The illegal business of smuggling migrants across the U.S border has become a multi-billion dollar industry due to the high prices individual migrants need to pay to cross the border as organized crime and violence have grown and revolutionized throughout the U.S-Mexico border according to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
Migrants who pay huge amounts of dollars to smugglers for passage across the border are often victims of ransom due to living in their trafficker’s hands, tortured, and kept in safe houses where they can be extorted for more money along the way.
There are different fees a migrant must pay depending on which part of the globe they’re coming from. An individual from Latin America is expected to pay $4,000 and up to $20,000 for an individual that comes from the Eastern hemisphere.
The multi-billion dollar industry of human smuggling has caused many accidents on the U.S border side such as the deaths of 53 migrants in the sweltering heat of San Antonio, Texas which became the biggest smuggling incident up to this day.
Policies such as Title 42 have left migrants with limited and life-threatening options such as relying on smugglers for passage into the United States.
For more information on this concern, please visit the article in The New York Times down below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/us/migrant-smuggling-evolution.html