A Border Patrol agent giving a tour of the El Paso, Texas region to a reporter said human smugglers list advertisements on radio stations in some Central American countries, telling people they will transport them to the United States.
“The word is definitely out. They have advertisements by radio. You listen to your radio on your way to work — on your way to the grocery store. And that country is advertising, ‘If you want the American dream, we’ll help you out — we’ll teach you how to get in the United States,'” the agent told Maria Bartiromo for a Fox News interview that aired Sunday. The agent appeared on camera with Bartiromo, but was not identified.
A report from the Department of Homeland Security estimates unauthorized immigrants are spending nearly $10,000 to hire a human smuggler to travel from Central America in an attempt to enter the U.S. illegally.
Smugglers charged an average of $1,200 as down payment and up to $8,000 following arrival at the final destination, often the southern point of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics’ September 2017 report “Efforts by DHS to Estimate Southwest Border Security between Ports of Entry.”
That number has more than doubled from down payments of less than $100 and final costs of between $1,000 and $3,000 that were seen in the late 2000s. The usage of smugglers has also increased despite the significant cost uptick.
“[R]elatively few illegal border crossers hired a smuggler prior to 2001, but usage rates climbed to 80-95 percent among apprehended border crossers in 2015,” according to Border Patrol interviews studied in the report.
Those estimates were based on information shared by migrants who were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection officers and questioned about how they made the trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Central America is comprised of seven countries: Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. The trip from the Mexico-Guatemala border is 1,200 miles, a little longer than the distance from Jacksonville, Fla., to Boston.
In the interview that aired Sunday, the Border Patrol agent said most people coming to the U.S. in the El Paso sector, one of Border Patrol’s nine southern border regions, are families from Central America, but the adults arriving are coming from Cuba. Thousands of people have left Cuba and traveled to southern Mexico since January, Mexican media has reported.
“For the most part, it’s single adults. Usually for the most part they are Cuban — family units are some Cuban. For the most part, they are from Guatemala, El Salvador, from that Northern Triangle region,” the agent said.
Customs and Border Protection, the federal law enforcement agency that oversees all border and customs operations, said last week it has arrested more people illegally crossing from Mexico into the U.S. in roughly the first six months of the 2019 fiscal year than in all of the previous year. More than 418,000 people had been apprehended from Oct. 1 through mid-April. In all of fiscal 2018 — from Oct. 1, 2017 to Sept. 30, 2018 — 404,142 people were taken into custody across all U.S. borders. Exactly 99% of all apprehensions, 414,000, took place on the southwest border in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The other 4,000 were on the northern border or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
