More U.S. citizens are being convicted of smuggling immigrants across the US border
More than 60 percent of people convicted of smuggling in federal courts in recent years have been U.S. citizens, the majority of them with little or no criminal history, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
“It’s pretty lucrative if you can get away with it,” said Brady J. Waikel, U.S. Border Patrol’s assistant chief agent in Del Rio, Tex., in a sector that includes Eagle Pass and Kinney County. “Nobody thinks they’re going to get caught.”
The smugglers who have been caught have an average age of 33 and include down-on-their-luck truck drivers, single mothers, oil-field workers and high school students, according to federal court and state court records in Texas, where smuggling is also charged as a local crime.
U.S. citizens are pulled into smuggling through word of mouth and social media, according to court records, law enforcement officials and researchers. Smugglers have been recruited by relatives, spouses and friends — even their bosses at work — and typically communicate via cellphone with the migrants and their guides in Mexico.
The U.S. citizens involved in smuggling usually act as couriers, often taking migrants from the border to their final destinations in the United States. Some pick up migrants in Mexico, hide them in their vehicles and drive them through legal checkpoints into the United States. Others work mainly on the U.S. side of the border, meeting migrants on remote ranch roads or stash houses after they cross the Rio Grande.
A video went viral online last week after two U.S. citizens with migrants in their white Mercedes allegedly filmed themselves while leading Texas authorities on a high-speed chase near the border. Authorities stopped the car in Jim Hogg County, southeast of Laredo, and the citizens — a 19-year-old woman and 22-year-old man — tried to flee along with a group of several migrants, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. The man and woman have been charged with smuggling and other offenses, authorities said.
Non-citizens used to account for about 80 percent of convicted smugglers in the mid-1990s, when U.S. authorities were logging more than 1 million apprehensions at the border each year, according to the Sentencing Commission.
But as the government heightened border security, smugglers turned to U.S. citizens for their flawless English and knowledge of local roads, which can help migrants bypass Border Patrol checkpoints after entering the United States.
Authorities arrested a string of U.S. Marines over the summer and accused them of involvement in smuggling operations. Two active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton were arrested July 3 and accused of picking up migrants in a black BMW in Southern California. Migrants said they paid $8,000 to be smuggled to New Jersey and Los Angeles. The Marines have pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court.
Several other Marines have been charged in military court in connection with alleged smuggling and other offenses, including perjury, according to a Marine Corps statement. On July 10, Border Patrol agents arrested a Marine from a different unit on smuggling charges. All have pleaded not guilty. |
