Mexican Drug Cartels are Cashing In
Inflation isn't just hitting your pocketbooks - illegal migrants are paying more, too, enabling a $20 billion "industry"
From Stephen Dinan, a Washington Times exclusive:
$20 billion payday: Biden’s border surge sends smuggling prices soaring
The migrant smuggling economy at the U.S.-Mexico border now tops $20 billion and the cartels have made at least $2.6 billion in profit over the past 12 months just from controlling the routes illegal immigrants use, according to a Washington Times analysis.
Both amounts are up substantially from the Trump and Obama years because more people are coming to the border and because they are paying higher prices.
Mexican migrants are paying an average of $8,600 in total smuggling fees this year, according to The Washington Times’ database of smuggling cases. That’s up roughly $2,000 from 2019, the last pre-pandemic year under the Trump administration. Migrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are paying about $11,500 for the trip, up from $9,000 in 2020 and $7,900 in 2019, The Times’ data shows.
Those rates are averages across the southern border. Migrants pay a little less in parts of Texas and a little more in California.
“There’s an inflationary pressure on the number,” said Ronald Vitiello, a former chief of the Border Patrol. “Everything else being equal, things are more expensive. Employees, gasoline, logistics — things are more expensive.”
The migrant surge that began at the start of the Biden administration is still going strong 20 months later. The numbers paint a grim picture of how the surge has fattened the wallets of the cartels that control the smuggling economy.
One yardstick is the mafia fee, or “piso” — literally, the tax — migrants pay to cartels to use their routes into the U.S. Nearly every migrant pays, and the rate has increased to $1,300 per person. That is up more than 50%, from about $850 in the Trump years.
The Border Patrol nabbed nearly 2.2 million people trying to sneak into the country from Mexico over the past 12 months. Subtracting repeat crossers who may have paid only once for multiple attempts, adding in estimated “gotaways” who avoid capture, and figuring conservatively that 90% of migrants pay the piso means the cartels have made $2.6 billion over the past year on crossing fees alone.
That’s free and clear profit just for use of their smuggling routes. Any money they make from the rest of the smuggling journey, such as operating stash houses or coordinating foot guides and drivers, comes on top of that.
“They’re printing money,” Mr. Vitiello said.
All the extra money is bad news for the U.S., said former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf.
He told The Times’ “Politically Unstable” podcast that the cash helps fuel cartels’ other deadly activities, such as producing and smuggling in fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is responsible for record drug overdose deaths in the U.S.
“It’s all the same enterprise,” Mr. Wolf said. “So the money that they make on the human trafficking, the $10,000 to $12,000 per head, they’re using to either import from China or make fentanyl and push that across the border.”
Mr. Vitiello said the cartels are cashing in under President Biden.
“Reasonable people can understand this has a shelf life,” he said. “They’re taking advantage of the maximum flow because they know it’s not going to last.”
Read more here.