Border Report Live: Cartels make presence felt on the border

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) — Mexican drug cartels control all aspects of crime and they operate all along the U.S.-Mexico border, including the American side.

In recent years, these criminal organizations have found easier and less expensive ways to make a lot of money, including smuggling migrants and producing meth and fentanyl, a highly addictive opioid.

Traditionally, the goal of drug cartels has been to control the supply of drugs and maximize profits. For cartels in Mexico, that means getting the drugs in the United States.

It also means a fight for control of smuggling corridors to the U.S.

In recent years, however, the wars have intensified as cartels have added migrant smuggling to their portfolio, using those same routes to the border.

It’s a lucrative business, in which migrants pay upwards of $15,000 to be smuggled into the U.S.

To the cartels, though, the migrants are mere “cargo,” and seeking the help of smugglers exposes migrants to kidnapping, trafficking and even death.

The cartels have created complex systems to get migrants — single adults, families and unaccompanied children — into the country.

Across the border from South Texas, for example, migrants are given colored wristbands, the type you’d see at a carnival or nightclub. That helps smugglers determine when a migrant should be smuggled or how much they paid or still owe.

In the El Paso region, cartels force migrants over the border wall and into remote parts of the desert, where many have died after becoming lost and falling ill due to extreme heat.

Whether it’s drugs, migrants or gun smuggling, cartels have operatives on the U.S. side of the border. More often than not, U.S. citizens are the ones caught with narcotics at U.S. ports of entry. Likewise, it’s often U.S. citizens who pick up those migrants and drive them to the interior of the U.S.

On the second Border Report livestream, the correspondents and host Chip Brewster explore how the cartels have changed life on the border and beyond.

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