Mexican Cartels Get the Blame for Human Smuggling. But Americans Are Heavily Involved.

The number of Americans apprehended for human smuggling in the El Paso border sector has spiked by “over 80 percent during the past three to four years,” Fidel Baca, a Border Patrol spokesperson in El Paso told VICE News. 

The El Paso sector, which has long been a hotbed of smuggling activity, includes 268 miles along the international line and 125,000 square miles of U.S territory. Federal prosecutors secured more than 2,000 smuggling convictions in the southern and western districts of Texas—where El Paso sits—in 2022 alone, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Baca said prosecutors have charged more than 750 U.S. citizens in the El Paso border sector in the first half of 2023 alone. And the number of arrests of U.S. citizens suspected of smuggling is much higher, he said.

“These are only the cases that got prosecuted. Many, many others don’t make it that far for a number of different reasons, so the number of sentences is incomplete [and] misleading,” he said.

Contrary to what most Americans understand, the majority of migrants arriving at the border want to turn themselves into the U.S. authorities to request asylum—a legal right under U.S. law. Unaccompanied minors and family units are most likely to be let in, while single, adult men are usually turned back. 

But for those migrants seeking to enter illegally, the journey doesn’t end once migrants cross the Rio Grande and step foot on U.S. soil. They still have to evade a hundred miles of Border Patrol checkpoints that reach well into the interior of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. That’s where the U.S. citizen smugglers come in. A surging number are being recruited to ferry migrants past Border Patrol checkpoints inside their personal vehicles, dump trucks and tractor trailers.