “colonias” and their children are exposed to every day south of the border.
North of the border, the docket in U.S. District Court in West Texas and Southern New Mexico reveals hundreds of cases involving migrant smuggling, migrant kidnapping and extortion, arrests in connection to stash houses, drug couriers and weapons smugglers, and almost daily seizures of narcotics as U.S. ports of entry.
El Paso is a city that prides itself as being one of the safest in America but is being infiltrated by a clever and silent enemy: drug cartels.
_________________
SUNLAND PARK, New Mexico (Border Report) – It was the summer of 2020 when parents in the El Paso region woke up to a stark reality: The drug cartels were using their children.
A Chevrolet Cruze driven by an El Paso teen crashed into a building coming off a curve on Paisano Drive. The crash claimed the lives of four El Paso residents ages 16 to 19 and three Guatemalan nationals. Authorities said the vehicle was involved in migrant smuggling.
Three years later, the crashes have multiplied. So have the injuries and deaths of U.S. citizens and migrants alike. This, as the Mexican drug cartels add a low-risk, high-reward asset to their portfolio of criminal activities: Migrant smuggling.
Mexican law enforcement officials tell Border Report transnational regional organizations today derive up to 50 percent of their income in the Chihuahua, Mexico-West Texas corridor from migrant smuggling. That’s a $70 million-a-month side gig for the drug gangs.
A car involved in a migrant-smuggling incident ended up beneath this parked trailer in Downtown El Paso. Four El Paso teens and three migrants died in the crash. (Shelby Kapp/KTSM)
Cartels courting U.S. citizens is not new. What has changed is who they are targeting and how they’re reaching out.
Teens in El Paso and New Mexico are enticed to transport migrants, with the recruiting taking place through social media apps and word-of-mouth.
“We are continuing to see the cartel – we know for a fact – they found a loophole using the minors as the getaway drivers as far as human smuggling. And the reason why is essentially the lack of punishment or prosecution with regards to the minors here in New Mexico,” said Sunland Park Police Chief Eric Lopez.
The cartels instruct their drivers to outrun the police. Law enforcement officials say this is the primary cause of the tragedies. Some community groups disagree. They say the pursuits themselves are contributing to the fatalities and should be stopped.
“It’s scary to think that somebody’s child can be convinced to drive a loaded vehicle into one of those situations. […] When you’re driving and told not to stop for law enforcement, to drive fast, to drive erratically, to drive on the wrong side of the road – when all these things happen, accidents happen,” said Scott Good, chief agent for the U.S. Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which includes New Mexico.
The cartels don’t care if American teens get hurt. But when a human smuggling attempt fails, gang members will come across the border to get their money back.
Gang members assault American high school students
“Students at Santa Teresa High School were being used in these smuggling incidents. But when they would lose the ‘bodies,’ meaning they would get caught or whatever, they were losing money. So, the cartel was sending people over to collect from those students. We had one case of a robbery of a student after school and a few other assaults and batteries,” Lopez said.
The police chief of this southern New Mexico community whose first responders have spent the past three years assisting migrants who fall over the border wall or are overcome by desert heat says the local school district this fall received additional school resource officers (SRO) at the Santa Teresa campus.
Sunland Park City Manager Mario Juarez Infante confirmed the city’s collaboration with the school district in shoring up the SRO program. The SROs are licensed peace officers assigned by local governments to some schools.
The Gadsden Independent School District declined an on-camera interview for this story.
In addition to migrant smuggling, the cartels are recruiting American teens to bring fentanyl across the border. They will give them the pills in exchange for anything of value, law enforcement officials say.
“Obviously, we have a huge issue with fentanyl that is occurring in our area. We see a very significant impact with our youth stealing vehicles and taking them down (to Mexico) and trading them for fentanyl pills and bringing them back to the United States, transporting them through the county and to the rest of the interior of America,” said Maj. Jon Day of the Dona Ana County, New Mexico, Sheriff’s Office.
The recruiting of their children is taking place in this community where one in three residents is an immigrant and 29 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Daniel Gamboa says he knows people his age whom the smugglers have tried to recruit to transport migrants in Sunland Park.
“At night, you don’t see so much Border Patrol. That’s when people pick up the migrants,” said Gamboa, a young adult in his 20s who works in Sunland Park. “They risk their lives for very little money. I have known guys that have come to pick up people. But how long does that last? One month, two, and they end up in jail.”
Fernando Garcia is the executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights. He says the cartels purposely target young people from disadvantaged communities.
“That’s where the cartel grows, out of the desperate need of those young people that cannot find employment, so they are somehow tempted to go get easy money,” Garcia said. “You go to Canutillo, you go to Sunland Park – those are colonias, they’re poor people, they are poor families, so the cartels are using that fact, and they are coming over and they are hiring these young people to do this work.”
The El Paso-based grassroots organization has been working with federal officials to reduce vehicle pursuits that typically originate at the Texas-New Mexico state line.
“We had to engage with Border Patrol, sit down with Border Patrol, put pressure on Border Patrol for them to understand that it was not worth it to put human lives at risk,” Garcia told Border Report. “I think they understood, and they changed the approach.”
A supervisor is called every time border agents follow a suspected human smuggler on highways or streets. The agency also tracks suspicious vehicles from a distance. That has led to the discovery of numerous migrant stash houses and thousands of apprehensions.
But other pursuits continue – as do the injuries and fatalities.
Garcia said he recently witnessed a crash during a Texas Department of Public Safety chase in West El Paso. He blames Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star for allegedly making a bad situation worse.
This image provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety, shows mangled vehicles at the scene of a crash, Nov. 8, 2023, near Batesville, Texas. Eight people died in the South Texas car crash while police chased a driver suspected of smuggling migrants, DPS said. (Texas Department of Public Safety via AP)
BNHR has documented a rise in pursuits in El Paso, from 13 in 2021 to 177 so far in 2023. The timing coincides with the start of Operation Lone Star.
Abbott says the Biden administration has failed to protect Texans. The Texas governor has deployed hundreds of state troopers to the border. The Texas Army National Guard occupies the Rio Grande banks behind razor wire and military vehicles.
The surge adds to some residents’ perception they are living in a state of siege.
“If we have any kind of ‘invasion’ at the end of the day, it is an invasion of state national guard, state troopers in our community,” Garcia said, referring to conservative politicians’ discourse that illegal migrants are invading the U.S. thanks to Biden’s “open borders” policies.
DPS officials in El Paso told Border Report they are merely fulfilling their sworn oath – enforcing the law and protecting Texans – when they chase smugglers. Letting them get away with a car full of migrants exposes the migrants to kidnapping, forced labor and sexual assault, said DPS spokesman Sgt. Eliot Torres.
“We have due diligence. We make sure things are right for public safety. When we are pursuing people at high rates of speed, we are trained to make sure whatever our next move is, it’s going to be safe for the public,” Torres said. “If anything gets out of hand to where the public isn’t safe, then we will terminate our pursuits.”
The cartels not only are endangering drivers on El Paso streets but also keeping migrants in squalor and damaging rental homes in El Paso.
Jeslaine Nevarez earlier this year rented out her East El Paso home to a family that turned out to be into migrant smuggling. Her neighbors called her one day to tell her the Border Patrol was on her property.
When she got there, the locks had been changed, the windows broken, and the garage door pried open.
“They went in, and they were able to take out men and children who were being trafficked and moved through my house. After everyone was removed, we were able to go in, my family and I, and inspect for any damages and we did find quite a few. The total of the damages was $15,000. We were not able to recover that money,” Nevarez said. “As a family, as a small business, that was very hurtful because we had to close that property down for about three months to do all the repairs (to include) broken windows, changing the vanities and the cabinets that were stained due to drug use in that property.”
Possible solutions
Speakers at a recent symposium sponsored by the University of Texas at El Paso’s Center for Law and Human Behavior said the number of migrant smuggling cases in U.S. courts has declined from 2016 to 2022. But the number of convictions has almost doubled, from 12.7% to 24%.
In the Western District of Texas, the number of migrant smuggling cases have gone up from 432 to 1,090, the speakers said. Most cases involve one to six migrants, and most defendants are U.S. citizens of Mexican-American descent. The number of female defendants has shot up in the past 15 years and primarily involves roles such as stash housekeepers, cooks and money couriers.
The number of minors involved in migrant smuggling north of the border is hard to get because they aren’t charged; in Mexico, children have been used as facilitators (guides) for a long time, but they aren’t charged, either, the speakers said.
The cartels are making their presence felt north of the border, so how can communities fight them off?
Garcia suggests regional leaders fund jobs and leisure activities for young people, so they are not tempted by cartel money.
On the law enforcement front, some would like to see increased binational cooperation rather than the U.S. sending troops to Mexico or firing missiles at cartel strongholds.
Experts say American troops would not be welcome in a country where schoolchildren learn from a young age that the U.S. took half of its territory following the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.
Instead, binational programs like the “Se Busca Informacion” (Information Sought) initiative offer hope against mistrust and corruption. Se Busca involves placing posters of the region’s most wanted criminals on both sides of the border. A call center in the United States receives the tips and sensitive information is shared only with vetted U.S. and Mexican agents.
The experts also call for the U.S. and Mexico to address the root causes of drug use in America and the lure of the drug trade in Mexico.
“The excessive use of drugs reflects social dysfunction. It is a symptom. […] You feel the pressure to belong, to achieve, you lack a job, you lack money, and then there is this glamour associated with (the drug trade). So, we should not be surprised if young people” chose such a path, Maynez said.
Victor M. Manjarrez Jr., director of UTEP’s Center for Law and Human Behavior, says families need to talk to their children about the dangers of drugs and gangs, including transnational criminal organizations.
“I believe it starts at the dinner table. I think over time we’ve gotten easy with the convenience of social media. … But I also think we lose touch with our own families. And I think there’s an expectation that the government will take care of this, but the government was never formed to take care of that,” he said.
Read: Read More