Posted on 07/19/2015 4:47:12 AM PDT by Vigilanteman
Traveling by Jeep, boat and foot, Tribune-Review investigative reporter Carl Prine and photojournalist Justin Merriman covered more than 1,900 miles over two months along the border with Mexico to report on coyotes — the human traffickers who bring illegal immigrants in the United States.
Most are Americans working for money and/or drugs. This series reports how their operations have a major impact on life for residents and the environment along the border — and beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at triblive.com ...
As a “coyote” myself, I have doubts about the accuracy of the media on this topic. I’ll have to watch the 7 part series.
Most “coyote” are friends and family, not un-related businessmen. Go to the Mexican side of any border town in Texas. (I’ve been told it is the same on the rest of the border but have no firsthand experience there.)
The border towns have a bunch of small family owned businesses. Each family business has an family inventory of valid passports, visas, IDs, etc. IDs of men, women, boys, girls, fat, skinny, tall, short, etc. They rent these papers to illegals for about $5 for a half-hour.
Their customers come by referrals from previous customers. The result is that each family business has built a relationship/network with certain towns in the interior of Mexico.
The person who rents an ID walks across the bridge at rush hour when the bridge is congested with thousands of commuters. The check of IDs is extremely cursory, if at all. In the times I crossed the bridge, they did not look at my ID, and did not look at the IDs of anyone around me any closer than a distance of 5 or 6 feet as we walked past. So at 5 or 6 feet they could only see the IDs for 2 or 3 seconds.
The whole thing is a joke.
Of course, on the US side of the river, a member of the family business collects the IDs of the customers who rented them and takes them back across the bridge for the next customer.
The family businesses I’ve seen can have up to a couple hundred rentals a day. I’ve talked with many illegal Mexicans about this. They all agree that those who cross the desert and those who pay high prices are really stupid.
(Of course, there are some potential customers with whom the family businesses will not deal. Their networks often warn them of undesireables to avoid. So maybe the small percentage of undesireables have to pay the high priced coyotes.)
I suspect the media has no intention of reporting the truth or reality and has every intention to sensationalize to boost eyeballs and their own egos.
Read the articles. This is some good journalism by and honest reporter.
I have read half the articles and they are excellent review of situations that show that we have a more serious immigration/border problem than most imagine.
You are also right about rented ID business. My Brother and his mexican wife live in TJ...and confirm what you say. Some border crossings the ID’s are checked more closely than others..varies by time of day and location.
HALF of illegals came here legally and stayed beyond their visas. I’ve worked beside many here legally, but their legal visa did not allow them to work legally.
HALF of illegals came here with no valid visa. The vast majority of these did not use a “coyote” in the normal sense of the word. It is only an extremely small percentage who used a “coyote”. Either that or there are millions of us who are coyotes, which turns the word meaningless.
Yes, there are problems. The #1 problem is that 10% of immigrants (legal and illegal) are undesireable.
90% are desireable. We should focus on the 10%. A focus on the 100% is no focus at all.
Are you saying that what you describe is legal? That it is entrepreneurship that everyone should admire and applaud?
Speak for yourself bub. The influx of uneducated Mexicans and other south Americans is a blight on US society. The lawlessness and corruption is mind boggling. You should be zotted in my opinion for being a part of the problem.
Source? I've heard 40% many times. Never heard 50%.
Why do you call yourself a “coyote”?
Mrs. AV
...”Crickets”...
I’d like to red the articles but the link you gave says I’ve got to subscribe to see them. Since I don’t live within a thousand miles of Pittsburg Pa it’s not worth it to me.
Sorry, I didn’t realize the Trib played those type of games. I will post the article in full when I get home as it is too hard to do on a tablet.
Coyote is one who facilitates illegal immigration for money on the Southern border and abuses the immigrants in the process: Narrow definition of coyote.
Broad definition is one who facilitate illegal immigration. I’d estimate that there are over 25 million American citizens who have done this. And I am one of them.
Some of the anti-illegal immigrant voices don’t realize how pervasive and inter-twined illegal immigration is with both citizens and legal immigrants. How intertwined it is with churches, schools, businesses, families.
For example, the 11 million illegals live somewhere, paying rent or mortgage. If they were all deported, that would mean 11 million not paying the rent or mortgage. without paying the rent the landlord can’t pay his mortgage. It would mean 11 million not buying food, gasoline, etc. Those businesses would decline and more mortgages would not be paid.
And consider the employment situation. Fast food would be unable to fined enough replacement employees ...at any minimum wage. There just aren’t enough of us who want to do that job. It isn’t just the money, I’ve known illegals in construction making $20-30/hr and more. If they went back to Mexico there would be nobody to replace them. I’ve seen employers try to hire construction workers out of government jobs programs. They just don’t want to work that hard...or get dirty.
I realize the above is “pragmatic” and avoids the morality that the illegals are guilty of a mis-demeanor equivalent to a parking ticket; What they did is illegal. Of course, pre-1920s it was not illegal. So the immorality is not in entering the US without permission. The immorality is solely in failing to play mother-may-I with the bureaucracy.
I see. You are at the core of the problem. You weasel around and give the Clintonian spin “Everybody does it” and “it’s just a little bit illegal” while this country goes to the dogs all around you.
Stop wrecking your country. You can be part of the solution instead of whoring out whatever principles you have left for some cheap tile work or gardening.
Mrs. AV
BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS — Roofer Sergio Elidoro Garcia never intended to become an American “coyote.”
But the construction industry collapsed in 2008 and the man who helped build homes became homeless.
Garcia, 32, scrambled to provide for his fiancée and three children, with one more baby on the way, by hauling undocumented immigrants across the U.S. border for $50 a head.
“As it is in Brownsville, there’s no job but in smuggling operations or drugs,” Garcia said in a telephone interview from a federal prison in Memphis, Tenn., where he’s serving a nine-year sentence for human smuggling.
An eight-month project by a reporter with the Tribune-Review’s investigations team found that it is largely America’s unemployed, the mentally ill, drug addicts and people looking to make an extra buck who become the coyotes who help smuggle immigrants into the United States. They perform a wide range of jobs, including guiding illegal immigrants around law enforcement checkpoints and transporting them to stash houses, where they’re hidden from the police during a long journey north.
Three out of five coyotes convicted of human smuggling in federal district courts along the Mexican border in 2013 and 2014 held American citizenship, a Trib investigations reporter found.
Human smuggling is a labor-intensive operation. The typical smuggler is a white male of Hispanic descent, about 34 years old, with little schooling. Half suffer from addiction and mental illnesses, a rate twice that of other American adults according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
A Trib analysis of 3,254 federal smuggling cases in southern Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and southern California determined U.S. citizens are a critical element to success. Most were the drivers transporting the human cargo, or the “chequedores” scouting ahead for Border Patrol and law enforcement.
American drivers and guides are the primary means for smuggling the children and the elderly — immigrants unlikely to survive long walks across harsh terrain — through U.S. ports of entry.
Critics of American immigration policy contend undocumented immigrants are flouting U.S. visa laws to steal jobs, hiking taxpayer costs for medical care and schools. Others argue that immigration can boost the economy and applaud a White House proposal to raise the number of temporary work permits for low-skilled workers who have migrated here without documentation, creating a potential path to citizenship for an estimated 11-12 million people already here. Texas has filed suit to block a Homeland Security proposal to allow adult parents here illegally to stay and get jobs.
Immigration has become an early hot topic among 2016 presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, protecting America from unlawful entry became a national security priority. Strategically, Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement agencies sought to stop illegal immigration at official ports of entry or across the long borders with Canada and Mexico.
Officials estimate that three of every five undocumented aliens use northern Mexico to cross into America.
The push to fortify America’s airports and vast southern borderlands developed amid rising concerns about other issues related to unlawful immigration.
Critics contend that undocumented immigrants flout American visa laws to steal jobs, increase the taxpayer’s bill for medical and education costs tied to the immigrants’ spouses and children, and bring foreign criminals into the nation’s heartland, where they extend the tentacles of Mexican criminal syndicates trafficking in drugs and people.
Opponents of government border policies argue that unlawful immigration boosts the economy, and have called for an overhaul of the visa system to increase the number of temporary work permits for low-skilled workers and to provide citizenship for an estimated 12 million or so illegal aliens.
Today, most of those entering America along the border with Mexico flow through south Texas, fording the Rio Grande River in sparsely populated places like Starr County, before homegrown coyotes drive them 50 to 100 miles east through a gauntlet of local, state and federal law enforcement.
In the dense urban tangle from McAllen to Brownsville, others in the smuggling chain help the newcomers blend in or, more often, store them in “stash houses” like two that Garcia’s crew operated. Then other coyotes sneak them in vehicles or on foot to Houston, the 21st century hub from which illegal immigrants fan out across America.
The United Nations estimates that undocumented immigrants attempting to jump the border hire coyotes 90 percent of the time. The fees charged by the smugglers vary widely based on expenses -- mostly for feeding and transporting immigrants -- and the risk the coyotes run of getting caught by Homeland Security agents, court records show.
Although a small portion of illegal immigrants, Chinese nationals smuggled by car pay the highest prices — $88,000 each into Arizona, $60,000 into California. The prices are way above what it would cost to hire a lawyer to obtain a visa, immigration experts said, indicating they are entering unlawfully because the quota for those immigrants was met or they were otherwise denied entry.
Undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America pay far less. To go from a Mexican border city to Houston, about 350 miles, costs the typical illegal traveler about $3,100; $800 more takes them to most other cities, according to a Trib investigations analysis of court documents.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Border Patrol doubled in size to nearly 21,000 agents, all but 3,000 of whom are stationed along the border with Mexico. That’s more than nine agents for every mile of border from Texas to California, and the agency contends it never has been more effective at capturing coyotes and the illegal immigrants they bring in.
Officials point to the declining number of illegal immigrants testing border security. Over the past 14 years, apprehensions of undocumented aliens along the southern border have slumped nearly 71 percent, a level of illegal immigration unseen since the 1970s.
With a higher level of border security, coyotes like Garcia have come to regard trafficking as part hide-and-seek and part livestock herding, which makes sense in a multibillion-dollar industry that calls the immigrants “pollos” and “chivos” – Spanish for chickens and goats.
In early 2014, the ringleaders in a group of 16 smugglers made an offer a homeless man like Garcia couldn’t refuse: live in a stash house for free with the pollos and collect fees their relatives wired to fund their stay and the next phase of their journey, a long hike around the Border Patrol outpost in Falfurrias, Texas, nearly 100 miles north.
To Garcia’s bosses, it made perfect business sense. Armed with a valid driver’s license and other identification, U.S. citizens can open bank accounts, buy groceries, collect wire payments and ferry human cargo with less risk of cops detecting them.
Classified criminal intelligence reports obtained by a Trib investigations reporter, along with reams of court documents analyzed by the newspaper, show that most smuggling cells operating on the U.S. side of the border are small, independent operations run by racially white but ethnically Hispanic bosses, who work with Mexican cartels and domestic street gangs.
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, intelligence reports indicate that 72 human smuggling organizations operate in the 50 miles separating the riverbank towns of Roma and Mission. Five gangs remain active near the Falfurrias checkpoint.
The typical smuggling ring operating on American soil allots one coyote for every three unlawful immigrants being smuggled, according to the Trib investigations analysis.
Coyote crews usually include an American driver or two to quickly overcome the vast distances of the American West before cops catch up; a stash house caretaker to feed the illegal immigrants when hiding out; a guide, usually Mexican, to navigate them on foot around checkpoints; and an American scout to watch for law enforcement along the routes.
An American driver gets paid about $840 per head to smuggle immigrants hidden in a vehicle through a Border Patrol checkpoint. Other American drivers shuttling immigrants from the border to stash houses or drop-off points near checkpoints make about $300 per person, the investigations team’s analysis of court documents showed.
A scout riding ahead earns about $450 per person and the stash house operator gets $250 for every alien that successfully makes it past Border Patrol, the same wage paid to the typical brush guide from Mexico.
“It was an acquaintance of an acquaintance. I had a driver’s license and debit card. I was asked, ‘Do you want to make a little money?’ I’d rent a car or fly to Texas and pick up some people,” said Pamela Joane Brill, 58, a widowed grandmother from Bullhead, Ariz., who was arrested in April near La Gloria, in the western stretch of the Rio Grande Valley.
Her lure: $3,700 to drive a van full of immigrants about 250 miles from the border to Ganado, Texas.
“They were already across the border. I didn’t think it was illegal to drive them once they were across.” Brill said. “When I got to prison I heard from people who are real smugglers. They told me that I was the decoy. That I was set up. But that’s not the way the prosecutors made it sound. They were trying to say that I was the mastermind.”
Called “suicide loads” because ringleaders count on cops to swarm these vehicles, the tactic allows a different shipment – sometimes narcotics – to drive past the dragnet in the confusion.
About a third of American coyotes caught along the border are women, based on the Trib investigations analysis of court records, but only 18 percent of the convicted ringleaders are female.
April Marie McBride, 28, a single mother from Austin, Texas, was a full-time student in 2013 when she was arrested “doing a favor for a friend” for $500.
“He didn’t tell me the risk. He just told me to go and pick up a few people for him — which wasn’t supposed to be 10 — and bring them back and he would give me a little money,” McBride said. “... I was in a tight spot at the moment, trying to move, and being a full-time student I figured it was worth it.”
Ronald Duane Tucker, 53, a diehard Cubs’ fan from Chicago’s North Side, went west to become a cowboy. Instead, he got hooked on cocaine in Tucson, Ariz.
“I needed work. A man offered me between $500 and $1,000 per head (to smuggle immigrants). It seemed like a fast way to get off the street,” Tucker said.
Two years ago and fresh out of drug rehab, his 1998 Lexus blew a tire near Rio Rico, Ariz., a 15-minute drive from the border. An Arizona Highway Patrol trooper pulled up behind him. Tucker had two Mexicans in the trunk.
“I lost my car. I lost two years of my life. I lost everything,” said Tucker, who is finishing a 20-month sentence in a Tucson, Ariz., halfway house.
Convicted in May as a coyote working a smuggling corridor in west Texas and New Mexico, Wilson Ivan Melgar-Marin, 34, was a Mexican roofer who illegally crossed the border to live with his wife, Angelica Rojas Medina, a citizen, and their children in El Paso, Texas. Her stepfather ran a human trafficking ring in neighboring Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court documents.
Speaking from federal prison in Mississippi, Melgar-Marin told the that he and his wife became slaves to the organization.
“I was threatened to be killed,” he said, adding that his father-in-law “had us all monitored. He would tell my wife that if she would try to get away, he would take it out on me.”
Melgar-Marin said he didn’t have access to the money the operation took in. His father-in-law “would pay me whatever was convenient for him — $20 per person. And with that I don’t think I would’ve become a millionaire.”
The Ciudad-based cartel’s boss – unnamed in court documents — died in a Mexican prison in 2012. Serving a 77-month term, Melgar-Marin fears the dead patrone’s henchmen will kill him when he’s deported to Mexico, so he’s appealing the sentence.
Garcia, the coyote serving time in a Memphis prison, agrees with Melgar-Marin that smuggling kingpins often get sweetheart deals while lower-ranking coyotes incur long sentences. The bosses have information to trade with prosecutors and the pawns don’t, he and dozens of past and present smugglers told the Tribune.
“They tried to make me say something, to get a reduced sentence, but I couldn’t give them anything. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know their real names. All I had were nicknames,” he said.
1. From a legal perspective, it is a very minor violation.
2. I have always been quite blunt about my position, which is the Republican position that I adopted in the late 1950s and argued.
3. I’ve collected rent from illegals (mostly Mexicans, perfect tenants for my style). But I have mostly hired Puerto Ricans and other citizens to do work.
4. Big differences between Clintons and me. a) They support giving the Central government the power to tell private employers whom they can and cannot hire. I oppose it. Anyone who thinks the government will not abuse that power over private employers is living in fantasy world.
b) Dems have no intention to deport/jail the 10% (1.1 million) criminals. They give lip service to it. I’m at the opposite extreme of focused action on murderers, rapists, DUI drivers.
c) Clintons favor welfare to immigrants. I oppose it. Of course, I oppose welfare to big business, and to small business and to citizens also. But we have to start somewhere. And preventing a new underclass is the place to start.
5. I bet I’ve personally deported far more illegals than you have. I bet you’re all talk, no action.
6. Focusing on all 11 million illegals is no focus at all. The lack of focus and effectiveness makes a “they’re all alike” policy opposite of what it claims to be. By being something that will never happen, it endorses the Democrat position in practical effect.
So tell me- how do you know your illegal tenants are not rapists, murders or DUI drivers? How do you know they don’t have TB or chagas or leprosy, chikungunya or any of the other myriad diseases they bring with them.
No, I have never personally deported any illegal immigrants. How is it that you have? I am a registered nurse, and I have seen many, many here from Mexico and Central and South America also Southeast Asia with drug-resistant TB though and the costly and sometimes forced treatment that it requires.
I live in a place now that has a mostly white population, so I haven’t been tempted to hire illegals. Plenty of white kids in need of pocket money if I need lawns mowed or firewood stacked.
I can honestly say that I am sure I have eaten a lot of food picked by illegals, but have not hired them nor rented to them, nor would I. By that choice I have acted in a conscious fashion to not contribute to a very large and costly problem.
You have done what you have done, and will live to regret your choices...or not, as God disposes in your life.
Mrs. AV
I knew most of my tenants quite well as I was not an “absentee” landlord. I lived with them, ate with them, etc. Of course, I knew some better than others.
The biggest problem by far among illegal Mexican men (and some women) is alcohol. People do stupid things when they’ve had a few drinks. Illegal Mexicans are no exception to that. I’ve rejected many as tenants for that reason alone. I had one tenant (out of hundreds) where that was a serious problem. The odds of the other diseases you mentioned were smaller than with my citizen tenants.
Many illegals practiced concealed carry. That is a plus for society when they are sober. But not when under the influence. I had one tenant where that was a serious problem. I’ve rejected many as tenants for that reason alone.
Pre-Nixon I facilitated the Chicago Police in deporting illegals guilty only of “drunk and disorderly” or “assault” against their drunk cousin who wouldn’t sign an arrest warrant. Pre-Nixon local law enforcement was primary in deportation and immigration enforcement. Nixon centralized enforcement in the INS (now ICE) and neutered local law enforcement. Chicago’s lawyers fought Nixon in court and lost.
That action by Nixon is the single most significant event of my 71 years in decline of the immigration system. Treas Sec Rubin’s destruction of the Mexican economy was the second most significant...or maybe it was the most significant as it got Republicans elected President of Mexico two terms in a row.
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