If you’re a parent of teens and young adults, there may be another topic you’ll want to add to those essential conversations you have with your children.
Load cars.
In his story about Glendale’s Arizona Christian University and its athletes who became “load car” drivers for drug syndicates, The Arizona Republic’s Jason Wolf makes an important point.
“The issue is far larger and more pervasive than court records suggest.”
Is it ever.
Mexican cartels are recruiting young Americans
Some of the largest criminal enterprises in the world are recruiting America’s young people to transport migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to areas deep within the United States.
The U.S. has become a major operations hub for the Mexican drug cartels, which now have a presence in all 50 states, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
The cartels have become transnational syndicates that are spreading their tentacles across Latin and North America and western Europe.
In the United States, that means luring high school and college students with big money to ferry illegal immigrants.
In 2022, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office warned that cartels are offering America’s young people up to $2,000 per passenger, a small fortune to someone making minimum wage.
About 1,000 people a month then were driving to Cochise County to pick up passengers, the office reported.
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels said at the time that this human smuggling trend is the worst he’s seen in 38 years.
'No idea what they're getting into'
The situation was about to grow worse.
In early 2024, that number had grown to 1,500 people per month arriving in Cochise County to participate in human trafficking, Robert Watkins, commander of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office patrol, told Cronkite News.
Many of those young people don’t understand they are committing a potential felony that carries up to 10 years in prison for every migrant transported.
On Monday, The Republic’s Wolf focused on two Arizona Christian football players (among others) who got caught up in this underworld and found themselves in federal custody. Fortunately for them, authorities chose not to prosecute.
That isn’t always the case. The feds forego prosecution in only about 20% to 25% of human smuggling arrests, Wolf reports.
In August 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Arizona announced it was charging 22 people with “conspiracy to transport illegal aliens for profit.”
Why I talked with my son about 'load cars'
Some of the accused smugglers had been recruited over the internet on Snapchat.
Young people have “ no idea what they’re getting into (when they go to work for cartels),” former U.S. DEA Chief of Operations Michael Braun told Fox News. “(There’s) simply no way out once they make that first smuggling run.”
“Anyone believing differently simply doesn’t understand how the Mexican cartels operate. They are the most powerful transnational drug trafficking and organized crime groups law enforcement has ever dealt with.”
Last year, I heard my eldest son joking about cartels and made a note to talk to him about “load cars.”
Too many AZ teens think: It's OK to smuggle people
At the appropriate time, I took him aside and told him how the cartels operate. That they’re recruiting young people in Arizona and across America with the promise of big money.
I told him, “You never want to go near those people — the drug cartels. They are evil beyond our ability to comprehend.”
He assured me he never would.
5 young men in Mexico met a horrific fate
This recruitment of young people started a long time ago in Mexico and has gone to depths we have not yet begun to see in the states.
Last summer, five handsome young Mexican men about my son’s age responded to an ad offering high-paying jobs in the western state of Jalisco in Mexico.
A few days later they were reported missing.
Then a ghastly video surfaced on the internet of the five being duct-taped, beaten, stabbed and beheaded.
Newspapers and websites ran a freeze frame from the video of the five tied and kneeling with their mouths taped. Their eyes were filled with dread as they seemed to know what was coming next.
One of the boys was wearing a sweatshirt that says, “Buccaneer.” It is not the logo of the Tampa Bay NFL team, but it got my attention.
That’s my son’s favorite team.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com .
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: OPINION: Every Arizona teen needs 'the talk' on a rampant border state problem
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