Criminals Profit When Illegal Aliens Crash the Border

Amidthe chaotic crush of migrants at America’s southern border, one group isreaping multimillion-dollar profits: Central America’s criminal drug cartels.

“A lot of Central American narcotics cartels — transnational criminal organizations — are facilitating smugglers in moving aliens, rather than drugs because it’s more profitable right now,” said Thomas Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Homan, who is said to be President Donald Trump’s choice for the role of the first-ever national “border czar,” said the festering humanitarian crisis “is making these cartels very, very rich.”

John Davidson, a reporter who traveled to the Guatemala-Mexico border, confirmed Homan’s account.

“From the moment Central American migrants cross Mexico’s southern border and begin their journey north, the entire process is a massive, multifarious, black-market, moneymaking machine,” he wrote in the Federalist.

“Cartelsgenerally require every man, woman and child who passes through their territoryon the way to the U.S. border pay a tax, which is often included in the totalfee smugglers quote to Central American families,” according to Davidson.“Without paying this tax [which Homan calls a “Plaza Fee”], migrants cannotcross the Rio Grande, and in many cases are at risk of being kidnapped orotherwise exploited.”

It’s easy money for the cartels. Using a rough, as well as conservative, estimate of Plaza Fees, Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies figures that the 144,000 illegal aliens who crossed the U.S. border in May paid $144 million to the cartels for final safe passage through northern Mexico.

“[The cartels] don’thave to grow a single poppy. They don’t have to make a single pound of meth.They just get the money, and if you don’t pay you’re dead,” Arthur says.

In a belatedattempt to stanch the Central American migrant flow at its source, Mexico haspledged to deploy 6,000 troops toits 541-mile border with Guatemala. How effective that effort is over thelong-term remains to be seen. The Guatemalan government– like Mexico’s — has been neck-deep in the drug- and human-smuggling industryfor years.

WhileWashington politicians and presidential aspirants ritually bash Trump and bemoanthe plight of migrants lining up to enter the U.S., a do-nothing Congress refusesto pass laws to stem the swelling tide of asylum seekers, or even toeffectively manage the crowds once they’re here. Where’s the outrage over thecriminal facilitation and profiteering of this humanitarian crisis?