Along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the low grassland near Penitas, southeastern Texas, hundreds of colorful plastic bracelets plucked out by migrants spread across the ground, signs of what U.S. border officials say is a growing trend among powerful cartels drug and smugglers track people who pay to enter the United States illegally.
The plastic strips – red, blue, green, white – some labeled “arrivals” or “entrances” in Spanish, are discarded after migrants cross the river on makeshift rafts, according to a Reuters witness. Its use has not been widely publicized before.
Some migrants are trying to flee from border agents, others are mostly Central American families or young children who travel without their parents who surrender to the authorities, often in search of asylum protection because of the dangers in their countries. source.
Border patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which stretches more than 34,000 square miles along the Texas-Mexico border, recently encountered immigrants wearing wristbands during several seizures, said Matthew Dyman, a spokesman for Customs and US Border Protection (CBP).
The “information on the bracelets represents a plethora of data used by smuggling organizations, such as payment status or membership in smugglers’ groups,” Dyman told Reuters.
The different smuggling techniques emerge at a time when the Joe Biden government seeks to reverse the restrictive immigration policies established by its predecessor, Donald Trump. But a recent jump in border crossings has prompted Republicans to warn loudly and repeatedly that easing hardline policies will lead to an immigration crisis.
U.S. border agents carried out nearly 100,000 apprehensions or rapid expulsions of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border in February, the highest monthly total since mid-2019.
The bracelet categorization system illustrates the sophistication of organized criminal groups that transport people across the border, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border politics at the Washington DC-based bipartisan policy center
“They run like a business,” said Cardinal Brown, which means “finding more sponsors and looking for efficiency.”
Migrants can pay thousands of dollars for travel to the United States and smugglers of people have to pay drug cartels to transport people through parts of Mexico where they claim territory.
“This is a profitable operation and they need to pay close attention to who paid,” she said. “This could be a new way to maintain control.”
Criminal groups operating in northern Mexico, however, have long used systems to register migrants who have already paid for the right to be in gang-controlled territory, as well as the right to cross the border into the United States, migration experts said.
When an increasing number of Central Americans arrived at the border on express buses in 2019, smugglers kept an eye on them, checking “the names and identities of migrants before getting off the bus to make sure they had paid,” Cardinal Brown said. .
A migrant in Reynosa – one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, across the border from McAllen, Texas – who refused to give his name for fear of retaliation, showed Reuters the photo of a purple bracelet he was wearing.
He said he paid $ 500 to one of the city’s criminal groups after he arrived a few months ago from Honduras to secure the purple bracelet against kidnapping or extortion.
He said that after migrants or their smugglers paid for the right to cross the river, which is also controlled by criminal groups, they were given another bracelet.
“So we are not in danger, neither we nor the coyote,” he said, using the Spanish word for smuggler.
A human smuggler who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed that the bracelets were a system for designating who paid for the right to transit the cartel territory.
“They are putting on these (bracelets) so that there are no deaths by mistake,” he said.
Migrants and smugglers say it is a system demanded by the cartels that control the coastal territory in the state of Tamaulipas, a Mexican state bordering on the conflict.
In January, a group of migrants was massacred in the state of Tamaulipas, just 40 miles west of Reynosa. Twelve police officers were arrested in connection with the murders.