Guns Up On the Rio Grande: Cartel Business is Booming
Two months after a group of suspected Mexican cartel members was apprehended near Fronton, Texas, another armed cadre crossed the Rio Grande at the same spot last weekend – and got away.
Occurring 200 miles downriver from Eagle Pass, where Texas has deployed a floating barrier to deter migrants, the Fronton crossings by the Northeast Cartel point to more weapons-wielding criminals expanding their footprint in this country.
In a video, Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez showed men in body armor brandishing rifles ushering migrants across a shallow section of the Rio Grande. “There’s a new level of brazenness. They know they are in control,” Olivarez said of the organized border crashers.
A few miles south of Fronton, the heavily traveled Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge was the scene of a shootout on the Mexican side of the river. Reports said Mexican troops had engaged in a firefight with “armed civilians” there.
Earlier this month, FAIR reported how Mexican cartels strategically use mass illegal border crossers as both a conduit for drug smuggling and a distraction to divert Border Patrol agents from narcotics trafficking.
“The human wave also serves as cover to smuggle in criminals and gang members who infiltrate the migrant throngs, some of whom then falsely claim to be victims of those gangs to obtain grounds for remaining in the U.S. Additionally, the human waves include victims of sex trafficking, one of the most horrendous forms of immigration abuse,” the FAIR report stated.
Even as the Biden administration’s CBP One phone app opens the front door to evermore asylum seekers, illegal crossings along America’s southern border are rebounding after dipping in June, according to preliminary U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
The 130,000 apprehensions last month – up from 99,545 in June – came as border agents allowed an additional 50,000 migrants to cross into the United States via CBP One and other “legal pathways” concocted by the administration in an attempt to hide the true extent of the Biden Border Crisis. “Gotaways” who elude capture numbered at least 400,000 during the first six months of Fiscal Year 2023, up 30 percent from the same period last year.
Since “border encounters” do not automatically result in removals in the Biden era, cartel-affiliated smugglers play the odds and openly advertise their services. Money is a motivating factor in the Southwest border surge, with narcotics, sex slavery and everyday migrants who, for whatever reason, pay up to $10,000 per person for illegal passage. The transactions are conducted by any means necessary, even if it means leaving migrants to die in the sun-baked Texas brush.
Notably, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations estimates that the human blood money paid to get across America’s southern border exploded from about $500 million in 2018 to a whopping $13 billion in 2022.
“This administration has been a windfall for [cartels],” concludes Ronald Vitiello, a former chief of the Border Patrol. “It’s completely changed their revenue stream.” Now it’s guns up on the Rio Grande.