Border Report Live: Cartels Make Their Feelings at the Border

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

In recent years, these criminal organizations have found easier and cheaper ways to make a lot of money, such as by smuggling migrants and producing methamphetamine and fentanyl, a highly addictive opioid.

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

It also means a battle for control of smuggling routes into the US.

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

It’s a lucrative business, with migrants paying more than $15,000 to be smuggled into the US.

But for the cartels, migrants are nothing more than “cargo.” When migrants seek help from smugglers, they risk being kidnapped, trafficked, and even killed.

The cartels have set up complex systems to get migrants – single people, families and unaccompanied children – into the country.

Across the border in South Texas, for example, migrants are given colored wristbands, the kind you see at a carnival or a nightclub. They help smugglers determine when a migrant needs to be smuggled or how much they’ve paid or owe.

In the El Paso region, cartels are forcing migrants across the border wall into remote parts of the desert, where many have died after getting lost and sickened by the extreme heat.

Whether it’s drugs, migrants or gun smuggling, cartels have agents on the U.S. side of the border. Often, it’s U.S. citizens who are caught with narcotics at U.S. border crossings. Likewise, it’s often U.S. citizens who pick up those migrants and drive them into the U.S. interior.

In the second livestream of Border Report, the correspondents and presenter Chip Brewster investigate how the cartels have changed life on the border and beyond.