Migrants Are Flocking to the U.S. From All Over the Globe
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over the world are making their way to the Southwest border, with U.S. and Mexican authorities reporting a surge in apprehensions of people from Asia and Africa as human smuggling networks widen their reach across the globe.
Arrests at the Southwest border of migrants from China, India and other distant countries, including Mauritania and Senegal, tripled to 214,000 during the fiscal year that ended in September from 70,000 in the previous fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Fewer than 19,000 migrants from Asia and Africa were apprehended in the fiscal year ended September 2021.
“The increase in migration from Asia and Africa is remarkable,” said Enrique Lucero, head of the migrant support unit of the Tijuana city government, across from San Diego. “These days, we are dealing with 120 nationalities and 60 different languages.”
Travelers say they exchange information and share videos of U.S.-bound routes on Tik Tok and Facebook
, while smugglers offer lodging and travel agencies advertise transport services. Most Asian and African migrants make multiple airport stopovers in what are coming to be known as “donkey flights” to reach countries such as Brazil, Ecuador or Nicaragua, which have few or no visa requirements for some nationalities.
Once they set foot in Latin America, they move north in buses or cars and stay at hotels booked by smuggling organizations . Many wear bracelets similar to those of an all-inclusive resort, with inscriptions that identify the organization that coordinated and charged them for the trip, Mexican authorities say.
For the second year in a row, arrests by the Border Patrol at the U.S. Southern border surpassed two million . Most of them, almost nine out of 10 apprehensions, are of migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean . But the surge in so-called extracontinental migrants poses a challenge for the U.S. because deporting migrants to Africa and Asia is time-consuming, expensive and sometimes not possible.
Mohamed Aweineny, a 30-year-old Mauritanian who made his living as a driver, left Mauritania Sept. 3. He followed a route from West Africa to Turkey, and on to Colombia before flying to Nicaragua.
“I followed the internet to learn how to get to America without a visa,” he said.
Once in Central America, and with the help of a smuggler he described as “the head of the snake” because he belonged to a larger organization, Aweineny headed north. He recorded his trek through tropical paths and boat rides with his cellphone. Aweineny crossed into San Diego before dawn on Sept. 22 and was released at a makeshift migrant center three days later. Aweineny settled in New York, where he said he is working with a migrant aid group to apply for asylum.
A senior Biden administration official said the U.S. government is recording increasing migrant arrivals at the border from parts of the world that it isn’t used to seeing.
“That puts a lot of strain on our operations because we just don’t have longstanding ties or agreements in place with many countries in order to facilitate quick removals. We are actively working on that,” the official said, adding that high migration levels from parts of the world that weren’t historically big senders will likely continue.
Mexico has reported a fourfold increase in migrants from Asia and Africa so far this year, including a surge in arrivals from Mauritania, neighboring Senegal, India and China.
In July, Mexican authorities said they rescued 46 migrants from India, Mauritania and Senegal who had been kidnapped by local gangs for four days at a safe house in the northern state of Sonora. A month later, 129 migrants from Egypt and eight Mauritanians were apprehended by officials on a bus in the Gulf state of Veracruz.
U.S. and Mexican officials have also seen an uptick in Chinese migrants, who arrive through Ecuador after China’s government lifted pandemic mobility restrictions. Indian migrants fly to Europe and then to Mexico City, or enter the U.S. through Canada. Some Afghans use Brazil as an entry point to the Americas.
U.S. and Mexican authorities have also reported a sharp increase in Russians fleeing their homeland. They fly into Mexico from Turkey, with some 12,500 surrendering to U.S. authorities after illegally crossing the Southwest border since the invasion of Ukraine. Only 509 Russians were detained by the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2021.
Nicaragua, a Central American country under the authoritarian regime of President Daniel Ortega that has strained relations with the U.S., has emerged as a relatively new entry point for Africans wanting to head north. The United Nations reported a sixfold jump in African migration via the country during the first half of this year. The mass arrivals generate millions of dollars in revenue for Ortega’s government, which charges each migrant some $50 for a transit visa.
Arriving in Nicaragua allows the African migrants to bypass the deadly jungle paths of the Darién Gap on their way to the U.S., through which a record 450,000 migrants have crossed so far this year, Panama officials say. That is up from around 248,000 for the whole 2022.
“The Darién Gap stopped being the barrier it once was, but so has the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. “The chance of getting in is pretty good right now, and it’s becoming a global phenomenon.”
Once they get to Mexican border communities, some Asian migrants buy local clothing, Texan-style boots and cowboy hats in an attempt to blend in and avoid detection, said one Mexican official.
In Tijuana, mass arrivals of African migrants have overwhelmed some U.S. ports of entry in recent weeks. Videos posted on social media showed large groups of migrants gathering at a square in Tijuana before dawn and rushing to the border fence, in some cases crawling through holes.
Lucero, the city’s migration agency chief, said that the groups are mostly made up of African migrants. They are guided by smugglers who hold them in hotels to wait for the right time to sneak across.
Less than 100 miles east in the Mexican border city of Mexicali, 61-year Ofelia Hernández ran an international human smuggling ring that charged migrants between $10,000 and $70,000 to get through the Southwest border, U.S. prosecutors said in an indictment.
Also known as Doña Lupe, Hernández worked with a network of smugglers handling migrants from as far away as Bangladesh, Yemen, Pakistan, Eritrea, India, Uzbekistan, Egypt and India, according to the recently unsealed indictment charging Hernández with human smuggling. Her lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
U.S. prosecutors say that the organization led by Hernández had links to Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, which controls smuggling routes along Mexico’s Pacific coast. Her group had operatives in Chiapas state and neighboring Guatemala, and collected payments in Central and South America, Asia and Africa, the indictment said.
In Mexicali, operatives would pick up the migrants at a bus station and take them to two rundown hotels until her organization directed them where and when to cross into the U.S. Smugglers would sometimes provide them with a ladder to climb over the border fence, direct them to a hole to crawl under the fence, or provide a plank for them to walk over a waterway, the indictment said.
Hernández was arrested by Mexican authorities in June and extradited to the U.S. in September.
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Thank you Prez Joe and thank you worthless Congress. Got any more tee shirts to give out? Sure you're gonna need them.
Joe Biden hasn't had a single clue about the border. He is worthless regarding security.
True, but all of Congress is to blame, on both sides. Repubs had Trump and both the House and Senate and they didn't do a damn thing except stab Trump in the back. Both parties are making too much money off the border crisis.
We have work for them. They know it. We should welcome them.
Only haters of the "other" think differently.
Maybe Mayor Eric Adams will read you here and woke up.
Only foolish people want more to come here unvetted and supported by US taxpayer dollars.
Most immigrants work harder for less pay than most lame ass Americans.
Dare you to break your back picking melons for a day.
WTF does that have to do with thousands of unvetted immigrants crossing our borders?
Got a job, thanks, but I am always amused by open-border advocates so damn worried about the price of their personal produce.
Know how if supply gets greater than demand, prices drop? Works the same with wages. Enough people cross the border and all of us will be working two or three jobs and you'll start seeing Americans picking melons. Like I did. Well, not melons. When things got especially bad, dad went and picked apples off the ground in orchards and he'd bring us kids to help him, as it meant more money. All day long, filling crate after crate. Later, when I was older, it was picking rocks up out of farmer's fields so they ploughs wouldn't get busted.
600,000 get-aways estimated in 2023 alone, that we don't have a fucking clue as to who they are. Think about that... More people than our current active Army have illegally entered this country because of the Biden administration's ineptitude with border security.
You act like this became an issue 3 years ago.
What is your solution?
Secure America's borders by stopping illegal immigration and smuggling....
What's yours?
Folk have been crossing the Rio Grande for work for decades now.
Thanks to global warming and the cartels you can't blame them for migrating North.
If I had a ranch/farm down there, I'd be hiring them.
Even illegal aliens?
I have no doubt that you would.
Especially illegals. I'd even arm them.
Have my own border army loyal to me only.
Pretty sure I'm not the first to think of this.
They do a good job cutting grass up here.
Ran a Guatemalan family crew cutting shatter cane once.
Gave the father a Zippo. Gave him a pack of American smokes and a few frozen bottles of water every day above and beyond the agreed wages. Gave him a pocket knife one day and a TV for their room. Helped them sharpen their machetes every night. They worked their asses off for me!
Thread 2.1 cleaned up for insults and trolling. Play nicely, please.