Viewed from the street, the brown house was pleasant but unattractive. A little red truck and a yellow toy school bus hung from the fence, and the front of the house was decorated with a big Texas star. But in the backyard was a decrepit trailer that a prosecutor would later describe as a “house of horrors.”
The trailer was discovered in 2014, when a man called from Maryland to report that his stepfather, Moisés Ferrera, a Honduran migrant, was being held there and being tortured by the human traffickers who had brought him to the US. His captors wanted more money. They were hammering Ferrera’s hands over and over again and promised to continue until his family sent the amount.
When federal agents and other law enforcement officers broke into the house, they discovered that Ferrera was not the only victim. His investigation found that traffickers had taken hundreds of migrants hostage there, maiming their legs and arms and raping women.
“What came out in that place is something worthy of science fiction, something worthy of a horror movie — something we just don’t see in the United States,” prosecutor Matthew Watters said, speaking to a jury, as the accused drug dealers went to trial. . According to him, organized crime cartels “brought terror to this side of the border.”
But if that was one of the first such cases, it wouldn’t be the last. Over the past ten years, smuggling of migrants on the southern border of the United States, which began as a dispersed network of freelance “coyotes”, has grown into a multibillion-dollar international business controlled by organized crime, including some of the most violent drug trafficking cartels in Mexico. .
The death of 53 migrants in San Antonio last month, crammed into a suffocating truck without air conditioning, was the deadliest incident to date involving smuggled migrants in the country. It came at a time when tightening US-imposed restrictions at the border, exacerbated by a public health rule linked to the pandemic, is pushing more migrants to turn to people smugglers.
It is not new that migrants are targets of kidnapping and extortion in cities on the Mexican side of the border, but such incidents are increasing on the American side, federal officials said.
More than 5,046 people were arrested last year on charges of human trafficking, up from 2,762 people in 2014. For the past year, federal agents have launched almost daily raids on hideouts where dozens of migrants are held captive.
Title 42, the public health ordinance introduced by the Trump administration at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, authorized the immediate expulsion of people caught crossing the border illegally, allowing migrants to cross it again and again in hopes of eventually achieving their goal. This has led to a sharp rise in the number of apprehensions of migrants at the border –1.7 million in fiscal year 2021–, generating an intensified movement for people smugglers.
On the same day in March, near El Paso, Texas, US agents rescued 34 migrants from two airless cargo containers. The following month, 24 people were found in a hideout, where they were being held against their will.
Cases of police cars chasing human traffickers at high speed through the streets of Uvalde, Texas, have been so frequent lately — there were nearly 50 such incidents in the city between February and May — that some staff at the school where a massacre took place in May said they did not take the order to close the school seriously, because so many similar orders were given when drug dealers fled through the streets.
Teófilo Valencia, whose 17- and 19-year-old sons died in the San Antonio tragedy, said he took out a loan, giving his family’s home as collateral, to pay drug dealers $10,000 for transporting each of his children.
Charges generally range from US$4,000 for migrants from Latin America to US$20,000 if they need to be transported from Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia. The information is provided by human trafficking specialist Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, from George Mason University.
For years, independent coyotes paid cartels a fee to move migrants through border territory under the cartels’ control, and the cartels focused their action on their traditional business, drug trafficking, which was far more lucrative.
But that situation began to change around 2019, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner told Congress last year. According to him, the huge number of people trying to make the crossing made human trafficking an irresistible attraction for some cartels.
According to Homeland Security Investigations, the federal agency that investigates these cases, the cartels have teams specializing in logistics, transportation, surveillance, captivity and accounting, all contributing to an industry whose revenue rose from $500 million in 2018 to an estimated $13 million. billion today.
Migrants are transported by plane, bus and in private vehicles. In some border regions, such as the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, traffickers place color-coded wristbands on migrants to designate that they belong to them and what services they are receiving.
“They are organizing merchandise in ways that would have been unimaginable five or 10 years ago,” Correa-Cabrera said.
Groups of Central American families who crossed the Rio Grande recently to reach La Joya, Texas, wore blue wristbands with the Gulf Cartel logo, a dolphin, and the word “deliveries”, indicating that they intended to turn themselves in to US authorities. and ask for asylum. After crossing the river, people are no longer the responsibility of the cartel.
Previously, migrants arriving in Laredo, Texas, would cross the river on their own and then seek to disappear into the dense urban landscape. Today, according to interviews with migrants and law enforcement officials, it is impossible to make the crossing without paying a coyote linked to the Nordeste cartel, a faction originating from the larger criminal organization Los Zetas.
Human traffickers often recruit teenagers to transport migrants to hideouts in working-class neighborhoods. After gathering a few dozen people, they load the migrants onto trucks parked in the huge industrial warehouse district of Laredo, off Killam Industrial Boulevard.
“Drivers are recruited from bars, strip clubs and truck stops,” said Timothy Tubbs, who until his retirement in January was a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations in Laredo.
The trucks that transport migrants disappear, without arousing suspicion, among the 20,000 trucks that travel daily along the I-35 highway to and from Laredo, the busiest land port in the country. In order not to disrupt the flow of vehicles, Border Patrol agents at checkpoints inspect only a tiny fraction of passing vehicles.
The trailer truck found on June 27 with its tragic cargo had passed a checkpoint 50 km north of Laredo without arousing suspicion. Three hours later, when he stopped on a remote road in San Antonio, most of the 64 people were already dead.
The driver, Homero Zamorano Jr., one of the two men named on Thursday (25) in connection with the tragedy, said he was unaware of the failure in the truck’s air conditioning system.
