Mexico: Smugglers use bracelets to track migrants as they cross the US border | American-Mexican border

The plastic bands – red, blue, green, white – some labeled “arrivals” or “entrances” in Spanish, are thrown away after migrants cross the river on makeshift rafts, according to a Reuters witness. Their use has not been widely reported before.

Some migrants try to escape border officials, others are mostly Central American families or young children traveling without parents who surrender to officials, often to seek asylum due to the dangers in their country original.

Border patrol officers in the Rio Grande Valley area, which stretches over 34,000 square kilometers along the Texas-Mexico border, recently encountered immigrants wearing the bracelets during several apprehensions, said Matthew Dyman, spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“Bracelet information represents a wealth of data used by smuggler organizations, such as payment status or affiliation with smuggler groups,” Dyman told Reuters.

The various smuggling techniques come as Joe Biden’s administration sought to reverse restrictive immigration policies put in place by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But a recent surge in border crossings has repeatedly warned Republicans that easing sweeping policies will lead to an immigration crisis.

U.S. border officials made nearly 100,000 apprehensions or rapid deportations of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, the highest monthly total since mid-2019.

The wristband categorization system exemplifies the sophistication of organized crime groups transporting people across the border, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Washington DC-based bipartisan political center.

“They run it like a business,” Cardinal Brown said, which means “finding more customers and seeking efficiencies”.

Migrants can pay thousands of dollars for travel to the United States, and smugglers have to pay drug cartels to move people through areas of Mexico where they claim territory.

“It’s a lucrative operation and they have to be very careful who paid,” she said. “Maybe this is a new way to keep track.”

Criminal groups operating in northern Mexico, however, have long used systems to record which migrants have already paid for the right to be in gang-controlled territory, as well as for the right to cross the border with states. United, said migration experts.

When more and more Central Americans arrived at the border by express bus in 2019, smugglers monitored them by double-checking “the names and IDs of migrants before getting off the bus to make sure they had paid.” said Cardinal Brown.

A migrant in Reynosa – one of Mexico’s most dangerous towns, across the border from McAllen, Texas – who refused to give his name for fear of reprisal, showed Reuters a photo of a purple bracelet he wore.

He said he paid $ 500 to one of the city’s criminal groups after arriving from Honduras a few months ago to secure the purple bracelet in order to protect against kidnapping or extortion.

He said that after migrants or their smugglers pay for the right to cross the river, which is also controlled by criminal groups, they receive another bracelet.

“That way we’re not in danger, neither us nor the coyote,” he said, using the Spanish word for smuggler.

A human smuggler, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the bracelets were a system for designating who paid for the right to transit through cartel territory.

“They put on these (bracelets) so that there are no murders by mistake,” he said.

Migrants and smugglers say it’s a system required by the cartels that control riparian territory in the conflict-ravaged Mexican state adjacent to the Tamaulipas border.

In January, a group of migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas state, just 65 km west of Reynosa. Twelve police officers have been arrested in connection with the killings.