Along the shores of the Rio Grande in the shrubbery near Penitas, southeastern Texas, hundreds of colored plastic tires torn down by migrants are filling the ground, signs of what U.S. border officials are saying are a growing trend among powerful drug cartels and smugglers . watching people crossing into the United States illegally.
According to a Reuters witness, the plastic straps – red, blue, green, white – some indicated as “arrivals” or “entries” are thrown away in Spanish after immigrants cross the river. Its use has not been widely reported before.
Some migrants try to evade border agents, others are mostly Central American families, or young children traveling without parents who work for officials, seeking asylum protection due to dangers in their home countries.
Border patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which stretches more than 34,000 square miles across the Texas-Mexico border, recently encountered immigrants during several arrests with the bracelets, said Matthew Dyman, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Excise. border protection (CBP), said.
The “information about the bracelets represents a wealth of data used by smuggling organizations, such as payment status or association with smuggling groups,” Dyman told Reuters.
The various smuggling techniques come when Joe Biden’s government sought to reverse restrictive immigration policies introduced by its predecessor, Donald Trump. But a recent leap into border crossings has warned Republicans loudly and repeatedly that loosening the harsh policies will lead to an immigration crisis.
U.S. border agents carried out nearly 100,000 fears or rapid expulsions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, the highest monthly total since mid-2019.
The wristband categorization system illustrates the refinement of organized crime groups that transport people across the border, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Washington-based two-party policy center.
“They run it like a business,” said Cardinal Brown, which means “finding more customers and being efficient.”
Migrants can pay thousands of dollars for the trip to the US and human traffickers have to pay off drug cartels to transport people through parts of Mexico where they claim territory.
“It’s a money making action and they need to pay close attention to who paid,” she said. “It might be a new way to keep up.”
However, criminal groups operating in northern Mexico have long used systems to report which migrants have already paid for the right to be in a gang-controlled area, as well as for the right to cross the border into the United States, said migration experts.
When increasing numbers of Central Americans arrived at the border with express buses in 2019, smugglers watched them by “checking the names and IDs of migrants before getting off the bus to make sure they paid,” Cardinal Brown said.
A migrant in Reynosa – one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas – who did not want to give his name for fear of retaliation, showed Reuters a photo of a purple wristband he was wearing.
He said he paid $ 500 to one of the criminal groups in the city after arriving from Honduras a few months ago to secure the purple bracelet against kidnapping or extortion.
He said once migrants or their smugglers have paid for the right to cross the river, which is also controlled by criminal groups, they receive another bracelet.
“This way we are not in danger, neither we nor the coyotes, ‘he said, using the Spanish word for smuggler.
One human trafficker who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed that the bracelets are a system to indicate who paid for the right to be transported through the cartel area.
“They put on these (bracelets) so that there are no accidents,” he said.
Migrants and smugglers say it is a system required by the cartels that control territory in the conflict-ridden part of the border with the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
In January, a group of migrants were killed in the state of Tamaulipas, just 40 kilometers west of Reynosa. Twelve police officers were arrested in connection with the murder.