By Josh Meyer
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Mexican drug cartels and their vast network of associates have branched out from their traditional business of narcotics trafficking and are now playing a central role in the multibillion-dollar-a-year business of illegal-immigrant smuggling, U.S. law-enforcement officials and other experts say.
The business of smuggling humans across the Mexico border has always been brisk, with many thousands coming across every year. But smugglers affiliated with the drug cartels have taken the enterprise to a new level -- and made it more violent -- by commandeering much of the operation from beginning to end from independent “coyotes,” according to these officials and recent congressional testimony.
U.S. efforts to stop the cartels have been stymied by a shortage of money and the failure of federal law-enforcement agencies to collaborate effectively with each other, their local and state counterparts and the Mexican government, officials say.
For many years, U.S. authorities have focused efforts on the cartels’ trafficking of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine, which has left a trail of violence and corruption in its wake.
Unlike the drug-trafficking problem, the cartels’ involvement in human smuggling has received scant attention in Washington.
The cartels often further exploit illegal immigrants by forcing them into economic bondage or prostitution, U.S. officials say. In recent years, illegal immigrants have been forced to pay even more exorbitant fees for being smuggled into the U.S. by the cartels’ well-coordinated networks of transportation, communications, logistics and financial operatives, according to officials.
Many more illegal immigrants are raped, killed or physically and emotionally scarred along the way, authorities say. Organized smuggling groups are stealing entire safe houses from rivals or trucks full of “chickens” -- their term for their human cargo -- so they can resell them or exploit them further, according to these officials and documents.
Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said greed and opportunity has prompted the cartels to move into illegal-immigrant smuggling.
“Drugs are only sold once,” Sanchez, the chairwoman of the House Homeland Security border subcommittee, said in an interview. “But people can be sold over and over. And they use these people over and over until they are too broken to be used anymore.”
The cartels began moving into human smuggling in the late 1990s, initially by taxing the coyotes as they led bands of a few dozen people across cartel-controlled turf near the border. After U.S. officials stepped up border enforcement after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the price of passage increased and the cartels got more directly involved, using the routes they have long used for smuggling drugs north and cash and weapons south, authorities said.
Sometimes they loaded up their human cargo with backpacks full of marijuana. In many cases they smuggled illegal immigrants between the two marijuana-growing seasons, authorities said.
Kumar Kibble, deputy director of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of Homeland Security, said the cartels make money by taxing coyotes and engaging in the business themselves.
“Diversification has served them well,” Kibble said.
The Obama administration and Congress are increasingly focusing their attention on Mexico, fearing that its government is losing ground in a battle against the cartels that already has resulted in the deaths of more than 7,000 people since the beginning of 2008.
At one of many congressional hearings on the subject last week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) unveiled a chart that he said described the cartels’ profit centers: drugs, weapons and money laundering.
“I would add one thing, senator,” said Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard, who then described to Durbin his concerns about the cartels’ role in illegal-immigrant smuggling. “It is really a four-part trade and it has caused crime throughout the United States.”
Arizona has become the gateway not only for drugs but for illegal immigrants. Fights over the valuable commodity have triggered a spate of shootings, kidnappings and killings, Goddard and one of his chief deputies said in interviews.
Goddard said that in Arizona, the cartels grossed an estimated $2 billion last year on smuggling humans.
Senior officials from federal law-enforcement agencies confirmed that they are concerned about the cartels’ human-smuggling network.
In recent years, the U.S. government has taken significant steps to go after illegal-immigrant smugglers on a global scale, setting up task forces, launching public awareness campaigns and creating a Human Smuggling & Trafficking Center to fuse intelligence from various agencies.
But at the border with Mexico, the effort has stumbled, in part because Homeland Security and various Justice Department agencies have overlapping responsibilities and are engaging in turf battles to keep them, Goddard and other federal and state officials said.
The vast majority of ICE agents cannot make drug arrests, for instance, even though the same smugglers are often moving illegal immigrants.
The reason: The Drug Enforcement Administration has not authorized the required “cross-designation” authority for them, according to Kibble and others. A top DEA official said that is partly to prevent ICE agents from unwittingly compromising ongoing DEA investigations and informants working the cartels.
Agents from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives focus almost exclusively on cartel efforts to smuggle large quantities of American-made weapons into Mexico.
“The only way we’re going to be successful is to truly mount a comprehensive attack upon the cartels. They’re doing a comprehensive attack on us through all four of these different criminal activities,” Goddard told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. “I’m afraid in this country we tend to segregate by specialty the various areas that we are going to prosecute. And our experience on the border is we can’t do that. We’ve got to cross the jurisdictional lines or we’re going to fail.”
Kibble agreed, saying the cartels’ diversification will require federal agencies to work together. “It means we need more teamwork so things don’t slip through the cracks.”
“We are very focused on it and applying law-enforcement pressure to all aspects of the cartels’ activities,” Kibble said.
Authorities also are hampered by budget shortcomings and other obstacles. Even though ICE has primary responsibility over illegal-immigrant smuggling, it has only 100 agents dedicated to the task, Kibble said.
Cameron Holmes, an assistant Arizona attorney general, said federal authorities are now trying to collaborate better.
“Are they working together enough? Absolutely not. Are they being successful? Look around,” Holmes said before describing details of illegal-immigrant smuggling cases in which people were killed or enslaved for years. “We have a multibillion[-dollar] criminal industry that has grown up in the last 10 years and it all involves violations of federal law. I would not call that a success.”
Copyright 2009 Chicago Tribune